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.

All this might perhaps be overcome, if the social prejudice which
discourages woman would only reward proportionately those who surmount
the discouragement. The more obstacles the more glory, if society would
only pay in proportion to the labor; but it does not. Women, being
denied not merely the antecedent training which prepares for great
deeds, but the subsequent praise and compensation which follow them,
have been weakened in both directions. The career of eminent men
ordinarily begins with colleges and the memories of Miltiades, and ends
with fortune and fame; woman begins under discouragement, and ends
beneath the same. Single, she works with half-preparation and half-pay;
married, she puts name and wages into the keeping of her husband,
shrinks into John Smith's "lady" during life, and John Smith's "relict"
on her tombstone; and still the world wonders that her deeds, like her
opportunities, are inferior.

Evidently, then, the advocates of woman's claims--those who hold
that "the virtues of the man and the woman are the same," with
Antisthenes,--or that "the talent of the man and the woman is the same,"
with Socrates in Xenophon's "Banquet"--must be cautious lest they
attempt to prove too much. Of course, if women know as much as