Woman and Her Wishes - 1853

The first lesson usually impressed upon a girl is, that the object of her instruction is to make her more pleasing and ornamental; but of her brother's, to make him more wise and useful. Parents, pulpit and pedagogue commonly teach her the same gospel. If she opens book or newspaper, she finds the same theory. I forget from what feeble journal I cut the following: -- "A sensible lady writes us as follows: 'Woman's true mission, about which so much has been written, is to make herself as charming and bewitching as possible to the gentlemen.'" Yet what is this but Milton's "He for God only, she for God in him"? We have but to turn to the books nearest at hand for abundant illustrations of the same thing.

"Women ought not to interfere in history," says an eminent writer, "for history demands action, and for action they are constitutionally disqualified!" Shades of Queen Bees and Margaret of Anjou, of the Countess of Derby, Flora McDonnell, and Grace Darling.

"This difficult statement requires some qualification," says another, "if the reader be young, inexperienced, or a female."

Goethe said that "Dilettanti, and especially women, have but weak ideas of poetry."

It seems hardly credible that even Dr. Channing, in an essay "on Exclusion and Denunciation in Religion," should have reflected quite severely on "women forgetting the tenderness of their sex, and arguing on theology." For if, as a recent Convention preacher declared, "Among the redeemed, up to this time, an immense majority are women; one would suppose that their experimental knowledge of religious matters might partially counterbalance a trifling deficiency in the Hebrew tongue --which is not, indeed, a quite universal accomplishment among the male sex.

It is strange to see that when men try to rise highest in their advice to women, they so seldom rise beyond this thought, that the position of woman is but secondary and relative. An eminent Boston teacher, who has done much for female education, astonished me when I read, in the "School and Schoolmaster," his unequal appeals for the school boy and school girl: --

"That boy on yonder bench may be a Washington or a Marshall. * * * * That fair-haired girl may be [what? -- not a Guion or a Roland, an Edgeworth or a Somerville? -- no, but] the future mother of a Washington or a Marshall! By inspiring her heart with the highest principles, you may do much to advance humanity, by forming a sublime specimen of a just man." And so on.