VI. Intelligence

Extract

The ancient world never made the social change which would most have altered family structures: delaying marriage for women until they had finished secondary education, and replacing marriage, for some women, with a religious or professional commitment. Perhaps it seemed too dangerous, or too unkind, to deny girls an outlet for the sexual feeling which becomes intense at puberty, or to waste their brief ‘bloom’, which was thought to begin about twelve. But the main reason was that women were thought to be unsuited to higher education. Even if they had the intelligence (which was doubtful), academic study was unfeminine and a formal training in rhetoric (the main purpose of higher education) was irrelevant, and it was all too much for them. When higher education was at last opened to women, in the late nineteenth century, they were threatened with infertility and ‘brain fever’ - and some succumbed.