The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760Reynolds, Myra
History
The Learned Lady in England, 1650-1760
Reynolds, Myra
Women -- Education -- Great Britain; Women -- Great Britain; Women authors, English
Your great question is, Whether to breed up Women in Arts and
Tongues, is not a mere new Device, never before practised in the
World. This you doubt the more: Because Women are of low Parts,
and not capable of Improvement by this Education. If they could
be improved you doubt, whether it would benefit them? If it
would benefit them, you enquire where such Education may be had?
or, whether they must go to School with Boys? to be made twice
more impudent than learned. At last you muster up a Legion of
Objections.
These doubts and objections are then discussed _seriatim_. To
establish her contention that women have been educated in arts and
sciences in the past she gives an unchronological, uncritical list of
women who attained distinction in Greece and Rome and in Bible times.
Miriam, "a great poet and philosopher," the women who danced before
David (singing songs "compos'd it's like by themselves"), Huldah the
Prophetess, "who dwelt (we may suppose) in a college where women were
bred up in good literature"; Anna and Phebe; Triphena, Triphosa, and
Persis; Priscilla who instructed Apollos; Timothy's mother Eunice and
grandmother Lois; and Philip's four daughters, make up from Sacred
Writ a list intended to allay the anxieties of a devout churchman
as to the effect of learning on female piety. Mrs. Makin was really
forced to get as many Biblical recruits as possible, since her
opponents regularly massed their forces in the Garden of Eden with
the Sin of Eve as their impregnable fort.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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