AP Success - AP English Language: The Usefulness of Women's Education

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like

rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating

graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of

perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly

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wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness

consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire

strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them

that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of

sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous

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with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are

only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been

termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the

men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence,

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and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite

sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be

the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to

show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of

laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being,

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regardless of the distinction of sex; and that secondary views

should be brought to this simple touchstone.

This is a rough sketch of my plan; and should I express

my conviction with the energetic emotions that I feel

whenever I think of the subject, the dictates of experience

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and reflection will be felt by some of my readers. Animated

by this important object, I shall disdain to cull my phrases

or polish my style;—I aim at being useful, and sincerity will

render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the

force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my

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language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods,

nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings,

which, coming from the head, never reach the heart—I

shall be employed about things, not words!—and, anxious

to render my sex more respectable to members of society, I

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shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slided from

essays into novels, and from novels into familiar letters and

conversation.

These pretty nothings—these caricatures of the real

beauty of sensibility, dropping glibly from the tongue, vitiate

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the taste, and create a kind of sickly delicacy that turns

away from simple unadorned truth; and a deluge of false

sentiments and overstretched feelings, stifling the natural

emotions of the heart, render the domestic pleasures insipid,

that ought to sweeten the exercise of those severe duties,

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which educate a rational and immortal being for a nobler

field of action.

The education of women has, of late, been more attended

to than formerly; yet they are still reckoned a frivolous sex,

and ridiculed or pitied by the writers who endeavour by

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satire or instruction to improve them. It is acknowledged that

they spend many of the first years of their lives in acquiring

a smattering of accomplishments: meanwhile strength of 

body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to

the desire of establishing themselves—the only way women

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can rise in the world—by marriage. And this desire making

mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such

children may be expected to act—they dress; they paint, and

nickname God’s creatures—Surely these weak beings are

only fit for a seraglio!—Can they govern a family, or take

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care of the poor babes whom they bring into the world?