STRICTURES ON THE MODERN SYSTEM OF FEMALE EDUCATION; WITH A VIEW OF THE PRINCIPLES AND CONDUCT PREVALENT AMONG WOMEN OF RANK AND FORTUNE. May you so raise your character that you may help to make the next age a better thing, and leave posterity in your debt, for the advantage it shall receive by your example.-Lord Halifax. INTRODUCTION. IT is a singular injustice which is often exercised towards women, first to give them a very defective education, and then to expect from them the most undeviating purity of conduct; to train them in such a manner as shall lay them open to the most dangerous faults, and then to censure them for not proving faultless. Is it not unreasonable and unjust to express disappointment if our daughters should, in their subsequent lives, turn out precisely that very kind of character for which it would be evident, to an unprejudiced bystander, that the whole scope and tenor of their instruction had been systematically preparing them? Some reflections on the present erroneous system are here with great deference submitted to public consideration. The author is apprehensive that she shall be accused of betraying the interests of her sex by laying open their defects; but surely, an earnest wish to turn their attention to objects calculated to promote their true dignity, is not the office of an enemy. So to expose the weakness of the land as to suggest the necessity of internal improvement, and to point out the means of effectual defence, is not treachery, but patriotism. Again, it may be objected to this little work, that many errors are here ascribed to women which by no means belong to them exclusively, and that it seems to confine to the sex those faults which are common to the species; but this is in some measure unavoidable. In speaking on the qualities of one sex, the moralist is somewhat in the situation of the geographer, who is treating on the nature of one country: the air, soil, and produce of the land which he is describing, cannot fail in many essential points to resemble those of other countries under the same parallel; yet it is his business to descant on the one, without adverting to the other; and though in drawing his map he may happen to introduce some of the neighboring coast, yet his principal attention must be confined to that country which he proposes to describe, without taking into account the resembling circumstances of the adjacent shores. It may be also objected, that the opinion here suggested on the state of manners among the higher classes of our countrywomen, may seem to controvert the just encomiums of modern travellers, who generally concur in ascribing a decided superiority to the |