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.
