WOMAN'S LONG STRUGGLE 75 



In the estimation of Luther, the intellectual aspirations 

 of women were not only an absurdity, but were also a 

 positive peril. "Take them," he says, "from their house- 

 wifery and they are good for nothing." He treated the 

 humanist Vives, preceptor of Mary Tudor, as " a dangerous 

 spirit, ' ' because the learned Spaniard was an ardent advo- 

 cate of the higher education of women. As to abstract and 

 severe studies they were for girls, according to one of Luth- 

 er's contemporaries, but "vain and futile quackeries." 

 For an accomplished woman to quote the Fathers or the 

 ancient classical writers was to provoke ridicule, because to 

 do so was considered an indication of pedantry or affecta- 

 tion. Montaigne gave expression to the age-old prejudice 

 against woman by refusing to regard her as anything but a 

 pretty animal, while Rabelais, the coryphaeus of the French 

 Renaissance, declared that ' ' Nature in creating woman lost 

 the good sense which she had displayed in the creation of 

 all other things. ' ' 



Such being the views of the great leaders of thought and 

 formers of public opinion respecting the mental inferiority 

 of woman views which, outside of Italy, had, with few 

 exceptions, the cordial approval of the supercilious, cocka- 

 hoop male is it necessary to add that the Renaissance did 

 nothing for popular education? The masses of women, es- 

 pecially after the suppression of the convent schools in 

 England and Germany, were, in many parts of Europe, 

 and notably in the two countries mentioned, in a worse 

 condition than they were during the Dark Ages. 1 



i The noted English divine, Thomas Fuller, chaplain to Charles II, 

 recognized the irreparable loss to women occasioned by the destruc- 

 tion of the nunneries by the Eef onners. ' * There were, ' ' he tells us in 

 his quaint language, "good she schools wherein the girls and maids 



of the neyghborhood were taught to read and work Yea, give 



me leave to say, if such feminine foundations had still continued, 

 haply the weaker sex, besides the avoiding modern inconveni- 

 ences, might be heyghtened to a higher perfection than hitherto hath 

 been attained." Church History, Vol. Ill, p. 336, 1845. 



