Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/94

 women, these were exceptional. Most women were almost entirely uneducated until well into the nineteenth century. When their condition of ignorance was shared by the men the evil was not felt so keenly. As educational opportunity widened for boys and men, but not for women, the inevitable effect was the development of arrogance on the one side with a false humility on the other. Such girls' schools as existed in the eighteenth century were poor things indeed—'Academies for Young Ladies,' in which only those subjects were taught which would enhance their physical charms and win for them suitable husbands. Half the energy of unwedded girls and young women was devoted to 'plying' the sampler and teasing the housewife's wool. Dancing and deportment were the staples of most of these abodes of learning. To faint with grace at the sight of a mouse, and blush becomingly at the slightest provocation, were considered more womanly accomplishments than to figure correctly or read with intelligence. Witness the words of a learned divine of the period, who wrote to his daughters in the following absurd strain: 'When a girl ceases to blush she has lost the most powerful charm of beauty. That extreme sensibility and weakness which it indicates may be a weakness and encumbrance in our sex, as I have too often felt; but in yours it is peculiarly