to ask pardon for this
digression; it is more proper for me in this place to say something to
excuse an address that looks so very presuming. My sex is usually forbid
studies of this nature, and folly reckoned so much our proper sphere, we
are sooner pardoned any excesses of that, than the least pretensions to
reading or good sense. We are permitted no books but such as tend to the
weakening and effeminating of the mind. Our natural defects are every
way indulged, and it is looked upon as in a degree criminal to improve
our reason, or fancy we have any. We are taught to place all our art in
adorning our outward forms, and permitted, without reproach, to carry
that custom even to extravagancy, while our minds are entirely
neglected, and, by disuse of reflections, filled with nothing but the
trifling objects our eyes are daily entertained with. This custom, so
long established and industriously upheld, makes it even ridiculous to
go out of the common road, and forces one to find as many excuses, as if
it were a thing altogether criminal not to play the fool in concert with
other women of quality, whose birth and leisure only serve to render
them the most useless and most worthless part of the creation. There is
hardly a character in the world more despicable, or more liable to
universal ridicule, than that of a learned woman; those words imply,
according to the received sense, a talking, impertinent, vain, and
conceited creature. I believe nobody will deny that learning may have
this effect, but it must be a very superficial degree of it. Erasmus was
certainly a man of great learning, and good sense, and he seems to have
my opinion of it, when he says _Foemina qui_ [sic] _vere sapit, non
videtur sibi sapere; contra, quae cum nihil sapiat sibi videtur sapere,
ea demum bis stulta est_. The Abbe Bellegarde gives a right reason for
women's talking overmuch: they know nothing, and every outward object
strikes their imagination, and produces a multitude of thoughts, which,
if they knew more, they would know not worth their thinking of. I am not
now arguing for an equality of the two sexes. I do not doubt God and
nature have thrown us into an inferior rank, we are a lower part of the
creation, we owe obedience and submission to the superior sex, and any
woman who suffers her vanity and folly to deny this, rebels against the
law of the Creator, and indisputable order of nature; but there is a
worse effect than this, which follows t