now stands.[409] The idea that any girl of this age is sufficiently
mature to know what she is doing by consenting to the lust of scoundrels
is a fine commentary on the acuteness of the legal intellect and the
high moral convictions of legislators.

[Sidenote: Women's rights to an education.]

The rights of women to a higher education is distinctly a movement of
the last half of the nineteenth century. It is true that throughout
history there are many examples of remarkably well-educated women--Lady
Jane Grey, for example, or Queen Elizabeth, or Olympia Morata, in Italy,
she who in the golden period of the Renaissance became a professor at
sixteen and wrote dialogues in Greek after the manner of Plato. But on
looking closely into these instances we shall find first that these
ladies were of noble rank and only thanks to their lofty position had
access to knowledge; and secondly that they stand out as isolated
cases--the great masses of women never dreamed beyond the traditional
Kleider, Kueche, Kinder, and Kirche. That an elementary education,
consisting of reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, was offered them
freely by hospital, monastery, and the like schools even as early as
Chaucer--this we know; nevertheless, beyond that they were not supposed
to aspire. So very recently, indeed, have women secured the rights to a
higher education that many thousands to-day can easily recall the
intensely bitter attacks which were directed against colleges like
Wellesley and Bryn Mawr in their inception. Until the middle of the
nineteenth century the whole education--what there was of it--of a girl
was arranged primarily with a view to capture a husband and, once having
him secure, to be his loving slave, to dwell with adoring rapture on his
superior learning, and to be humbly grateful if her liege deigned from
time to time to throw his spouse some scraps of knowledge which might be
safely administered without danger of making her think for herself.
These facts no one can well deny; but a few instances of prevalent
opinion, in addition to those which I have already quoted, will afford
the amusement of concrete examples.

Mrs. Chapone, in the eighteenth century, advised her niece to avoid the
study of classics and science lest she "excite envy in one sex and
jealousy in the other." Lady Mary Wortley Montagu laments thus: "There
is hardly a creature in the world more despicable and more liable to
universal ridicule than a lear