To exhibit the nature of the difficulties woman has had to contend with in every age and in every land, in order to secure what we now consider her inalienable rights to things of the mind, it is not necessary to review the history of female education, or to enter into the details of her gradual progress forward and upward in the New and Old Worlds. But it is necessary that we should know what was the attitude of mankind toward woman's education during the leading epochs of the world's history and what were, until almost our own day, the opinions of men--scholars and rulers included--respecting the nature and the duties of woman and what was considered, almost by all, her proper sphere of action. Understanding the numerous and cruel handicaps which she had so long to endure, the opposition to her aspirations which she had to encounter, even during the most enlightened periods of the world's history, and that, too, from those who should have been the first to extend to her a helping hand, we can the better appreciate the extent of her recent intellectual enfranchisement and of the value of the work she has accomplished since she has been free to exercise those God-given faculties which were so long held in restraint. The first great bar to the mental development of woman was the assumed superiority of the male sex, the opinion, so generally accepted, that, in the scheme of creation, woman was but "an accident, an imperfection, an error of nature"; that she was either a slave conducing to man's comfort, or, at best, a companion ministering to his amusement and pleasure. From the earliest times she was regarded as man's inferior and relegated to a subordinate position in society. She was, so it was averred, but a diminutive man--a kind of mean between the lord of creation and the rest of the animal kingdom. By some she was considered a kind of half man; by others, as was cynically asserted, she was looked upon as a _mas occasionatus_--a man marred in the making. She was, both mentally and physically, what Spencer would call a man whose evolution had been arrested, while man, as in the modern language of Darwin, was a woman, whose evolution had been completed. When such views prevailed, it was inevitable that, so long as physical force was the _force majeure_, a woman should be relegated to the position of a slave or to that of "a mere glorified toy." Every man then said, in effect, if not in words, of the woman who happened to be in his power what Petruchio said of Katherine: "I will be master of what is mine own, She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house, My household stuff, my field, my barn, My horse, my ox, my ass, my everything."