The Higher Education of Women/Chapter 3

by Emily Davies

CHAPTER III.

THINGS AS THEY ARE.

HETHER it is owing to the prevailing confusion of ideas as to the objects of female education, or to whatever cause it may be attributed, there can be little doubt that the thing itself is held in slight esteem. No one indeed would go so far as to say that it is not worth while to educate girls at all. Some education is held to be indispensable, but how much is an open question; and the general indifference operates in the way of continually postponing it to other claims, and, above all, in shortening the time allotted to systematic instruction and discipline. Parents are ready to make sacrifices to secure a tolerably good and complete education for their sons; they do not consider it necessary to do the same for their daughters. Or perhaps it would be putting it more fairly to say, that a very brief and attenuated course of instruction, beginning late and ending early, is believed to constitute a good and complete education for a woman.

It is usually assumed that when a boy's school education has once begun, which it does at a very early age, it is to go on steadily till he is a man. A boy who leaves school at sixteen or eighteen, either enters upon some technical course of training for a business or profession, or he passes on to the University, and from thence to active work of some sort or other. In other words, he is in statu pupillari until general education and professional instruction are superseded by the larger education supplied by the business of life. In the education of girls no such regular order appears. A very usual course seems to be for girls to spend their early years in a haphazard kind of way, either at home, or in not very regular attendance at an inferior school; after which they are sent for a year or two to a school or college to finish. The heads of schools complain with one voice that they are called upon to 'finish' what has never been begun, and that to attempt to give anything like a sound education, in the short time at their disposal, is perfectly hopeless. But, to take the most favourable case,—that of a girl so well prepared that she is able to make good use of the teaching provided in a first-rate school,—just at the moment when she is making real, substantial progress, she is taken away. At sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, as the case may be, her education comes to an abrupt pause. When she marries, it may be said to begin again; but between leaving school and marriage there is usually an interval of at least three or four years, if not a much longer period. These years a youth spends, as has been before said, in preparation for his future career. In the case of girls, no such preparation seems to be considered necessary.

Is this reasonable? Apart from immediate pecuniary necessity, is it desirable that the regular education of women should be considered as finished at the age of eighteen? If we are to take the almost universal practice as an answer, it is a very decided affirmative. Even girls whose parents must be fully aware that they will eventually have to maintain themselves, seldom receive any adequate training for their future work. Those whose fathers intend to provide for them, are still less likely to be supposed to want any further education after they leave school.

So fixed and wide-spread a custom must have had, at some time or other, even if it has not now, a meaning and a justification. And this may perhaps be found in the fact that our mothers and our grandmothers were accustomed to undergo at home, after leaving school, what was in fact an apprenticeship to household management. It seems indeed at one time to have been customary to apprentice girls of what we now call the middle class, to trades,—as we find George Herbert urging his Country Parson not to put his children 'into vain trades and unbefitting the reverence of their father's calling, such as are taverns for men and lacemaking for women,'—but even where there was no apprenticeship to a specific business, the round of household labours would supply a very considerable variety of useful occupation. An active part in these labours would naturally devolve upon the daughters of the house, who would thus be forming habits of industry and order invaluable in after life.

Probably a great many fathers, profoundly ignorant as they are of the lives of women, cherish a vague imagination that the same kind of thing is going on still. If Providence should at any time lead them to spend a week in the society of their daughters, under ordinary circumstances—not when illness has altered the usual current of affairs—they would find that this is very far from being the case. That great male public, which spends its days in chambers and offices and shops, knows little of what is going on at home. Writers in newspapers and magazines are fond of talking about the nursery, as if every household contained a never-ending supply of young children, on whom the grown-up daughters might be practising the art of bringing up. Others have a great deal to say about the kitchen, assuming it to be desirable that the ladies of the house should supersede, or at least assist, the cook. In that case, where there is a mother with two or three daughters, we should have four or five cooks. The undesirableness of such a multiplication of artists need scarcely be pointed out.^[1] Needlework, again, occupies a much larger space in the imagination of writers than it does in practical life. Except in families where there are children, there is very little plain needlework to be done, and what there is, many people make a point of giving out, on the ground that it is better to pay a half-starved needlewoman for work done, than to give her the money in the form of alms.

Having mentioned needlework, cookery, and the care of children, we seem to have come to an end of the household work in which ladies are supposed to take part. If young women of eighteen and upwards are learning anything in their daily life at home, it must be something beside and beyond the acquirement of dexterity in ordinary domestic arts.

