Huntsville gazette., 1889-09-21
THE WEIGHT OF TRADITION.

| The WEIGHT OF TRADITION.
| The Obstacles to woman's Intellectual
| Advancement in Foreign Lands.
An eminent teacher has lately written
. paper directed against certain ex-
treme theories of,teaching, and entitled
Tho presumption of Brains" What
| has weighed down woman, and still
weighs her down, says writer in Har-
per's Bazaar. is not SO much any tempo
| rary Or local inconvenience, as the
| great collective tradition still held
| against her-"The Presumption of No
Brains" There is solidarity of the
human race, and the total soil and at
mosphere of the planet, socially speak
| ing, Is to be taken into account in her
| case. The most gifted woman, strug-
Cling for intellectual progress in the
| most favorable surroundings, is still
like single plant, or little group of
plants, trying to sustain itself where
the soil as whole is not yet fitted for
| its reception, and it is only in some fa-
vored nook that it manages to exist at
all. The traditions of Turkey still keep
down Europe; the vast East, with its
solid and unbroken prejudice. discour-
ages our little England and America
When we consider that out of the
,877,94 pupils in the schools of Brit
ish India in 1878 less than 100, 900
were girls, we have fact which makes
it seem as if this planet, taken as a
whole, was still intellectually uninhab-
table for women. Then we must take
farther into view that in the Presidency
of Bombay the prize books distributed
to deserving girls in the Government
aided schools have such passages as the
following:
If the husband of virtuous woman be ugly
of good or bnd disposition, diseased, fiendish,
irascible, drunkard, old, stupid, dumb, blind,
deaf, hot-tempered, poor, extremely covetous,
a slanderer, cowardly, perfidious and immoral,
nevertheless she ought to worship him as God
with mind, speech and person The wife who
gives an angry answer to her husband will be-
come village pariah dog; she will also become
female iackal, and live in an uninhabited des-
ert. The woman who speaks disrespect-
fuzzy to her husband will be dumb in the next
incarnation. The woman who hates her hus
DanQ reIaJlOnS Will become from Dlrtn 10 Dlrtn
q muskrat living in ordure and filth
We must remember that the mar
riages for which this code is provided
are mostly child marriages, made with
out the consent of the bride; we must
remember that these prize books are
distributed virtually at the expense of
the British government-and how vast
is the abyss of ignorance and degreda-
ton in which these things show women
as plunged! But that abyss comprises
the greater part uf the human race, and
| the teeming millions of China, Africa
and Oceanica would show nothing much
better.
The moral is that any intellectual
opportunities given to woman, even in
| the most enlightened countries, are but
| exceptional and recent things. She
| enters every competition burdened with
| the worldwide Encouragement and re-
preston of her sex. The obstacles
with which she has to contend are not
| merely the obvious and local ones, but
have the vast superintendent Of weight
| of cosmic tradition behind them.
The local obstacles are often quite
enough. An accomplished German
woman, long resident in England, told
| me that she once went back to her ma
| tive land to live, but found the intel
lectual position of women so humiliat-
ing, compared with England that she
could not remain. Yet about the same
| time brilliant American woman told
me that it took her a whole year in
England to get accustomed to the sub
ordinate position of women there, as
compared with America AS to France,
Mr.. John d. PhilbricK told me at the
Exposition of 1878, where he had
| charge of our educational exhibit, that
he spent large part of his time in
trying to convince incredulous French
men that there were actually in
| stitutions in the United States
where girls studied Greek. They went
away, he said, bowing courteously. but
| evidently unconvinced. Yet these arc
the foremost countries of the world in
their recognition Of brains in women
| and even these, it seems, ara backward
| and reluctant But behind these lies,
1t must always be remembered, the
vast hopeless, impenetrable incredulity
of India, China and the Dark Conti-
nent This dense resistance may not
affect. directly and obviously, the more
enlightened sentiment of more favored
regions but it affects it Indirectly aud
unconsciously; the status of woman is
determined by the condition of mind of
the human race. The wonder will one
day be. not that she did not accomplish
more in the nineteenth century, but that
she accomplished what she has. For