Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
many hundred thousands and acquitted them on her own credit? And, nally,
who, of all human beings, would so well understand and interpret to others
my inner and outer being as this one, of such nobleness in her way of thinking,
such great intellectual capacity, and free from the theological perplexities that
enveloped me?
An observer adds this testimony.
We may in many marriages regard it as the best arrangement, if the man has so
much advantage over his wife that she can, without much thought of her own,
be, by him, led and directed, as by a father. But it was not so with the Count and
his consort. She was not made to be a copy; she was an original; and, while she
loved and honored him, she thought for herself on all subjects with so much
intelligence, that he could and did look on her as a sister and friend also.
Such a woman is the sister and friend of all beings, as the worthy man is their
brother and helper.
Another sign of the time is furnished by the triumphs of female authorship.
These have been great and constantly increasing. They have taken possession of
so many provinces for which men had pronounced them unt, that though these
still declare there are some inaccessible to them, it is dicult to say just where they
must stop.
The shining names of famous women have cast light upon the path of the sex,
and many obstructions have been removed. When a Montague could learn better
than her brother, and use her lore to such purpose afterwards as an observer, it
seemed amiss to hinder women from preparing themselves to see, or from seeing all
they could when prepared. Since Somerville has achieved so much, will any young
girl be prevented from attaining a knowledge of the physical sciences, if she wishes
it? De Stael ’s name was not so clear of oence; she could not forget the woman in
the thought; while she was instructing you as a mind, she wished to be admired as
a woman. Sentimental tears often dimmed the eagle glance. Her intellect, too, with
all its splendor, trained in a drawing room, fed on attery, was tainted and awed;
yet its beams make the obscurest school house in New England warmer and lighter
to the little rugged girls, who are gathered together on its wooden bench. They may
never through life hear her name, but she is not the less their benefactress.
This inuence has been such that the aim certainly is, how, in arranging school
instruction for girls, to give them as fair a eld as boys. These arrangements are
made as yet with little judgment or intelligence, just as the tutors of Jane Grey,
and the other famous women of her time, taught them Latin and Greek, because
they knew nothing else themselves, so now the improvement in the education of
girls is made by giving them gentlemen as teachers, who only teach what has been
caught themselves at college, while methods and topics need revision for those
new cases, which could better be made by those who had experienced the same
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