Many fathers, however, are no doubt aware that their daughters have very little to do. But that seems to them anything but a hardship. They wish they had a little less to do themselves, and can imagine all sorts of interesting pursuits to which they would betake themselves if only they had a little more leisure. Ladies, it may be said, have their choice, and they must evidently prefer idleness, or they would find something to do. If this means that half-educated young women do not choose steady work when they have no inducement whatever to overcome natural indolence, it is no doubt true. Women are not stronger-minded than men, and a commonplace young woman can no more work steadily without motive or discipline than a commonplace young man. It has been remarked that 'the active, voluntary part of man is very small, and if it were not economised by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null. We could not do every day out of our own heads all we have to do. We should accomplish nothing; for all our energies would be frittered away in minor attempts at petty improvement.' The case of young women could scarcely have been better stated. Every day they have to do out of their own heads nearly all that they have to do. They accomplish little; for their energies are frittered away in minor attempts at petty improvement.

How true this is, the friends and counsellors of girls could abundantly testify. There is no point on which schoolmistresses are more unanimous and more emphatic than on the difficulty of knowing what to do with girls after leaving school. People who have not been brought into intimate converse with young women have little idea of the extent to which they suffer from perplexities of conscience. 'The discontent of the modern girl' is not mere idle self-torture. Busy men and women—and people with disciplined minds—can only, by a certain strain of the imagination, conceive the situation. If they at all entered into it, they could not have the heart to talk as they do. For the case of the modern girl is peculiarly hard in this, that she has fallen upon an age in which idleness is accounted disgraceful. The social atmosphere rings with exhortations to act, act in the living present. Everywhere we hear that true happiness is to be found in work—that there can be no leisure without toil—that people who do nothing are unfruitful fig-trees which cumber the ground. And in this atmosphere the modern girl lives and breathes. She is not a stone, and she does not live underground. She hears people talk—she listens to sermons—she reads books. And in her reading she comes across such passages as the following:—

'It is a real pleasure to me to find that you are taking steadily to a profession, without which I scarcely see how a man can live honestly. That is, I use the term "profession" in rather a large sense, not as simply denoting certain callings which a man follows for his maintenance, but rather a definite field of duty, which the nobleman has as much as the tailor, but which he has not, who having an income large enough to keep him from starving, hangs about upon life, merely following his own caprices and fancies; quod factu pessimum est.'^[2]

Or again:—

'N'est-il pas vrai que la fadeur de la vie est à la fois le grand malheur et le grand danger? Il y a une douzaine d'années, un orateur s'écriait à la tribune: "La France s'ennuie." Et moi je dis: L'humanité' s'ennuie, et son ennui ne date ni d'aujourd'hui ni d'hier, quoique peut-être il n'ait jamais été plus visible qu'en ce moment. Sans la poursuite d'un but idéal, toute vie devient inevitablement insipide, même jusqu'au dégout. Or, comptez parmi vos connaissances les personnes qui poursuivent un but élevé. Beaucoup vivent sans savoir pourquoi, uniquement, je pense, parce que chaque matin ramène le soleil. Que de femmes, si vous exceptez les mères qui se donnent à leur famille, que de femmes, hélas, dont la vie se passe entière dans de futiles occupations, ou dans des conversations plus futiles encore! Et l'on s'étonne que, rongées d'ennui, elles recherchent avec frénésie toutes les distractions imaginables! Elles accusent la monotonie de leur existence d'être la cause de ce vague malaise; la vraie cause est ailleurs, elle est dans la fadeur intolérable, non d'une vie dépourvue d'événements et d'aventures, mais d'une vie dont on n'entrevoit pas la raison ni le but. On se sent vivre sans qu'on y soit pour quelque chose, et cette vie inconsciente, inutile, absurde, inspire un mécontentement trop fondé.'^[3]

Such things the modern girl reads, and every word is confirmed by her own experience. With the practical English mind, which she has inherited from her father, she applies it all to herself. She seeks for counsel, and she finds it. She is bidden to 'look around her'—to do the duty that lies nearest—to teach in the schools, or visit the poor—to take up a pursuit—to lay down a course of study and stick to it. She looks around her, and sees no particular call to active exertion. The duties that lie in the way are swallowed up by an energetic mother or elder sister; very possibly she has no vocation for philanthropy—and the most devoted philanthropists are the most urgent in warning off people who lack the vocation—or she lives in a village where the children are better taught than she could teach them, and the poor are already too much visited by the clergyman's family; she feels no sort of impulse to take up any particular pursuit, or to follow out a course of study; and so long as she is quiet and amiable, and does not get out of health, nobody wants her to do anything. Her relations and friends—her world—are quite satisfied that she should 'hang about upon life, merely following her own'—or their own—'caprices and fancies.' The advice given, so easy to offer, so hard to follow, presupposes exactly what is wanting, a formed and disciplined character, able to stand alone, and to follow steadily a predetermined course, without fear of punishment, or hope of reward. Ought we to wonder if, in the great majority of cases, girls let themselves go drifting down the stream, despising themselves, but listlessly yielding to what seems to be their fate?

