GIRLS, WIVES, AND MOTHERS.
A WORD TO THE MIDDLE CLASSES.
There may be theoretically much to sympathise with in the cry for the yet higher culture of the women of our middle classes, but at the same time not a little to find fault with in practice. While it is difficult to believe that there can be such a thing as over-education of the human subject, male or female, there may yet be false lines of training, which lead to a dainty misplaced refinement, quite incompatible with the social position the woman may be called to fill in after-life, and which too often presupposes, what even education has a difficulty in supplying—a subsistence in life. Where we equip, we too frequently impede. In the hurry to be intelligent and accomplished, the glitter of drawing-room graces is an object of greater desire than the more homely but not less estimable virtues identified with the kitchen. Our young housewives are imbued with far too much of the æsthete at the expense of the cook; too much of the stage, and too little of the home. In abandoning the equally mistaken views of our grandfathers on women’s up-bringing, we have gone to the opposite extreme, to the exclusion of anything like a means to an end; and in the blindest disregard of the recipients’ circumstances in life, present and prospective.
In considering what the aim of female education ought to be, it is surely not too much to expect that of all things it should mentally and physically fit our women for the battle of life. Its application and utility should not have to end where they practically do at present—at the altar. While it is necessary to provide a common armour for purposes of general defence, there certainly ought to be a special strengthening of the harness where most blows are to be anticipated; and if not to all, certainly to middle-class women, the years of battle come after, not before marriage. Every one of them, then, ought to be trained in conformity with the supreme law of her being, to prove a real helpmate to the man that takes her to wife. Make sure that she is first of all thoroughly qualified for a mother’s part, in what may be called a working sphere of life; then add whatever graces may be desirable as a sweetening, according to taste, means, and opportunity. It is in this happy blending of abstract knowledge with the economy of a home, that true success in the education of middle-class women must be sought.
In the training of our boys, utility in after-life is seldom lost sight of. Why should it be too often the reverse in the education of our girls, whose great vocation in life, as wives and mothers, is a birthright they cannot renounce, which no lord of creation can deprive them of, and which no sticklers for what they are pleased to call the rights of women can logically disown? No doubt, among the last-named there are extreme people, who cannot, from the very nature of their own individual circumstances, see anything in wifely cares save the shackles of an old-world civilisation. In their eyes, motherhood is a tax upon pleasure, and an abasement of the sex. With them, there need be no parley. There is no pursuit under the sun that a woman will not freely forsake—often at a sacrifice—for the wifely cares that supervene on marriage; and therein, few will deny, lies her great and natural sphere in life. Than it, there is no nobler. In it, she can encounter no rival; and any attempt to divest herself of nature’s charge can have but one ending. The blandishments of a cold æstheticism can never soothe, animate, and brighten the human soul, like the warm, suffusive joys which cluster round the married state.
Here we may briefly digress to remark, that in our opinion, no valid objections can be urged against women entering professional life, provided they stick to it. They already teach, and that is neither the lightest nor least important of masculine pursuits. Why should they not prescribe for body and soul? why not turn their proverbial gifts of speech to a golden account at the bar? It would be in quitting any of these professions, and taking up the rôle of wife and mother, which they would have to learn at the expense of their own and others’ happiness, that the real mischief of the liberty would lie. In nine cases out of ten, their failure in the second choice would be assured, thereby poisoning all social well-being at its very source.
The woman not over- but mis-educated is becoming an alarmingly fruitful cause of the downward tendencies of much of our middle-class society. She herself is less to blame for this, than the short-sighted, though possibly well-meant policy of her parents and guardians, who, in the worst spirit of the age, veneer their own flesh and blood, as they do their furniture, for appearance’ sake. Let us glance at the educational equipment they provide their girls with, always premising that our remarks are to be held as strictly applicable only to the middle ranks of our complex society.
Our typical young woman receives a large amount of miscellaneous education, extending far through her teens, and amounting to a very fair mastery of the Rs. If she limp in any of these, it will be in the admittedly vexatious processes of arithmetic. She will have a pretty ready command of the grammatical and idiomatic uses of her mother-tongue; a fairly firm hold of the geography of this planet, and an intelligent conception of the extra-terrestrial system. She will have plodded through piles of French and German courses, learning many things from them but the language. She will have a fair if not profound knowledge of history. She can, in all likelihood, draw a little, and even paint; but of all her accomplishments, what she must imperatively excel in is music. From tender years, she will have diligently laboured at all the musical profundities; and her chances in the matrimonial market of the future are probably regarded as being in proportion to her proficient manipulation of the keyboard. If she can sing, well and good; play on the piano she must. If, as a girl, she has no taste for instrumental music, and no ear to guide her flights in harmony, the more reason why she should, with the perseverance of despair, thump away on the irresponsive ivories, in defiance of every instinct in her being. The result at twenty may be something tangible in some cases, but extremely unsatisfactory at the price.
During all these years, she has been systematically kept ignorant of almost every domestic care. Of the commonplaces of cookery she has not the remotest idea. A great educationist, whose statement we have good reason to indorse, asserts that there are thousands of our young housewives that do not know how to cook a potato. This may seem satire. It is, we fear, in too many cases, true, and we quote it with a view to correct rather than chastise.
The misapplications of young miss’s upbringing do not end here. She cannot sew to any purpose. If she deign to use a needle at all, it is to embroider a smoking-cap for a lover or a pair of slippers for papa. To sew on a button, or cut out and unite the plainest piece of male or female clothing, is not always within her powers, or at least her inclinations. Prosaic vulgar work, fit only for dressmakers and milliners! She will spend weeks and months over eighteen inches of what she is pleased to call lace, while the neighbouring seamstress is making up all her underclothing, to pay for which, papa has not too much money; but then it is genteel.
