Two years since I visited some portions of the East, where these primitive Oriental types of womanhood are to be seen. Sometimes in the gardens of a harem, I have seen them, sitting, lolling, gossiping life away, only careful to guard their veiled faces from exposure, no matter if the rest of the body were as destitute of covering as their souls were of feeling, or their brains of thought. I saw more frequently another class of women—those from whom poverty had rent the veil—some still clinging to a filthy rag, or diverting a more filthy shred from the tatters of their garments to cover their faces, because, as a sheik explained to me, “cause she shame she's woman.” Desiring to compare the length of the life of woman, under such conditions, with that of life which we have been wont to call civilized and enlightened, I often inquired the age of women whom we saw, and was surprised at being as often assured that women whose furrowed, wrinkled faces would indicate that they were sixty, were not more than thirty-eight—at most, forty years old. Most Eastern women that I saw, exemplified the “Oriental care of woman's organization” by abandoning their own to a mere animal vegetation. They had borne children innumerable. These swarmed upon us from fissures in the rocks, from dens, caves, and old tombs in the mountain sides—a scrofulous, leprous progeny of wretchedness, with a few fairer types, to which some principle of “natural selection” had imparted strength to rise above the common conditions of life.
I had also some opportunity to see the “Oriental organization of woman” under process of mental culture, in schools something like our own. Especially anxious to learn all that pertained to progress in education in the old cities in the East, I sought every opportunity to visit schools, Mahometan, Christian, and Jewish, under the old or under the more modern régime, and at the risk of being set down as a true American inquisitor, I pressed questions in every direction that would be likely to be suggested to a practical teacher, studying the problem we are here trying to solve: “What is the best education for our American girls?”
The best schools that I visited are those established within twelve or twenty years some, quite recently, by the Prussian Protestant Sisters or Deaconesses, who have had a rare and severe training for their work—physical, mental, and hygienic. In these schools, also, are to be found pupils from the better classes of the people, though they often have an orphan department attached, into which the neglected and wretched children are received, kindly cared for, and educated. In the opinion of these teachers, mental development is the source of health to their pupils, and they invariably spoke of the improving health and vigor of their girls under school training. They come, often, miserable and sickly from the neglect or abuse of ignorant mothers. Many such were growing healthy. The inert were growing active and playful, the deformed, greatly improving. One teacher said that to see the girls under her care inclined to any active play, until they had been in school months, sometimes years, was very rare. This inertness was more difficult to overcome in girls from the higher than the lower classes, for, in addition to an inert physical organization, a contempt for labor, with which they associated all exertion whatever, was born with them; and only through a long course of training—not until their brains began to take in the meaning and pleasure of study—could they throw it off; To rouse a girl and find out what she looked forward to in life, she had often asked her, “And what do you intend to do when you leave school?” “Oh, sit,” had been many times the answer she had received, “Sit,” which meant, she said, to wait and get married.
At Beyrout I visited several very interesting schools. The Superior or Principal of one told me she had been associated, in her preparatory course, at Kaiserwerth, with Florence Nightingale, for two years; and she described to me the discipline of that institution and others, where these teachers and nurses are trained. It is a discipline of severe study, accompanied by nursing, watching, hospital practice, and sometimes the hardest drudgery of work. She had often seen, she said, “Miss Nightingale, a born lady, on her knees scrubbing floors. But there was no distinction of persons in these institutions. Those who came to them looked forward to lives, not of ease, but useful work, and they must be prepared to bear hardness as good soldiers.” “But Miss Nightingale has broken down; may not the severity of this discipline have been one cause of what she is suffering now?” She did not think so; they had all had a training just as severe as hers, the sisters here, in Jerusalem, Smyrna, and everywhere, and they were well and strong. But there were limits to human strength and endurance; and Miss Nightingale's work in the Crimea, performed under such conditions as it was, had transcended what the human organization could endure—cold, hunger, foul air, insufficient and unwholesome food, with such incessant work, watching, and nursing, that no human being was proof against it. It was a miracle what Miss Nightingale had withstood before she broke down.
But these sisters wear no long or heavy dresses. Their uniform is a simple dark-blue-and-white calico dress-skirt neither long nor very full, sleeves close, yet allowing perfect freedom in the use of the arm, a simple white collar and apron, and cap of shining, spotless whiteness. Their shoes, too, are after the pattern of those which, we are told, are always worn by Florence Nightingale—with a sole as broad as the foot they were made for, and fitted to the natural shape of the foot. The food, the sister said, at Kaiserwerth, as in all the training-schools, was “nourishing, but very simple.” Such facts are worth noting. If they were accompaniments of our system of education, I do not believe that American girls would break down under the brain-work that any University course for men, in our country, imposes. As to the item of shoes, who does not know that a great deal more work, and better, can be performed in shoes that fit, than in such as tire the feet? And this is scarcely less true of brain-work than house-work. I believe that the shoes worn by young girls and young women now, are a great cause of nervous irritability, and, joined with other causes, may be a source of disease, “nervous prostration,” so called in after life. I have heard women say many times, “Nothing in the world will bring a sick-headache on so quickly as wearing a shoe that hurts my feet.” The oft repeated words have led me to watch my pupils in this respect carefully, and to study shoes and their effects, as among the evils which certainly ought not to be charged to brain-work, per se, nor to our school system, in general. It also made me take especial note of the shoes that the Deaconess sisters wore as a part of the dress in which, through long practice, they learned “hardness,” and came out strong and healthy, but not the less accomplished, charming women.