An appeal to natural guides is most often either summarily dismissed, or received with reproachful astonishment. It is considered a just cause for surprise and disappointment, that well brought up girls, surrounded with all the comforts of home, should have a wish or a thought extending beyond its precincts. And, perhaps, it is only natural that parents should be slow to encourage their daughters in aspirations after any duties and interests besides those of ministering to their comfort and pleasure. In taking for granted that this is the only object, other than that of marriage, for which women were created, they are but adopting the received sentiment of society. No doubt, too, they honestly believe that, in keeping their daughters to themselves till they marry, they are doing the best thing for them, as well as pleasing themselves. If the daughters take a different view, parents think it is because they are young and inexperienced, and incompetent to judge. The fact is, it is the parents who are inexperienced. Their youth was different in a hundred ways from the youth of this generation; and the experience of thirty years ago is far from being infallible in dealing with the difficulties and perplexities of the present. No doubt young people are ignorant, and want guidance. But they should be helped and advised, not silenced. Parents take upon themselves a heavy responsibility when they hastily crush the longing after a larger and more purposeful life.

That such an impulse is worthy of respect can scarcely be denied. The existence of capacities is in itself an indication that they are intended for some good purpose. Conscious power is not a burden, to be borne with patience, but a gift, for the due use of which the possessor rightly feels accountable. To have a soul which can be satisfied with vanities is not eminently virtuous and Christian, but the reverse. To be awake to responsibilities, sensitive in conscience, quickly responsive to all kindling influences, is a sign that education has, so far, done a good work. A flowing river is no doubt more troublesome to manage than a tranquil pool; but pools, if let alone too long, are apt to become noxious, as well as useless. The current may require to be wisely directed; but that there should be a current of being, wanting to set itself somewhere, is surely a cause for thankful rejoicing. It is an unfortunate misunderstanding of the true state of the case that makes parents sigh over what might well be their happiness and pride: one more exemplification of the sluggishness which hates nothing so bitterly as to be called upon to think—to consider a new idea—perhaps to go farther, and take a step out of the beaten track. It is much easier, no doubt, to say to a daughter who comes to you with her original notions—'My dear child, put it out of your head directly; it cannot be thought of for a moment'—than it would be to hear her patiently, to consider how far her crude ideas are practicable, to help her, so far as may be, in carrying them out. And one ought not to wonder that the easiest course is the one most commonly chosen. How far it may, or may not, be the duty of daughters to sacrifice their own wishes to the temporary pleasure of those to whom they owe so much, is a separate question. It is at least well for parents to know that, far more than they are at all aware of, it is felt to be a sacrifice, and that they must accept it as such, if at all.^[4]

The representation here given is, of course, not universally applicable. It is quite possible that in some senses, and to some persons, an apparently empty life may be easier, and even richer, than one of toil. There are people to whom the Happy Valley kind of life is by no means intolerable; and even earnest-minded and conscientious girls, urged by a strong sense of the heinousness of discontent, often manage to crush troublesome aspirations, and make themselves happy. There is something undignified in being miserable, without a just and intelligible cause to show for it; and many young women, capable of higher things, accommodate themselves with a considerable degree of cheerfulness to a narrow and unsatisfying round of existence. Nor is it intended to represent ladies as habitually doing nothing. On the contrary, they have many resources. Among them are various arts and handicrafts, gardening, letter-writing, and much reading. Of these, the last is perhaps the most popular and the most delusive. A girl who is 'very fond of reading' is considered to be happily suited with never-failing occupation, and no thought is taken as to what is to come of her reading. On this subject, the observations of Miss Aikin, herself an experienced reader, are worth considering. 'Continual reading,' she says, 'if desultory, and without a definite object, favours indolence, unsettles opinions, and of course enfeebles the mental and moral energies.' And Mr Robertson of Brighton, speaking in reference to girls, remarks that they 'read too much, and think too little. I will answer for it that there are few girls of eighteen who have not read more books than I have. . . . That multifarious reading weakens the mind more than doing nothing; for it becomes a necessity at last, like smoking, and is an excuse for the mind to lie dormant, whilst thought is poured in, and runs through, a clear stream, over unproductive gravel, on which not even mosses grow. It is the idlest of all idlenesses, and leaves more of impotency than any other.'

