Shortly after the revival of letters, when the institution of chivalry was still in successful operation, there seemed to be a combination among the literati in Europe, to place woman in every respect above man. The celebrated Boccaccio, the most beautiful writer, one of the most devoted lovers, and perhaps the greatest favorite of his time with women, led on the van of this band of gallant authors. In his work "On Illustrious Women," he runs through the whole circle of history and fable. He ransacks the Grecian, Roman and sacred histories, and brings together Cleopatra and Lucretia, Flora and Portia, Semiramis and Sappho, Athalia and Dido, &c.—and lavishes out his sweetest praises on charming woman. We are not to wonder then at his popularity and authority among the women of his age, when we remember his devotion and his eulogy. His harangue against the marriage of christian widows, did not however share the same popularity with those to whom it was addressed, although backed by quotations and ingenious explanations thereof, from the apostle Paul.
Boccaccio was followed by a host of imitators, singing the praises of the sex. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the tide of discussion, if I may be allowed the expression, ran almost wholly on the side of the females. Love, polytheism, christianity, and the worship of the saints, were strongly blended by the over-zealous gallantry of the times, into one incongruous heterogeneous compound, calculated to excite the smile of the philosopher, and the frown of the theologian. Ruscelli, for example, one of the most celebrated writers of his day, maintains the decided superiority of woman over man. "But the effect of his reasoning," says a modern writer, "is destroyed by the confused impression which is made on the mind of the reader by the mixture of divinity and platonism; by blending through the whole the name of God and woman; by placing Moses by the side of Petrarch and of Dante; and by giving in the same page, and even in the same period, quotations from Boccaccio and St. Augustine, from Homer and from St. John." "This however," says the same writer, "must necessarily be found in a country where we often meet with the ruins of a temple of Jupiter in the neighborhood of a church, a statue of St. Peter upon a column of Trajan, and a Madonna beside an Apollo."
Throughout the whole of this period it seems to have been ungallant in the highest degree in an author not to place woman decidedly above man in every particular. Even in intellectual power she was considered as superior; and in perusing the voluminous proofs which were so industriously, and sometimes so ingeniously brought forward to prove it, we find ourselves as bewildered as the femme de chambre of Molière, under the learned remarks of the doctor upon the death of the coachman. The poor woman at last exclaims, "Le Medecin peut dire ce qu'il veut, mais le cocher est mort." Whatever may have been written or said in praise of the intellectual powers of woman during the very gallant period of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is now a conceded point, that under the actual constitution of society, and with the superior education of our sex, the intellectual endowments and developments of man are generally found superior to those of woman at the age of maturity. In fact, the remark is susceptible of the greatest possible extension. Among all the barbarous nations—among the half civilized, as well as among the refined and polished, we find the intellectual powers of man every where and in every age superior to those of woman.3
3 I do not mean to assert here that woman has been found inferior to man in every department or modification of the intellect; for in some kinds of intelligence she always has been, as we shall soon see, man's superior;—but my meaning is, that in the higher department of the intellectual powers, and in the general range of the mind, man is superior to woman.
It is fable alone which tells us of whole nations of Amazons. There is no well authenticated history of any people where the women have taken the lead, and governed the men by their superior intellectual endowments. Of course, as already remarked, individual exceptions prove nothing. We are here concerned with masses of individuals; and from the foundation of the world to the present time, we find that man has been uniformly the commander in the field; he has formed the material of the armies; he has led them to battle, won the victories and achieved the conquest. He has directed at the council board; his eloquence has been most powerfully felt in the senate and the popular assembly; he has established and pulled down dynasties—built up and overthrown empires, and achieved the mighty and convulsive revolutions of the nations of the earth. All the great, and learned, and lucrative occupations of life are filled by him. 'Tis he who studies the wondrous mechanism of our frame, the nature and character of our diseases and physical infirmities, and applies the healing balm to the suffering individual stretched on the couch of pain and sickness. 'Tis he who made the law—who studies its complicate details, its massive literature and profound reasoning, and traces out the chain of system and order, which like the delicate thread of the labyrinth, runs through the whole range of its subtleties and sinuosities. 'Tis he who has studied most profoundly and elaborately the record of man's fall and redemption. 'Twas he who conducted the children of Israel, under the guidance of heaven, out of Egypt, through the wilderness, into the promised land of Canaan. 'Twas a man who first preached the new gospel of Christ at Jerusalem, before the assembled nation, on the great day of Pentecost. It is man upon whom devolves the sacred functions of preaching and spreading the gospel through the world. It is
| "He that negotiates between God and man, As God's ambassador, the grand concerns Of judgment and of mercy." |
It is he whose sublime and warning eloquence is heard from the pulpit, arousing and awakening the apathy of the listless, and stimulating the ardor of the pious. 'Tis man who carries forward, by his restless energies, all the complicate business of that great commerce, which binds together by the indissoluble ties of interest, all the nations of the earth. 'Tis he who creates the stocks, charters companies of enterprise, and works by his skill the mighty machinery of capital and trade. And if we look to the rich and varied fields of literature and science, we shall find his footstep every where, and see that his labors have reared the choicest fruit, and produced the most stately and enduring trees. We cannot then for a moment question his past and present intellectual superiority in society.
