Page:Margaret Fuller by Howe, Julia Ward, Ed. (1883).djvu/98

Rh defects which she thought that later study, aided by the stimulus of mutual endeavour and interchange of thought, might do much to remody. Her opening remarks are as instructive to-day as they were when she uttered them:

"Women are now taught, at school, all that men are. They run over, superficially, even more studies, without being really taught anything. But with this difference: men are called on, from a very early period, to reproduce all that they learn. Their college exercises, their political duties, their professional studies, the first actions of life in any direction, call on them to put to use what they have learned. But women learn without any attempt to reproduce. Their only reproduction is for purposes of display. It is to supply this defect that these conversations have been planned.”

Margaret had chosen the Greek Mythology for the subject of her first conversations. Her reasons for this selection are worth remembering:

“It is quite separated from all exciting local subjects. It is serious without being solemn, and without excluding any mode of intellectual action; it is playful as well as deep. It is sufficiently wide, for it is a complete expression of the cultivation of a nation. It is also generally known, and associated with all our ideas of the arts."

In considering this statement it is not difficult for us at this day to read, as people say, between the lines. The religious world of Margaret's youth was agitated by, oppositions which rent assunder the heart of Christendom. Margaret wished to lead her pupils beyond 'all discord, into the high and happy unity. Her own nature was both fervent and religious, but she could not accept intolerance either in belief or in dig