But, allowing what is very natural to man, that the possession of
rare abilities is really calculated to excite over-weening pride,
disgusting in both men and women- in what a state of inferiority
must the female faculties have rusted when such a small portion of
knowledge as those women attained, who have sneeringly been termed
learned women, could be singular?- Sufficiently so to puff up the
possessor, and excite envy in her contemporaries, and some of the
other sex. Nay, has not a little rationality exposed many women to the
severest censure? I advert to well known facts, for I have
frequently heard women ridiculed, and every little weakness exposed,
only because they adopted the advice of some medical men, and deviated
from the beaten track in their mode of treating their infants. I
have actually heard this barbarous aversion to innovation carried
still further, and a sensible woman stigmatized as an unnatural
mother, who has thus been wisely solicitous to preserve the health
of her children, when in the midst of her care she has lost one by
some of the casualties of infancy, which no prudence can ward off. Her
acquaintance have observed, that this was the consequence of
new-fangled notions- the new-fangled notions of ease and
cleanliness. And those who pretending to experience, though they
have long adhered to prejudices that have, according to the opinion of
the most sagacious physicians, thinned the human race, almost rejoiced
at the disaster that gave a kind of sanction to prescription.
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