from first
to last would not have sufficed, if directed into the one channel, for
the genesis and evolution of the modern bicycle.

I once heard a lady who had playfully competed with men in a jumping
match gravely attribute her defeat to the trammeling of her skirt.
Similarly, women are pleased to explain their penury of mental
achievement by repressive education and custom, and therein they are not
altogether in heresy. But even in regions where they have ever had the
freedom of the quarries they have not builded themselves monuments.
Nobody, for example, is holding them from greatness in poetry, which
needs no special education, and music, in which they have always been
specially educated; yet where is the great poem by a woman? where the
great musical composition? In the grammar of literature what is the
feminine of Homer, of Shakspere, of Goethe, of Hugo? What female names
are the equivalents of the names of Beethoven, Mozart, Chopin, Wagner?
Women are not musicians--they "sing and play." In short, if woman had no
better claim to respect and affection than her brain; no sweeter charms
than those of her reason; no means of suasion but her power upon men's
convictions, she would long ago have been "improved off the face of
the earth." As she is, men accord her such homage as is compatible with
contempt, such immunities as are consistent with exaction; but whereas
she is not altogether filled with light and is moreover, imperfectly
reverent, it is but right that in obedience to Scriptural injunction she
keep silence in our churches while we are worshipping Ourselves.

She will not have it so, the good, good girl; as moral as the best of
us, she will be as intellectual as the rest of us. She will have out her
little taper and set the rivers of thought all ablaze, legging it over
the land from stream to stream till all are fired. She will widen her
sphere, forsooth, herself no wider than before. It is not enough that we
have edified her a pedestal and perform impossible rites in celebration
of her altitude and distinction. It does not suffice that with never
a smile we assure her that she is the superior sex--a whopper by the
repetition whereof certain callow youth among us have incurred the
divine vengeance of belief. It does not satisfy her that she is
indubitably gifted with pulchritude and an unquestionable genius for
its embellishing; that Nature has endowed her with a prodigious knack
at accroachment, whereby th