She cannot knit. A pair of worsted cuffs or a lanky cravat is something great to attain to; while a stocking, even were the charwomen less easily paid, is sure to come off the needles right-lined as any of Euclid’s parallelograms—all leg and no ankle—a suspicion of foot, but never a vestige of heel. To darn the hole that so soon appears in the loosely knitted fabric, would be a servile, reproachful task, quite staggering to the sentimental aspirations of our engaged Angelina. Yet darning and the divine art of mending will one day be to her a veritable philosopher’s stone, whose magic influences will shed beams of happiness over her household, and fortunate will she be if she have not to seek it with tears.
By the sick-bed, where she ought to be supreme, she is often worse than useless. The pillows that harden on the couch of convalescence, too rarely know her softening touch. She may be all kindness and attention—for the natural currents of her being are full to repletion of sweetness and sympathy—yet as incapable of really skilled service as an artist’s lay-figure. And, as a last touch to the sorry picture, instead of being in any way a source of comfort to the bread-winners of her family, or a lessening of the strain on their purse-strings, she is a continual cause of extra work to servants, of anxiety to her parents, of ennui to herself.
Apparently, the chief mission of the young lady to whom we address ourselves, is to entice some eligible young man into the responsibilities of wedlock. He, poor fellow, succumbs not so much to intrinsic merits, as to fine lady-like airs. He sees the polish on the surface, and takes for granted that there is good solid wear underneath. Our young miss has conquered, and quits the family roof-tree, sweetly conscious of her orange wreath of victory; but alas!—we are sorry to say it—do not her conquests too often end at the altar, unless she resolutely set herself to learn the exacting mysteries of her new sphere, and, what is far more difficult, to unlearn much that she has acquired? That she often does at this stage make a bold and firm departure from the toyish fancies of her training, and makes, from the sheer plasticity and devotion of her character, wonderful strides in the housewife’s craft, we cheerfully confess. Were it otherwise, the domestic framework of society would be in a far more disorganised condition than it happily is. But why handicap her for the most important, most arduous portion of her race in life? Why train her to be the vapid fine lady, with almost the certainty that, by so doing, you are taking the surest means of rendering her an insufficient wife and mother? And, unfortunately, not always, in fact but seldom, is she able, when she crosses her husband’s, threshold, to tear herself away from her omnivorous novel-reading, piano-playing, and all the other alleviations of confirmed idleness.
The sweets of the honeymoon and an undefined vacation beyond make no great calls on her as a helpmate and wife. If her husband’s means permit of a servant or two, the smoother the water and the plainer the sailing for the nonce; although these keen-scented critics in the kitchen will, in a very short time, detect and take the grossest advantage of their mistress’s inexperience. Besides, if we reflect that among our middle classes more marry on an income of two hundred pounds than on a higher, it becomes painfully apparent that two or three servants are the one thing our young housewife needs, but cannot possibly afford.
She is now, however, only about to begin her life-work, and if there is such a thing clearly marked out for a being on this globe, it is for woman. By birthright, she is the mother of the human race. Could she have a greater, grander field for enterprise? How admirably has nature fitted her for performing the functions of the mother and adorning the province of the wife! Hence, there devolves upon her a responsibility which no extraneous labour in more inviting fields can excuse. No philosophy, no tinkering of the constitution, no success in the misnamed higher walks of life and knowledge, will atone for the failure of the mother. Let her shine a social star of the first magnitude, let her be supreme in every intellectual circle, and then marry, as she is ever prone to do, in spite of all theories; and if she fail as a mother, she fails as a woman and as a human being. She becomes a mere rag, a tatter of nature’s cast-off clothing, spiritless, aimless, a failure in this great world of work.
As her family increases, the household shadows deepen, where all should be purity, sweetness, and light. The domestic ship may even founder through the downright, culpable incapacity of her that takes the helm. Her children never have the air of comfort and cleanliness. In their clothes, the stitch is never in time. The wilful neglect, and consequent waste, in this one matter of half-worn clothing is almost incredible. A slatternly atmosphere pervades her entire home. With the lapse of time our young wife becomes gradually untidy, dishevelled, and even dirty, in her own person; and at last sits down for good, disconsolate and overwhelmed by her unseen foe. Her husband can find no pleasure in the ‘hugger-mugger,’ as Carlyle phrases it, of his home; there is no brightness in it to cheer his hours of rest. He returns from his daily labours to a chaos, which he shuns by going elsewhere; and so the sequel of misery and neglect takes form.
As a first precaution against such a calamity, let us strip our home-life of every taint of quackery. Let us regard women’s education, like that of men, as a means to a lifelong end, never forgetting that if we unfit it for everyday practice, we render it a mere useless gem, valuable in a sense, but unset. Middle-class women will be the better educated, in every sense, the more skilled they are in the functions of the mother and the duties of the wife. Give them every chance of proving thrifty wives and good mothers, in addition to, or, where that is impossible, to the exclusion of accomplished brides. Let some part of their training as presently constituted, such as the rigours of music, and the fritterings of embroidery, give way, in part, to the essential acquirements which every woman, every mother should possess, and which no gold can buy. Give us a woman, then, natural in her studies, her training, her vocations, and her dress, and in the words of the wisest of men, who certainly had a varied experience of womankind, we shall have something ‘far more precious than rubies. She will not be afraid of the snow for her household; strength and honour will be her clothing; her husband shall have no need of spoil; he shall be known in the gates, when he sitteth among the elders; he shall praise her; and her children shall call her blessed.’