"My deep regard for learning, my conviction that equal justice is the right of all, impel me to protest against the theory which would allow only a minority of my sex to attain to what is in the opinion of all men most worth having. For, since wisdom is admitted to be the crown of human achievement, and is within every man's right to aim at in proportion to his opportunities, I cannot see why a young girl, in whom we admit a desire of self-improvement, should not be encouraged to acquire the best that life affords." To those who objected that the distaff and the needle were sufficient to occupy women's minds, Anna Maria made answer that the words of Plutarch--"It becomes a perfect man to know what is to be known and to do what is to be done"--applied with equal truth to a perfect woman.[80] In England, until the latter part of the nineteenth century, 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.[81] 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 weakening 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 creature."[82] Higher studies for their daughters were regarded by the generality of men, the same writer tells us, "as great a profanation as the clergy would do if the laity would presume to exercise the functions of the priesthood." Referring to the handicaps suffered by the women of England in the pursuit of knowledge, the same writer declares: "We are educated in the grossest ignorance, and no art is omitted to stifle our natural reason; if some few get above their nurses' instructions, our knowledge must be concealed and be as useless to the world as gold in the mine."