ON FEMALE EDUCATION AND OCCUPATIONS. 175 



him the progress of knowledge and civilization ; but as 

 the mere slave of his convenience, creature of his 

 senses, idol of his fancy, and toy of his leisure hours. 

 To this end has every varied form of female education 

 and culture been hitherto directed, and for this purpose 

 framed. In such a state of things it is easy to foresee 

 that impediments in the w^ay of knowledge and of 

 social happiness will continue to arise, and the weak- 

 ness and errors of woman to revert upon the head of 

 her oppressors. All injustice, every vice — carries with 

 it its own punishment. The tyrant and the slave, the 

 oppressor and the oppressed, the subjugator and the 

 subjugated, are alike deteriorated in moral worth and 

 degraded. 



* How (observes Rousseau) shall a woman, unaccus- 

 tomed to reflection, be able to educate her offspring ? ' 

 — and yet the first years of man, all his first impress- 

 ions, are invariably received from and directed by the 

 sex. How important, both in a physical and moral 

 view, are these first years, these first impressions ! Of 

 this the philosophical observer of mind needs not to be 

 informed. How, through the whole life, do they con- 

 tinue to act upon, to form the future man ! While 

 woman is only valued, admired, courted, for her per- 

 sonal graces and accomplishments; while her esta- 

 blishment in life, her importance in society, principally 

 depend upon these, it would be a moral miracle if she 

 sedulously sought to cultivate any other. It is true 

 (but exceptions do not invalidate the rule) that a few 

 respectable women of talents have indignantly broken 

 the degrading fetters by which the sex has been 

 bound and restrained. In vain have these lifted the 

 warning voice ; in vain, contemning the obloquy by 

 which they were assailed, sought to rouse their own 

 sex, and to appeal to the justice, the reason, even to 

 the interest of the other ! But little reformation 

 has yet taken place. Catherine Macauley, whose 

 memory is entitled to more veneration than it has re- 

 ceived, and whose acute and penetrating mind advanced 

 before the period in which she lived, observes, in her 



