Page:Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea 1903.djvu/119

 INTRODUCTION cxv ���The Fair Sex, and especially the dominant ideal concern- ing woman's work and woman's education, was the theme most certain to touch her pen with bitterness. In her famous Preface of 1703, Mary Astell says: �In the first place, Boys have much Time and Pains, Care and Cost bestowed on their education, Girls have little or none. The former are early initiated in the Sciences, are made acquainted with Antient and Modern Discoveries, they Study Books and Men, have all imaginable encouragement; not only Fame, a dry reward now- a-days, but also Title, Authority, Power, and Riches themselves which purchase all things, are the reward of their improvement. The latter are restricted, frown'd upon, beat, not for but from the Muses; Laughter and Ridicule that never-failing Scare-Crow is set up to drive them from the Tree of Knowledge. But if in spite of all difficulties Nature prevails, and they can't be kept so ignorant as their masters would have them, they are stared upon as Mon- sters, Censured, Envyd and every way discouraged, or at the best they have the Fate the Proverb assigns them: Virtue is praised and starved. �These words must have been read with secret satisfaction by Lady Winchilsea, for she had, years before, confided similar ideas to that gilt-edged, morocco-bound, diffident first manuscript of hers, and had summed up the situation in the epigrammatic phrase, "Women are Education's and not Nature's Fools." To read, to write, to think, to study these, she indignantly exclaims, are tabooed lest they should cloud a woman's beauty, and exhaust the time more profit- ably spent in adorning herself for conquest. She resents the commonly received opinion that dressing and dancing, fashions and theaters, are woman's only legitimate interests. She resents with equal emphasis the ultra-domestic ideal. She frankly declares that she, at least, was never meant for "the dull manage of a servile house." Her own tastes are of the simplest. Of her table she asks little except that it be "set without her care." She can dispense with "orto- lane," "treufles," and "morilia," but leisure and a free ��� �