The rights of women to a higher education is distinctly a movement of the last half of the nineteenth century.  It is true that throughout history there are many examples of remarkably well-educated women—­Lady Jane Grey, for example, or Queen Elizabeth, or Olympia Morata, in Italy, she who in the golden period of the Renaissance became a professor at sixteen and wrote dialogues in Greek after the manner of Plato.  But on looking closely into these instances we shall find first that these ladies were of noble rank and only thanks to their lofty position had access to knowledge; and secondly that they stand out as isolated cases—­the great masses of women never dreamed beyond the traditional Kleider, Kueche, Kinder, and Kirche.  That an elementary education, consisting of reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, was offered them freely by hospital, monastery, and the like schools even as early as Chaucer—­this we know; nevertheless, beyond that they were not supposed to aspire.  So very recently, indeed, have women secured the rights to a higher education that many thousands to-day can easily recall the intensely bitter attacks which were directed against colleges like Wellesley and Bryn Mawr in their inception.  Until the middle of the nineteenth century the whole education—­what there was of it—­of a girl was arranged primarily with a view to capture a husband and, once having him secure, to be his loving slave, to dwell with adoring rapture on his superior learning, and to be humbly grateful if her liege deigned from time to time to throw his spouse some scraps of knowledge which might be safely administered without danger of making her think for herself.  These facts no one can well deny; but a few instances of prevalent opinion, in addition to those which I have already quoted, will afford the amusement of concrete examples.

Mrs. Chapone, in the eighteenth century, advised her niece to avoid the study of classics and science lest she “excite envy in one sex and jealousy in the other.”  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu laments thus:  “There is hardly a creature in the world more despicable and more liable to universal ridicule than a learned woman,” and “folly is reckoned so much our proper sphere, we are sooner pardoned any excesses of that than the least pretensions to reading and good sense.”  Pursuant to the prevailing sentiment on the education of women, the subjects which they studied and the books which they were allowed to read were carefully regulated.  As to their reading, it was confined to romantic tales whereof the exceeding insipidity could not awaken any symptom of intelligence.  Lyly dedicated his Euphues to the “Ladies and Gentlewomen of England” and Sidney’s Arcadia owed its vast success to its female readers.