men, and the
women also, who then had a right to vote; and the result was that Minerva
carried the election by a glorious majority of one. Then Attica was
overflowed and laid waste: of course the citizens attributed the calamity
to Neptune, and resolved to punish the women. It was therefore determined
that in future they should not vote, nor should any child bear the name
of its mother.

Thus easily did mythology explain all troublesome inconsistencies; but it
is much that it should even have recognized them as needing explanation.
The real solution is, however, more simple. The obstacle to the woman's
sharing the alphabet, or indeed any other privilege, has been thought by
some to be the fear of impairing her delicacy, or of destroying her
domesticity, or of confounding the distinction between the sexes. These may
have been plausible excuses. They have even been genuine, though minor,
anxieties. But the whole thing, I take it, had always one simple,
intelligible basis,--sheer contempt for the supposed intellectual
inferiority of woman. She was not to be taught, because she was not worth
teaching. The learned Acidalius aforesaid was in the majority. According to
Aristotle and the Peripatetics, woman was _animal occasionatum_, as if a
sort of monster and accidental production. Mediaeval councils, charitably
asserting her claims to the rank of humanity, still pronounced her unfit
for instruction. In the Hindoo dramas she did not even speak the same
language with her master, but used the dialect of slaves. When, in the
sixteenth century, Francoise de Saintonges wished to establish girls'
schools in France, she was hooted in the streets; and her father called
together four doctors, learned in the law, to decide whether she was not
possessed by demons, to think of educating women,--_pour s'assurer
qu'instruire des femmes n'etait pas un oeuvre du demon_.

It was the same with political rights. The foundation of the Salic Law was
not any sentimental anxiety to guard female delicacy and domesticity; it
was, as stated by Froissart, a blunt, hearty contempt: "The kingdom of
France being too noble to be ruled by a woman." And the same principle was
reaffirmed for our own institutions, in rather softened language, by
Theophilus Parsons, in his famous defence of the rights of Massachusetts
men (the "Essex Result," in 1778): "Women, what age soever they are of, are
not considered as having a sufficient acquired discretion [to exercis