The pretext would have been more plausible if it had also been argued that there are certain kinds of cases and of evidence that men ought not to hear.

As a matter of fact, whatever frontier there may be in these matters is not of a sexual kind.
Everything that concerns men ultimately concerns women, and everything that concerns women ultimately concerns men.

Neither women nor men are entitled to claim dispensation.
It is evident that in the fifteenth century in England there was a wide prevalence of this method of education, which in France, a century later, was still regarded as desirable by Montaigne.

His reason for it is worth noting; children should be educated away from home, he remarks, in order to acquire hardness, for the parents will be too tender to them.

"It is an opinion accepted by all that it is not right to bring up children in their parents' laps, for natural love softens and relaxes even the wisest."[2] [2] Montaigne, _Essais_, Bk.