It was the same with political rights.  The foundation of the Salic Law was not any sentimental anxiety to guard female delicacy and domesticity; it was, as stated by Froissart, a blunt, hearty contempt:  “The kingdom of France being too noble to be ruled by a woman.”  And the same principle was reaffirmed for our own institutions, in rather softened language, by Theophilus Parsons, in his famous defence of the rights of Massachusetts men (the “Essex Result,” in 1778):  “Women, what age soever they are of, are not considered as having a sufficient acquired discretion [to exercise the franchise].”

In harmony with this are the various maxims and bon-mots of eminent men, in respect to women.  Niebuhr thought he should not have educated a girl well,—­he should have made her know too much.  Lessing said, “The woman who thinks is like the man who puts on rouge, ridiculous.”  Voltaire said, “Ideas are like beards:  women and young men have none.”  And witty Dr. Maginn carries to its extreme the atrocity, “We like to hear a few words of sense from a woman, as we do from a parrot, because they are so unexpected.”  Yet how can we wonder at these opinions, when the saints have been severer than the sages?—­since the pious Fenelon taught that true virgin delicacy was almost as incompatible with learning as with vice; and Dr. Channing complained, in his “Essay on Exclusion and Denunciation,” of “women forgetting the tenderness of their sex,” and arguing on theology.

Now this impression of feminine inferiority may be right or wrong, but it obviously does a good deal towards explaining the facts it assumes.  If contempt does not originally cause failure, it perpetuates it.  Systematically discourage any individual, or class, from birth to death, and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to acquiesce in their degradation, if not to claim it as a crown of glory.  If the Abbe Choisi praised the Duchesse de Fontanges for being “beautiful as an angel and silly as a goose,” it was natural that all the young ladies of the court should resolve to make up in folly what they wanted in charms.  All generations of women having been bred under the shadow of intellectual contempt, they have, of course, done much to justify it.  They have often used only for frivolous purposes even the poor opportunities allowed them.  They have employed the alphabet, as Moliere said, chiefly in spelling the verb Amo.  Their use of science has been like that of Mlle. de Launay, who computed the decline in her lover’s affection by his abbreviation of their evening walk in the public square, preferring to cross it rather than take the circuit; “from which I inferred,” she says, “that his passion had diminished in the ratio between the diagonal of a rectangular parallelogram and the sum of two adjacent sides.”  And their conception, even of art, has been too often on the scale of Properzia de Rossi, who carved sixty-five heads on a walnut, the smallest of all recorded symbols of woman’s sphere.