The author, Reverend John Bennett, expressed a growing concern for his time when he wrote about the importance of educating women and girls. He said: “above all, when we reflect, that the youth of both sexes are under their [women’s] management for many of those early years, when all the durable impressions must be made, it may justly appear a matter of amazement, that their education has been so much and so generally neglected; that no nation, ancient or modern, has esteemed it an object of publick importance that no Philosopher or Legislator has interwoven it with his system, nor any writer deemed it a subject worthy of a full or a serious discussion.
Many systems of instruction have been adopted for the other sex…. But, by a strange fatality, women have been considerably omitted in the account, as if they were not gifted with reason and understanding, but were only to be valued for the beauty of their persons, for the elegance of their manners, or the symmetry of their forms.”
