a height of ten
feet with the aid of a springboard, it would be considered slightly absurd
to ask a woman to leap eleven feet without one; yet this is precisely what
society and the critics have always done. Training and wages and social
approbation are very elastic springboards; and the whole course of history
has seen these offered bounteously to one sex, and as sedulously withheld
from the other. Let woman consent to be a doll, and there was no finery so
gorgeous, no baby-house so costly, but she might aspire to share its
lavish delights; let her ask simply for an equal chance to learn, to labor,
and to live, and it was as if that same doll should open its lips, and
propound Euclid's forty-seventh proposition. While we have all deplored the
helpless position of indigent women, and lamented that they had no
alternative beyond the needle, the wash-tub, the schoolroom, and the
street, we have usually resisted their admission into every new occupation,
denied them training, and cut their compensation down. Like Charles Lamb,
who atoned for coming late to the office in the morning by going away early
in the afternoon, we have first, half educated women, and then, to restore
the balance, only half paid them. What innumerable obstacles have been
placed in their way as female physicians; what a complication of
difficulties has been encountered by them, even as printers, engravers,
and designers! In London, Mr. Bennett was once mobbed for lecturing to
women on watchmaking. In this country, we have known grave professors
refuse to address lyceums which thought fit to employ an occasional female
lecturer. Mr. Comer stated that it was "in the face of ridicule and
sneers" that he began to educate American women as bookkeepers many years
ago; and it was a little contemptible in Miss Muloch to revive the same
satire in "A Woman's Thoughts on Women," when she must have known that
in half the retail shops in Paris her own sex rules the ledger, and
Mammon knows no Salic law.

We find, on investigation, what these considerations would lead us to
expect, that eminent women have commonly been exceptional in training and
position, as well as in their genius. They have excelled the average of
their own sex because they have shared the ordinary advantages of the other
sex. Take any department of learning or skill; take, for instance, the
knowledge of languages, the universal alphabet, philology. On the great
stairway at Padua stands the sta