Woman unable to assert her Individuality.
As with barbarians, so with women. We have never had among us a class of educated thinkers, and this has always resulted through the presence of both the above-mentioned powers of mental darkness. For, first, everywhere and at all times the immense majority of women have been engaged in the same round of simple but incessant domestic occupations, which, however admirable and necessary in their place, are nevertheless strictly unintellectual, and cannot be esteemed as anything higher than mere mechanical or manual labour; and, second, the all-powerful masculine rulers of women, from the beginning of history until now, have said to us: "This, that, or the other is not suited to the feminine mind. You are now all that your sex is capable of. Stop therefore where you are." It is true that they have never been consistent enough to draw the line at the same point. In India it is placed before the alphabet;[1] in England and America it stretches across the portals of the universities. But wherever it appears, our docile womanhood respects the prohibition, and agrees to call everything beyond it "unfeminine." At this dread word the greater number of those whose girlish impulse is to press forward are alarmed. They look back, and seeing the multitude steadily sewing with bent head, refusing to follow or approve, they lose confidence in their own instincts. Their courage fails: they hesitate: they pause: at length, abashed, they shrink back and begin sorrowfully and painfully to conform to the universal vocation,—
"To finger the fine needle and nice thread;"
though many, perhaps, like glorious Britomart,
"Liever would with point of foeman's spear be dead."
- ↑ "What!" says the Hindoo gentleman to the missionaries, "teach women to read? Teach cows to read!"
[The Hindoos were not always so. Messrs. Trubner & Co. are publishing a work, in which is given the names of twenty-eight Hindoo poetesses, with specimens of their poetry.—Athenæum, October 15, 1870.]
