ABSTRACT
This remark of John Locke’s encapsulates the main issue I want to address in this chapter: girls’ achievement and how it is constructed. In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), Locke was interested in discussing how to educate young gentlemen, not how clever little girls were. He wanted to promote the conversational method to teach boys Latin, and his reference to girls was merely to show how easily languages were learned by conversation rather than by rules (Locke, 1989, p. 218). By attributing girls’ success to the method, he was able to correct gentlemen’s misapprehension that their daughters might be brighter than their sons. For Locke, as one concerned with the education of gentlemen, it was inconceivable that boys might be less able than girls. Nevertheless, Locke’s remark also shows that he did not fail to notice girls’ attainment. This is the main argument of this chapter: it is not so much that girls’ achievement has been ignored or overlooked throughout history, it is rather that the often visible evidence of this achievement has served to construct female minds as inferior. Conversely, lack of achievement has produced what have been construed as the superior mental power and, especially, the boundless potential of boys. The issue, then, is not the visibility of girls’ achievement but the way this performance has been inserted into other discoursesdiscourses on sex difference and education.
