74 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



solely, as has been stated, for the benefit of the children of 

 princes or of scholars of those only who could claim either 

 nobility of birth or nobility of genius. 1 Even the most 

 zealous of the humanists would have been surprised if 

 they had been asked to diffuse a portion of their light 

 among the women of the masses. For education, as they 

 viewed it, was something solely for the elect for ladies of 

 the court and not for women of a lower condition. So far 

 as the rest of womankind was concerned, their occupation 

 was limited, according to a Breton saying, to looking after 

 altar, hearth, and children "La, femme se doit garder 

 I'autel, le feu, les enfants." 



It was about this time, too, that men began, especially in 

 France and Germany, to revive the anti-feminist crusade 

 which had so retarded the literary movement among the 

 women of ancient Greece and Home. They refused to hear 

 women and intellect spoken of together. The Germans 

 recognized no intelligence in them apart from domestic 

 duties, and seemed to belong to that strange race, that has 

 not yet died out, which believes woman to be * * afflicted with 

 the radical incapacity to acquire an individual idea." 

 "What the Italians called intelligence a German would 

 call tittle-tattle, trickery, the spirit of opposition. They 

 rejected such gratifications and had no intention of allow- 

 ing Delilah to shear them." 2 



iA prominent writer of the time, Jean Bouchet, expressed the 

 prevailing opinion regarding the education of the women of the 

 masses in the following quaint sentence: "Je suis bien d 'opinion 

 que les femmes de bas estat, et qui sont contrainctes vaquer aux 

 choses familieres et domestiques, ne doivent vaquer aux lettres, 

 parce que c'est chose repugnante a rusticite; mais, les roynes, prin- 

 cesses et aultres dames qui ne se doibvent pour reverence de leur 

 estat, appliquer a mesnage." Cf. Bousellot's Histoire ds I'Educa- 

 tion des Femmes en France, Tom. I, p. 109, Paris, 1883. 



His ideal of a woman of the peasant type was apparently Joan 

 of Arc, who, according to her own declaration, did not know a 

 from b "elle declarait ne savoir ni a ni b." 



2 Claviere, op. cit., p. 415. 



