Women's Education Prohibition

The Female non-education decree is a policy, established by the Chief Circle roughly three hundred years before Square’s account, that bars Women from education on the stated ground that they are deficient in reason and abundant in emotion. Its effects reach beyond the women it excludes: Square argues that the system forces men to maintain separate vocabularies and habits of thought, and may be enfeebling the intellectual powers of the society that imposed it.

Establishment and Scope

Square traces the policy to a decree issued about three hundred years earlier by the Chief Circle. The ruling determined that Women should no longer be treated as rational beings or receive mental education. Its premise turns a claim about women’s supposed emotional nature into an institutional rule governing what they may learn.

The prohibition is practical as well as ideological. Women are no longer taught to read, or even enough arithmetic to count the angles of their husbands or children. Square says the consequences have accumulated over generations: women’s intellectual power has declined, while the system of non-education, which he also calls quietism, continues in his own time.

A Divided Language

The decree’s effects are not confined to the people denied instruction. Square fears that the policy, despite its professed good intentions, has reacted injuriously on the male sex. Men, he says, must lead a nearly bilingual and bi-mental existence, maintaining one mode of speech for Women and another for male company and books.

In women’s presence, men use words such as love, duty, right, wrong, pity, and hope. Square describes these concepts as emotional fictions used to control what he calls feminine exuberance. Among men, those words are translated into a different, supposedly scientific idiom: love becomes the anticipation of benefits, while duty becomes necessity or fitness. The division makes the policy a system of managed discourse as well as restricted schooling; men learn to speak differently according to their audience.

The split extends to social deference and belief. Men use language that presents them as reverent toward Women, and Women believe that they are adored almost as devoutly as the Chief Circle. Away from them, however, men regard and describe them in sharply diminished terms. Square further reports that theology in women’s chambers differs entirely from theology elsewhere. The decree thus sustains different public and private accounts of women’s status, and even separate religious instruction or belief across social settings.

Education and Generational Consequences

The separation begins early. At three years of age, boys are taken from maternal care and taught to unlearn the language used with their mothers and nurses, except when repeating it in those women’s presence. They are instead trained in the vocabulary and idiom of science. Square presents this transition as a burden imposed on the young: it requires them to acquire not simply new words but a second framework of thought.

He links that divided training to a decline in male intellectual strength. In his estimation, contemporary men already grasp mathematical truth less firmly than their ancestors did three centuries earlier, before the policy had worked across so many generations. His concern is therefore both institutional and intergenerational: the rule that denies women access to learning also shapes how boys are taught to communicate, what they are taught to conceal, and how they acquire scientific reasoning.

Square raises two further risks, though he does not claim that either has occurred. A Woman might secretly learn to read and communicate what she finds in even one popular book to other Women. Alternatively, an infant boy might disobey or speak carelessly and reveal to his mother the secrets of the logical dialect. The possibilities expose the system’s reliance on keeping knowledge separated, even as Square’s account treats the separation as a source of strain for the men charged with maintaining it.

Square’s Appeal and the Policy’s Significance

Square’s request to the highest authorities is explicitly limited. He does not build it around the injustice done to Women or call for their intellectual independence; he rests it on the alleged enfeeblement of male intellect and asks that the regulations governing female education be reconsidered. His argument therefore criticizes the policy while retaining the gender hierarchy and assumptions that support it.

That tension makes the decree a revealing feature of Flatland’s social order. Education is withheld through an official judgment about women’s nature, while men are trained to sustain the judgment through segregated language, concealed meanings, and sharply different accounts for different audiences. Square’s warning is that this arrangement may damage the intellectual capacities it was meant to preserve. The policy’s consequence, in his presentation, is not only women’s declining access to knowledge but a society whose supposedly rational male culture depends on a divided and increasingly burdensome form of thought.