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Paris smiled, for an hour or two, in the year 1801, when, amidstNapoleon's mighty projects for remodelling the religion and governmentof his empire, the ironical satirist, Sylvain Maréchal, thrust in his"Plan for a Law prohibiting the Alphabet to Women." Daring, keen,sarcastic, learned, the little tract retains to-day so much of itspungency, that we can hardly wonder at the honest simplicity of theauthor's friend and biographer, Madame Gacon Dufour, who declared thathe must be partially insane, and proceeded to prove herself so byreplying to him. His proposed statute consists of eighty-two clauses,and is fortified by a "whereas" of a hundred and thirteen weightyreasons. He exhausts the range of history to show the frightful resultswhich have followed this taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge;quotes the Encyclopédie, to prove that the woman who knows the alphabethas already lost a portion of her innocence; cites the opinion ofMolière, that any female who has unhappily learned anything in this lineshould affect ignorance, when possible; asserts that knowledge rarelymakes men attractive, and females never; opines that women have nooccasion to peruse Ovid's "Art of Love," since they know it all inadvance; remarks that three-quarters of female authors are no betterthan they should be; maintains that Madame Guion would have been farmore useful, had she been merely pretty and an ignoramus, such as Naturemade her,—that Ruth and Naomi could not read, and Boaz probablywould never have married into the family, had they possessed thataccomplishment,—that the Spartan women did not know the alphabet, northe Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor Lucretia, nor Joan ofArc, nor Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of Charlemagne, nor thethree hundred and sixty-five wives of Mohammed;—but that Sappho andMadame de Maintenon could read altogether too well, while the case ofSaint Brigitta, who brought forth twelve children and twelve books, wasclearly exceptional, and afforded no safe precedent.
We take it, that the brilliant Frenchman has touched the root of thematter. Ought women to learn the alphabet? There the whole questionlies. Concede this little fulcrum, and Archimedea will move the worldbefore she has done with it; it becomes merely a question of time.Resistance must be made here or nowhere. Obsta principiis. Woman mustbe a subject or an equal; there is no middle ground. What if the Chineseproverb should turn out to be, after all, the summit of wisdom,—"Formen, to cultivate virtue is knowledge; for women, to renounce knowledgeis virtue"?
No doubt, the progress of events is slow, like the working of the lawsof gravitation generally. Certainly, there has been but little change inthe legal position of woman since China was in its prime, until withinthe last dozen years. Lawyers admit that the fundamental theory ofEnglish and Oriental law is the same on this point: Man and wife areone, and that one is the husband. It is the oldest of legal traditions.When Blackstone declares that "the very being and existence of the womanis suspended during the marriage," and American Kent echoes that "herlegal existence and authority are in a manner lost,"—when Petersdorffasserts that "the husban