96 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



tury, the educational status of women was but little better 

 than in Germany. During the Stuart period schools for 

 girls were so scarce that most of those who received any 

 education at all obtained it at home under private tutors. 

 Even then it rarely embraced more than reading, writing, 

 needlework, singing, dancing and playing on the lute or 

 virginal. 1 



As to the higher studies for women, Lady Mary Wortley 

 Montagu writes as follows: "My sex is usually forbid 

 studies of this nature and folly reckoned so much our 

 proper sphere that we are sooner pardoned any excesses of 

 that than the least pretensions to reading or good sense. 

 We are permitted no books but such as tend to the weaken- 

 ing or effeminating of the mind. Our natural defects are 

 in every way indulged, and it is looked upon as in a degree 

 criminal to improve our reason or fancy we have any. . . . 

 There is hardly a creature in the world more despicable 

 or more liable to universal ridicule than that of a learned 

 woman: these words imply, according to the received 

 sense, a tattling, impertinent, vain and conceited crea- 

 ture/' 2 



man Opuscula, pp. 35 and 41, Leyden, 1656, and her De Ingenii 

 Muliebris ad Doctrinam et Meliores Literas Aptitudine, Leyden, 

 1641. Cf. also Anna van Schurman, Chap. IV, by Una Birch, London, 

 1909. 



1 A writer of the seventeenth century gives the following as the 

 popular programme of female study : ' ' To learn alle pointes of good 

 housewifery, spinning of linen, the ordering of dairies, to see to the 

 salting of meate, brewing, bakery, and to understand the common 

 prices of all houshold provisions. To keepe account of all things, 

 to know the condition of the poultry for it misbecomes no woman 

 to be a hen-wife. To know how to order your clothes and with fru- 

 gality to mend them and to buy but what is necessary with ready 

 money. To love to keep at home." How like the German four K's 

 and the words on the sarcophagus of a Koman matron lanifica, frugi, 

 domiseda a diligent plyer of the distaff, thrifty and a stay-at-home. 



2 The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Vol. 

 II, p. 5, Bohn Edition, 1887. 



