New facts and remarks concerning idiocy : being a lecture delivered before the New York Medical Journal Association, October 15, 1869 / by Edward Seguin.

  • Seguin, E. C. (Edward Constant), 1843-1898.
Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: New facts and remarks concerning idiocy : being a lecture delivered before the New York Medical Journal Association, October 15, 1869 / by Edward Seguin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Brandeis University Libraries, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Robert D. Farber University Archives & Special Collections Department, Brandeis University.

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    There is nothing new in this position. On the contrary, it is so old that it seems to be entirely forgotten. Women who have remained single, by their own choice, our own dereliction, chance, misconduct, maltreatment, injustice, over-destruction of males by war, or over-production of fe- males in our species, etc., etc., have not always been lowered or cast away among the dangerous classes by our intermittent repulses and caresses, in disregard of their natural higher as- pirations. Nor have they always been shut up in convents, where their capacity for labor and power of tenderness are buried alive in incense, music, and moral annihilation. Nobody seems to remember that once the laws, habits, and religions even, provided not for one class of women only, but for all classes. Such sayings as that of Taney about a whole race of men, that some women have no rights that we are bound to respect, is a modern infamy j since, behind every lost woman, may be seen, Mephistopheles like, the phantasm of a man's lie. Let us sooner recall the times of Pericles, when the greatest statesman of Greece was his unmarried friend and adviser, Aspasia, one of the hetairce * of Athens. Then all classes of women were respected, or at least had their rights acknowledged, because all had their archetype in the Greek heaven, Olympus. But as for us, we had only one type of womanhood ; and our incredulity or its uselcssness has broken it. Alas! The rekindled worship of the Virgin Mary does not protect the mothers better than the Made- lines, and serves only as a delusive mirage to lull the despair of nuns. In.our Blessed Lady, the impossible has killed the ideal. Truly, in a tradition which dates but of yesterday, we have carved, out of reality, a beautiful type of womanhood, whose reflex influence can be read on the countenance of American mothers. But the likeness to Martha Washington's face, whose beauty is virtue, can be reached by the young woman only through an intermediate type of youthful perfection, that is yet to come out from the development of the national character. In the absence of that youthful educational type, it is fortunate to * See the learned researches of L. P. Brockett on the historical conditions of women, in his book, Women's Bights, Wrongs, and Privileges.