The same might be said of all merely dilettante occupation. Its fault is simply that it is dilettante—literally a pastime. It may as well be done, if nothing else turns up, and that is all. And this drawback, belonging to nearly all the ordinary work of young women, they are by themselves unable to overcome. Of course, the case is partly in their own hands, and those who are by nature abnormally energetic, will make a career for themselves in spite of difficulties. Where the inward impulse is irrepressible, it becomes a lantern to the feet, and a lamp unto the path, making the way of duty plain and unmistakable. But for the few whose course is thus illumined, there will be the many hovering in uneasy doubt, their consciences and intellects just lively enough to make them restless and unhappy, not sufficiently clear in their minds as to right and wrong, either to be nerved for vigorous action, or to accept contentedly the conventional duty of quiescence. There must be something wrong in social regulations which make a demand for exceptional wisdom and strength on the part of any particular class; and that such a demand is made upon average young women is sufficiently clear. What society says to them seems to be something to this effect. Either you have force enough to win a place in the world, in the face of heavy discouragement, or you have not. If you have, the discipline of the struggle is good for you; if you have not, you are not worth troubling about. Is not this a hard thing to say to commonplace girls, not professing to be better or stronger than their neighbours? Why should their task be made, by social and domestic arrangements, peculiarly and needlessly difficult? And why should it be taken for granted that, if they fail, they must be extraordinarily silly or self-indulgent? More than any other class, at the same age, they are exempted from direction and control—liberally gifted with the kind of freedom enjoyed by the denizens of a village pound. Within their prescribed sphere, they may wander at will, and if they 'there small scope for action see,' it is explained to them that they must not 'for this give room to discontent;' nor let their time 'be spent in idly dreaming' how they might be

'More free
From outward hindrance or impediment.
For presently this hindrance thou shalt find
That without which all goodness were a task
So slight, that virtue never could grow strong.'

In reply to such admonitions they are tempted to inquire what task, other than that of dreaming, is set before them—what virtue, always excepting that one virtue of passive submission, has any chance of growing strong under such conditions. The 'slow,' who sink into dull inertia, and the 'fast,' who get rid of their superfluous energy in silly extravagances, have alike the excuse, that at the moment when they need the support of a routine explained and justified by a reasonable purpose, discipline and stimulus are at once withdrawn, leaving in their place no external support beyond the trivial demands and restraints of conventional society.

It may seem that an exaggerated importance is here attached to the interval between school and marriage; and if the considerations brought forward had reference to this period only, the charge would be just. But rightly to estimate the value of these years, we must bear in mind that they are the spring-time of life—the season of blossom, on which the fruit of the future depends. It is then that an impress is given to character which lasts through life. Opportunities then thrown away or misused can scarcely be recovered in later years. And it has seemed necessary to dwell upon the existing tenour of young women's lives, because, in dealing with the question of extending the duration of female education, we must be largely influenced by our conception of the alternative involved in leaving things as they are. It has been said that the end of education is 'to form a nation of living, orderly men.' If it has been shown that the course now pursued tends to make a large part of the nation inanimate and disorderly, a case would seem to be established for urging efforts at improvement.

1. As this pursuit is sometimes recommended with apparent seriousness, it may be as well to point out to the uninitiated, that if mistresses are to do the cooking, masters must dine alone. Dinners cannot be cooked an hour beforehand, and left to serve themselves up. In this, as in other arts, the finishing touches are among the most important. This does not mean, of course, that a mistress may not give directions and occasional help, or that it may not be a very good thing for girls to lend a hand, now and then, by way of learning to cook. That is a different thing from regularly spending a considerable part of their daily lives in the kitchen.
2. Letter to Dr Greenhill, an old pupil, in 'Life of Dr Arnold,' p. 392.
3. Sermons par T. Colani.—Deuxième Recueil, p. 293.
4. 'M. de Parthenau would have been surprised had any one suggested that this peaceful life was less to the taste of his children than himself. Like so many excellent fathers, he sincerely believed that because it suited him, it must suit them. He had forgotten his own stormy youth, to find himself happy by his fireside, and it never occurred to him to ask, "Is my daughter happy?" So much the better, since he could have done nothing; and Thérèse was the last person to make him suspect that she was not perfectly satisfied. Yet, whoever had seen her, would have thought her destined for a wider sphere than that of the narrow world where she strove to be content. It had not always been so. Now, however, she stifled all the aspirations, the radiant visions which once haunted her, under the crowd of occupations which she found for herself. She silenced the cry of her intellect, and yet heard it always; perhaps because she shunned as snares the natural outlets which presented themselves, refusing each rare opportunity of leaving home, lest she should return discontented; and putting away books and pencils, that she might have no interests but those of her father and her poor dependents. It was an honest, mistaken effort to do right; and the confessor, who stood to her in the place of a conscience, approved it—nay, urged it on her. It was strange, this mute, ceaseless conflict, known only in its full extent to herself, and hidden under so monotonous and peaceful a life!'—Sydonie's Dowry, p. 24.

   May not something like a counterpart of this mute, ceaseless conflict be hidden under many a monotonous and peaceful English life?