The Education of American Girls

by Anna C. Brackett

For men, too, life, with all its evil, seems to be measurably adjusted. We do not hear constant discussions of men's sphere and men's education. Each man is left very much to work out his own career, without the responsibility of the whole sex resting upon him. He is at liberty to make mistakes in his medical practice, to blow up steamboats by his carelessness, to preach dull sermons, and write silly books, without finding his whole sex put under ban for his shortcomings, and so he works with a sense of individual power and responsibility which calls out his energies, and educates him even in spite of the foolish cosseting of a mother or the narrow pedantry of a teacher.

But in regard to woman, there is a general confession that life is not yet well adapted to her needs, or she to her place in the world. There is a perpetual effort to readjust her claims, to define her position, and to map out her sphere, and these boundary lines are arbitrarily drawn at every conceivable distance from the centre, so that what seems extravagant latitude to one, is far within the narrowest limits of another.

Very few have arrived at the conclusion that woman's nature, like man's, is self-determining, and that her character and her powers must decide her destiny; that instead of prescribing the outward limits of her action, the important point is to increase her energy, to regulate her activity by self-discipline, to purify her nature by nobility of thought and sentiment, and then to leave her free to work out her thought into life as she can and must.

But this, it seems to me, should be the grand leading principle of a mother in the education of her daughter, to give her such faith in herself, such knowledge of the laws of her own being, such trust in the guiding power of the universe, that she will have a principle of life and growth within her which will react upon all outward circumstances and turn them into means of education.

It is in this freedom alone that the essential meaning of her nature will show itself. In free, conscious obedience to law, natural limitations become a source of power, as the hardness of the marble gives effect to the sculptor's forming stroke; but all arbitrary restraints dwarf and deform the growing soul.

But in the very beginning a great difficulty meets the mother of the girl who seeks to train her up into glad, free acceptance of life, for instead of general rejoicing in the birth of her child, too often there is a wail of discontent over the hapless infant who is “not a boy.”

It is an idea very deeply grounded in our social feeling, that it is a misfortune and an indignity to be a woman. True, all men do not, like the Jews in the old service, insultingly thank God that he has not made them women, while the meek woman plaintively thanks God that he has made her at all. But how constantly is the thought and feeling expressed, that the boy is a more welcome comer into the family circle than the girl, and that the woman is to have a hard fate in life. And if the popular idea of woman be true, is it not a great calamity to be born a girl? “If man must work, and woman must weep,” who would not choose the former lot? It is a very common thing to hear women wish most earnestly from their earliest to their latest hour of life, that they had been born men. It is very rarely that the youngest boy wishes to be a girl, or that men covet the vaunted privileges of womanhood.

Margaret Fuller alludes feelingly to this prevailing sentiment in her noble Essay on Woman, and quotes Southey the despairing cry of the Paraguay Woman, “lamenting that her mother did not kill her the hour she was born—her mother, who knew what the life of a woman must be.”

And yet, it seems to me, any woman is entirely unfit to educate her daughter who has not so sifted her life experience, so learned the meaning of her creation, so separated the accidents and follies of to-day from the divine purpose, as to read clearly the meaning of life, and to accept for her daughter, as for herself, the great fact of her womanhood; not with submission merely, but with a joyful recognition of its wonderful possibilities and its supreme glories.

That this is possible to achieve, I might bring the testimony of women speaking from the midst of suffering and anguish, and yet rejoicing in the spiritual ideal of womanhood. Mrs. Eliza Farnham has done great service by her eloquent vindication of the claims of womanhood, which she bases on very noble spiritual truths. But too often the high estimate of woman is placed on purely æsthetic and sentimental grounds, and does not satisfy the demands either of mind or heart in the hour of trial, or the practical common sense applied to daily life. It hardly strengthens a woman, to be told that women are more angelic by nature, more amiable, more religious, and more holy than men, when she is suffering from excessive nervous irritability, from neglected solitude, from want of employment suited to her feeble powers, or from the unused energies of mind and body which are devouring her day by day—to be called an angel, when she is only a drudge, is not consoling.