Cheyenne transporter. [volume] (Darlington, Indian Terr.) 1879-1886, 1883-03-12
Prejudice Against Educated women.

March Century, in favor of the higher
education of women, apropos of the
recent petition for the extension to
women of the educational privileges of
Columbia college. In the extract
which follows she refers to prejudices
which are not yet altogether of the
past:
Do these objectors remember that
every appeal for better female edu-
cation seemed in its day, equally pie
posterous? 1t is hardly three centuries
since Mademoiselle FRANCHISE de San:
tonge was hooted through the streets
of her native village for proposing so
disreputable plan as the establish.
ment of schools for girls in France,
and her anxious father called in four
| learned doctors to determine whether
this mad idea was not due to her pos
session by devils. The doctors pro-
nounced her in her right mind but her
pious fellow-citizen stopped the spread
of immoral ideas by the conclusive
argument of insults ieveled at the
teacher and stones addressed to the
pupils. The progress of the next
century and half is recored in Dean
Swift's observation that men constantly
asked each other whether it was pru-
dent to choose a wife who had good
neutral parts, some sense of wit and
humor, little knowledge of history,
the capacity to relish travels or moral
and entertaining discourse, and to dis
cern the more obvious beauties of
poetry. The general verdict, he says,
was against such attainments in
women. because their tendency was to
make wives pretentious and conceited,
and not duly subject to their husbands
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, trans
lating Epictetus at nineteen, and send
ing her work to her kind frie,d the
Lord Bishop of Salisbury, apologies at
ltnght for attempting task universal
ly pronounced unfit for woman, and
CERTAIN to draw down censure upon her
(eXcusing herself, however by citinG
the opinions of Erasmus, in the LatinD
Nearly fifty years afterward, in advio-
ing her daughter concerning the educa-
ton of bright little namesake, she en-
treats that free scope may be accorded
the child's capacity, for the sake of
the pure delight of learning and of her
future hap mess. But she adds the
marriage, the young girls wit and ac-
quirements must be as carefully con-
cealed as dcformity, from a world
which suspected or despised learned
woman. So strong, almost to our own
day, has been this half-conscious CON
tempt of the feminine mentality, that
even Charles Lamb, that gentle and
charitable soul, could speak of l.. +. l..
with an unmanly sneer, and declare
that female poet or female author of
any kind invited dsrespect,
1t is but ninety years since an Eng
lish woman published the first serious
demand for the higher education OF
English women. Her public found the
book immodest, irreligious, anarchic.
Issued to-day, it would appear harm
less plea, trihe heavy and conserva-
tive, perhaps, for the thorough culti-
vaton of the female mind, urged on
social, moral, and religious grounds,
and protesting against the sentimen-
| talsm of Rousseau, and the now for
gotten DR.. Gregory. Mrs. Hannah
Moore's dull novel of "CGlebs in
Search of Wife," issued in 1903, con-
tanned, the first argument in fiction
that ninny is not necessarily the ideal
wife. or knowledge of the Latin gram
mar incompatible with turn for house
keeping.
1t was no scotfer but the sweet-spirit-
ed Fenelon who taught that contact
with learning would be almost as fatal
to womanly delicacy as contact with
vice. To Voltaire's love of opigram
| might be pardoned his saying that,