lent plea
forgiving women a thorough education, complaining that it is denied
them, and then they are charged with being superficial: "True
knowledge and solid learning cannot but make woman as well as man more
humble; ... and it must be owned that if a little superficial
knowledge has rendered some of our sex vain, it equally renders some
of theirs insupportable." With all the sex's frivolity, she adds,
women have not been found to spend their lives on mere _entia
rationis_ splitting hairs and weighing motes like the Schoolmen. She
concludes that men deprive women of education lest they should oust
them "from those public offices which they fill so miserably." She
handles her logic admirably, and exposes her adversaries for begging
the question and reasoning in a circle. Of course she enforces her
assertions by citing the women who have distinguished themselves in
every position of responsibility, military, political and
intellectual, and only refrains from multiplying instances because of
their number. Not to quote those alone who have filled chairs of
medicine with honor, she ingeniously remarks that the remedies classed
as "an old woman's recipe" are those oftenest prescribed, to the glory
of her sex, who by patience, humanity and observation have invented
without the help of Galen and Hippocrates an infinity of reliefs for
the sick which their adherents can neither improve nor disapprove. She
makes her final point on the question of moral superiority. It is
sometimes stated "that some _women_ have been more flagitious than any
_men_, but that in nowise redounds to the dishonor of our sex in
general. _The corruption of the best is ever the worst_: should we
grant this, ... it must be owned their number would at least balance
the account. I believe no one will deny but that at least upon the
most moderate computation there are a thousand _bad men_ to one _bad
woman_." She winds up by an appeal to her own sex in the very spirit
of Miss F.P. Cobbe, the sum of which is to adjure women, for their own
sakes, not to be silly.

How many contemporaries of George Selwyn had their eyes opened by this
clear statement of their demerits there are no means of ascertaining.
But Sophia raised up at least one furious antagonist, who replied by a
pamphlet called "MAN _Superior to_ WOMAN, _or a Vindication of Man's
Natural Right of Sovereign Authority over the Woman, containing a
Plain Confutation of the Fallacious Arguments of_ SOPHI