While the society at at that time was mainly responsible for the stifling of women prodigies I think a large part of the blame in this particular case should go to Leopold Mozart.<p>"There is evidence that Marianne wrote musical compositions, as there are letters from Wolfgang praising her work, but the voluminous correspondence of her father never mentions any of her compositions, and none have survived" (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Anna_Mozart" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Anna_Mozart</a>)<p>Now, contrast her case with another contemporary female prodigy, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Gaetana_Agnesi" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Gaetana_Agnesi</a>) one can see that not all parents at that time were so ignorant of their daughters' potential.<p>"When she was fifteen, her father began to regularly gather in his house a circle of the most learned men in Bologna,[9] before whom she read and maintained a series of theses on the most abstruse philosophical questions. Records of these meetings are given in Charles de Brosses' Lettres sur l'Italie and in the Propositiones Philosophicae, which her father had published in 1738 as an account of her final performance, where she defended 190 theses."<p>Leopold Mozart was no ignoramus (say, like, Gauss' father who tried to stop his son's education so to avoid him being an "egghead"), he could have supported Maria Anne similarly.
I could not help but gravitate towards the comment on that article where nervous chauvinists wring their fingers over the fact that perhaps, perhaps, people are giving a woman too much credit for what could have been her accomplishments in a time when married women in Austria could not even own property separate from their husbands. How can such men be presumed to converse in good faith when they refuse to budge an inch on the idea that women <i>in the 18th century</i> were given a terrible deal?<p>I wonder, when do they peg the date that men and women became treated equally and henceforth all difference in autonomy, liberty, and respect were due to the inherent superiority of men? It seems they still circle about pounding their hands on the good books lamenting the lost wisdom of the iron age.