man was _animal
occasionatum_, as if a sort of monster and accidental production.
Mediaeval councils, charitably asserting her claims to the rank of
humanity, still pronounced her unfit for instruction. In the Hindoo
dramas, she did not even speak the same language with her master, but
used the dialect of slaves. When, in the sixteenth century, Francoise de
Saintonges wished to establish girls' schools in France, she was hooted
in the streets, and her father called together four doctors, learned in
the law, to decide whether she was not possessed by demons, to think of
educating women,--_pour s'assurer qu'instraire des femmes n'etait pas un
oeuvre du demon_.

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 takes for
granted. 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