A young man of very good brains was telling me, the other day, his dreams
of his future wife. Rattling on, more in joke than in earnest, he said,
"She must be perfectly ignorant, and a bigot: she must know nothing, and
believe everything. I should wish to have her from the adjoining room call
to me, 'My dear, what do two and two make?'"
It did not seem to me that his demand would be so very hard to fill, since
bigotry and ignorance are to be had almost anywhere for the asking; and, as
for two and two, I should say that it had always been the habit of women to
ask that question of some man, and to rest easily satisfied with the
answer. They have generally called, as my friend wished, from some other
room, saying, "My dear, what do two and two make?" and the husband or
father or brother has answered and said, "My dear, they make four for a
man, and three for a woman."
At any given period in the history of woman, she has adopted man's whim as
the measure of her rights; has claimed nothing; has sweetly accepted
anything; the law of two-and-two itself should be at his discretion. At any
given moment, so well was his interpretation received, that it stood for
absolute right. In Rome a woman, married or single, could not testify in
court; in the middle ages, and down to quite modern times, she could not
hold real estate; thirty years ago she could not, in New England, obtain a
collegiate education; even now she can only vote for school officers.
The first principles of republican government are so rehearsed and
re-rehearsed, that one would think they must become "as plain as that two
and two make four." But we find throughout, that, as Emerson said of
another class of reasoners, "Their two is not the real two; their four
is not the real four." We find different numerals and diverse
arithmetical rules for the two sexes; as, in some Oriental countries,
men and women speak different dialects of the same language.
In novels the hero often begins by dreaming, like my friend, of an ideal
wife, who shall be ignorant of everything, and have only brains enough to
be bigoted. Instead of sighing, like Falstaff, "Oh for a fine young thief,
of the age of two and twenty or thereabouts!" the hero sighs for a fine
young idiot of similar age. When the hero is successful in his search and
wooing, the novelist sometimes mercifully removes the young woman early,
like David Copperfield's Dora, she bequeathing the bereaved husband, on her
deathbed, to a woman of sense. In real life these convenient interruptions
do not commonly occur, and the foolish youth regrets through many years
that he did not select an Agnes instead.