On this page
-
Text (1)
-
Untitled Article
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.
-
-
Transcript
-
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.
Untitled Article
room ornaments , should be delicate ; but , nevertheless , debility is not delicacy . Health is a blessing" , and limbs were made and meant by nature for pleasurable exercise ; nor can that be anything but a factitious notion of beauty , form ,, and delicacy , which requires so much restraint as the girl is often condemned to endure , and is accompanied by so much imperfection of
development , and irregularity of function , as the woman is often doomed to experience . There is an original difference of constitution which makes it clear ^ that men must always have more physical strength than women , but that is surely no reason why a course of training and a set of habits should be kept up ( happily , they are diminishing ) which seem to be a direct contrivance for
aggravating her comparative feebleness , helplessness , and dependence . Some excellent remarks on this subject were extracted from a medical work in our number for August , 1831 , p . 549 . If we do not allow women to be politicians , we might surely allow them to be women , and to attain , by freedom from undue toil , from most pernicious indolence , and from absurd training , taste , and fashion , the full perfection of their physical nature .
Nor do we see any reason why education should either direct female intellect to comparatively trifling objects , or impart to it only superficial attainments . We see no reason why accomplishment should be the aim , and solid knowledge the accident . Anatomists say , that woman ' s brain is , on the average , lighter than that of men ; it may be so , but a head as heavy as an elephant ' s may only be a lump of leaden ignorance . We cannot doubt that the lightest ladies' brain might be educated to a
degree of mental energy and acquirement far beyond that of the heavy men who often occupy our courts and senates , assuming wisdom on the score of specific gravity . The once fashionable argument against educating the poor is still , perhaps , the great obstacle in the way of a better education of women . c It will raise them above their station ; ' and the reply is the same— All the better . As the growing intelligence of the population shamed the aristocracy , so might that of the women shame the men , into something like intellectual progress .
There is no more probability that thinking and well-informed women would neglect domestic duties , than there is that an entire population , being well instructed , would leave the ground untilled , the fruits ungatfrered , and all the raw material of clothing unmanufactured . The real probability is that the political economy " in the one case , and the household economy in the other , by being the better understood would be the better practised . Mind sheds its influence on every department , and , if more generally cultivated in woman , would render her aid to man tenfold more
efficient , and her companionship tenfold more pleasurable . The great evil is , that , while men are educated for various professions and occupations , which require some intelligence for
Untitled Article
640 A Political and Social Anomaly .
-
-
Citation
-
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1832, page 640, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1820/page/64/
-