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of seven. Her father had backed her studies and supplied the best of tutors; by the time she enrolled in the
10 University of Padua, she knew not only Latin and Greek, French, English and Spanish, but also Hebrew, and
Arabic, and Chaldaic.
What was it like to be a gifted woman, an Elena Comaro, three hundred years ago? What happened to a
15
bright woman in the past who wanted to study another culture, examine the roots of a language, master the
intricacies of higher mathematics, write a book or prevent or cure a terrible disease?
To begin with, for a woman to acquire anything that amounted to real learning, she needed four basics.
20
She needed to survive. In the seventeenth century women's life expectancy had risen only to thirty-two; not
until 1750 did it begin to rise appreciably and reach, in mid-nineteenth century, age forty-two. A woman
ambitious for learning would do well to choose a life of celibacy, not only to avoid the hazards of childbirth
25 but because there was no room for a scholar's life within the confines of marriage and childbearing. Elena
Comaro had taken a vow of chastity at the age of eleven, turned down proposals of marriage to become an
oblate of the Benedict Order. *)
*«an oblate of the Benedict Order» = a person in the service of a (Benedictine) Roman Catholic monastery.
30 Secondly, to aspire to learning a woman needed basic literacy; she had to be one of the fortunate few
who learned at least to read and write. Although studies of literacy in earlier centuries are still very
incomplete and comparative data on men's and women's literacy are meager, it appears from one such study
35
that before 1650 a bare 10% of women in the city of London could sign their names. What is most striking
about this particular study is that men are divided by occupation — with clergy and the professions at the
top (100% literate) and male laborers at the bottom of scale (about 15% literate); women as a group fell
40
below even the unskilled male laborers in their literacy rate. By about 1700 half the women in London
could sign their own names; in the provinces woman's literacy remained much lower.
The third fundamental a woman needed if she aspired to learning was, of course, an economic base. It
45
was best to be born, like Elena Comaro, to a family of wealth who owned a well-stoc ked library and' could
afford private tutors. For girls of poor families the chance of learning the bare minimum of reading and
writing was small. Even such endowed charity schools as Christ's Hospital in London were attended mostly
50 by boys; poor girls in charity schools were apt to have their literacy skills slighted in favor of catechism,**)
needlework, knitting, and lacemaking in preparation for a life of domestic service.
**«catechism»— a book containing a summary of the principles of the Christian religion, on an elementary level.
55 The fourth fundamental a woman scholar needed was simply very tough skin, for she was a deviant in a
society where the learned woman, far from being valued,was likely to hear herself preached against in the
pulpit and made fun of on the public stage. Elena Cornaro was fortunate to have been born in Italy where
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an array of learned women had flourished during the Renaissance and where the woman scholar seems to
have found a more hospitable ambiance that in the northern countries. In eighteenth-century England the
gifted writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, writing in 1753 about proposed plans for a little granddaughter's
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education, admonished her daughter with some bitterness to «conceal whatever learning (the child) attains,
with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness».
And yet, despite all the hurdles, some bright women did manage to make a mark as scholars and writers.
70 Sometimes girls listened in on their brothers lessons. A fortunate few, like Elena Cornaro, had parents
willing and able to educate daughters equally with sons. But by far the largest number of women scholars
in the past were self-educated. Through sheer intellectual curiosity, self-discipline, often grinding hard
75 work, they taught themselves whatever they wanted to know. Such self teaching may be the only truly
joyous form of learning. Yet it has its drawbacks: it may also be haphazard and superficial. Without access
to laboratory, lecture, and dissecting table, it was all but impossible for women to train themselves in
80 higher mathematics, in science, in anatomy, for instance.
So if one asks what it was like to be a gifted woman, to aspire to learning at the time of Elena Cornaro,
the answer must be that it was a difficult and demanding choice, requiring not merely intellectual gifts but
85 extraordinary physical and mental stamina, and only a rare few women succeeded in becoming contributing
scholars and writers. All the usual scholarly careers were closed to women, so that even for women who
succeeded in educating themselves to the level of their male colleagues, the opportunities to support
90 themselves were meager.
After Elena Cornaro's death a half a century passed before a second woman, again Italian, was awarded
a doctorate at the University of Bologna. Not until 150 years later did American universities admit women