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A QUESTION 335
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
Are Men Natttbaliiy Cleverer Than Women?
how little time can be bestowed in obtaining what really is knowledge . Real knowledge strengthens the understanding and improves
the judgment . The learning of languages strengthens the memory , while drawing and music refine the taste . Now observe , women
are never accused of being inferior to men in memory and are confessedly superior to them in taste ; thus in that particular point
wherein they have received an equal education with men they are mentally their equalswhere they have received a superior education
they are their superiors , , and it is only where they have received no education at all or a very slight one that they fall short of the male
standard . We would therefore advocate that girls be restricted in their accomplishments to one foreign language , and either to
drawing * or music as their taste inclines , and that the rest of their time be spent in studying that which will strengthen their understandings
and improve their judgment , such as history , arithmetic , mathematics , and logic . This last may appear uselessbut we assert that -women
, are often ignorant of the principles of reasoning , and that the perverse and crooked use which they sometimes make of arguments
tends to bring the female understanding into contempt more than any other circumstance whatever .
They should learn also things of practical use , —how to get a post-office order , to write a cheque on a banker , etc ., and should
count be taug _" " above the meaning and below of par various 7 ' and business what funds terms and such securities as " are dis- ,
for at , present young ladies know , far more of the course of the planets than they do of these useful mundane institutions . This elementary
instruction would enable those scholars who had any natural intelligence to learn more hereaffcerand thus give them the power of
pro-, tecting their own interests , while even the stupid ones would be made capable of understanding the conversation of men .
Had this kind of instruction been universal , the unhappy lady whose case we have all so lately read in the newspapers , who left her
money-securities with her broker from ignorance of their value , would still have been in the possession of her fortune . The
advocates for a graceful ignorance of business in women ought to subscribe and provide for the declining years of that unfortunate victim
to their theory . Were this reform in education carried out , women would be found to possess more reasoning minds and greater powers
of calculation than they now get credit for , and something would have been done towards raising them to a mental equality with men .
regard But even to the then means men of would acquiring still remain knowled in ge a . superior The world position is after with
all the best school-master 5 and women cannot move in the world as freely as men . From some professions they are debarred by their
own feebleness , from others by the prejudices or interests of men . The man who spends his life from twenty to thirty in idleness at
home , becomes inferior to another who has passed those years
working in a profession ; or rather the latter rises superior to the
A Question 335
A _QUESTION 335
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Citation
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English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), Jan. 1, 1859, page 335, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01011859/page/47/
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