Ivy, Oak & ....... *

In marriage, the women's graceful ivy was seen as ornamenting the man's sturdy Oak. Alas, Wollstonecraft says, if only husbands were so stable and reliable, rather than more like "overgrown children". Yet thanks to upbringing and lack of education, their wives are similarly weak. They lack order in their activities, because they were never taught method or reasoning. They learn only "in snatches," by observations picked up through daily life and society, and have no body of abstract knowledge against which to test what they discover. Women's mental understanding has always been sacrificed to the need to look good or seem charming, and even their body is only half-developed through lack of exercise or physical training. (Mary Wollstonecraft)