But whence arises this actual superiority? Is it the result of nature? or is it the result of education in that enlarged sense which I have already explained in my first number? Is the capacity of man naturally greater than that of woman? or are they born with equal natural endowments in this respect? and are the great differences which we observe in the full maturity of age, generated by the different circumstances under which they act, and the different positions which they occupy in society? I have already said that we have no data by which this question can be positively and satisfactorily settled; that long before the child arrives at that age at which we are able to detect the development of the intellectual powers, his education both physical and moral, has already advanced to such an extent as to render all our deductions from mere experiment and observation entirely fallacious. I am inclined however to the belief, that there is no natural difference between the intellectual powers of man and woman, and that the differences observable between them in this respect at mature age, are wholly the result of education, physical and moral. At all events, I think I shall be able to show that the difference in education is fully sufficient to explain these differences, without looking to any other causes.
First then, we find that the education which boys receive from teachers, is much more scientific and complete than that of the girls. The latter are sent to school but a few years, and those during the earlier period of their lives, before the development of the reasoning powers. What they learn at school, therefore, must be acquired by the exercise of memory alone, and not by the employment of the far higher powers of judgment, reason and reflection. These latter powers are not generally developed before the age of seventeen or eighteen, and in some cases still later. It is for this reason we so often find the mature man failing to fulfil the promise of his youth. In the early part of our lives we learn principally by memory, and the boy with the most ready memory therefore, is he who treasures up the knowledge generally acquired in youth with most facility. He, therefore, is apt to pass for the brightest genius. But it may happen that this bright youth may never develope to any extent the reasoning powers; and if so, he will rarely go much beyond the mere smartness and quickness of youth. Memory will ever be his principal and greatest faculty, and with it alone he can never travel out of the common routine of knowledge, or disenthral himself from the dominion of mere precedent and example. On the other hand, we frequently see the dull boy developing at the age of maturity a large share of the reasoning power, and infinitely surpassing, in stretch of mind and depth of research, the individual who far outstripped him in his boyhood. Every man can readily call to mind illustrations of the remarks here made. Newton never exhibited any very great range of faculty till he commenced the study of the mathematics; and Dean Swift, the great wit and philosopher, is said to have been rather a dull boy.
Now then, just at the period when the reasoning faculties are about developing themselves—when a new intellectual apparatus is just coming into play, by which we are capable of achieving at school, in one or two years, more than we have done by all our past labors—the girl is taken from her studies, enters into society, plunges into all the scenes of gaiety and fashion, and is frequently married before that age at which the boy is sent to college. It is impossible then, under the prevalence of such a system as this, to give an education at all scientific to the female. Her mind at school is not sufficiently developed to receive such an education. You frequently find our female teachers professing to teach the higher branches of science, such as chemistry, natural philosophy, moral and mental philosophy, and political economy. I do not pretend to call in question the capacity of such teachers, or their ability to teach what they profess to do; but I do assert that most of our young ladies are not competent at the time they are sent to school to acquire such knowledge. They skip, at so early a period of life, as lightly and fantastically over the buried treasures of science, as they would over the floor of the ball room. I have never known an individual, no matter how apparently bright his intellect—no matter how much Latin and Greek, and Grammar and English he had studied, who was capable, at the age of sixteen, of mastering the abstruse principles of the philosophy of the human mind. Such a science as this absolutely requires a development of the higher powers of the mind, before it can be studied with any degree of success; and that development very rarely takes place before the age of seventeen, no matter how stimulating may have been the previous education of the youth.