The school at Beyrout, under charge of these sisters, is probably one of the best in all the East. I was conducted by the lady Principal through every department. In one room an Arabic Professor was engaged at the black-board, instructing a class in studies pursued in that language. In another part of the same room, young ladies were reading to a lady-teacher an oration of Demosthenes in classic Greek. Another class was reading critically a portion of Milton's “Paradise Lost,” and yet another was engaged in preparing a French lesson. With all these classes the lady sister spoke in the language under study or recitation, as did the teachers of each class, with the exception of the Greek class, in which, the sister said, the pupils were taught to read the classic Greek, but allowed to speak the language as now spoken, as they had many pupils to whom this was their native tongue; but they ought to be able to read the works of their great men of another age. In another department I heard the same sister speak most beautiful German. This was her native tongue. Italian was also taught, and I heard it fluently spoken. It seemed to me that their course, though different, required nearly as much study as ours.
At the hotel, where I remained ten days, I made the acquaintance of two young ladies, of Greek and Armenian parentage. They had been in this school for several years and were still pursuing their studies. They spoke half a dozen languages, English, they said, the most imperfectly of any, but I have never seen an American girl who spoke French or German, when she graduated, as well as these girls spoke English, and their drill in music was quite as severe as that of American girls. They were taught arithmetic, but not to the extent that girls are in our schools. Physiology was also a part of their course. They were not so unctuously fat as many of the entirely idle women of the harems, whose object in life is to “sit,” but to us, who are wont to call that a “well-developed form” which would seem to adapt its owner to do something in life, rather than to sit an existence through, their physiques would indicate more vigorous health than those of the “grave Turk's wifely crowd,” which Dr. Clarke wished he could marry to the “brain-culture” of our women. Their faces were still “rich with the blood and sun of the East,” and I should pity the American who could find a loss in the exchange of the “unintelligent, sensuous faces” of the harem drones for the soul-light which, through brain-culture, beamed from the eyes of these Oriental young women.
In this school they had advanced to an innovation beyond anything to which the teachers had been themselves trained in Europe—quite beyond anything in the East, even the mission schools—the experiment of co-education, in the primary department, where a few boys had been admitted. Here I saw a daughter and a son of the Pasha of Syria in the same room and in the same class, “And how does this system work?” I asked. “Well;” the sister said, “admirably; it is especially good for the boys, who, in this country, are so arrogant and overbearing. They are born with a contempt for girls; and begin, when they are but little things, to lord it over them. But it has a wonderful influence to humble their pride, to find the girls fully their equals, as they are, in their classes.”
Dr. Clarke says, that “the error of the co-education of the sexes, and which prophesies their identical co-education in colleges and universities, is not confined to technical education. It permeates society.” That it does so, is true, but that it is always an “error,” we should not so readily admit, as one of its permeating effects upon society in Beyrout, may illustrate. In one church, through conformity to Oriental prejudices against any sign of equality between men and women, the sittings designed for the men on one side, and the women on the other, had always been separated by a heavy curtain drawn between them. Reaching far above the heads of the worshippers, even when they should be standing, it had formed a complete partition wall, dividing the church up to the space in front of the preacher's desk. But this curtain had, within the last few months, been removed, and the minister was now, on Sundays, dispensing a straightforward gospel, the same to men and women. Thus was the co-education system in the school already permeating the church! This was noticed with surprise by a missionary whom I had met on the Mediterranean, returning, after two or three years' absence in this country, to his former mission field, and who entered the church, for the first time after his return, with me. “Ah!” he exclaimed, “this denotes a great advance in Christian sentiment! This is as it should be. And how does it work?” he asked of the pastor of the church, in delighted surprise. “Admirably,” was the reply. There was some remonstrance on the part of some of the older men at first, but even they did not seem to think anything about it any longer, and it was so much more agreeable preaching to the people all together, than to have his congregation separated by that high wall of a curtain, and to seem to be dispensing one kind of gospel to the men, and another to the women, of his church. Yet I had heard this good man, in a conversation with brethren who had come down to Joppa to meet him on his return, discussing with severe reprobation “this absurd woman movement” in America, “opposed to Christianity,” “unsettling the churches,” “pervading society in a thousand ways,” “subversive of social order and refinement;” and, as one of its most ridiculous, almost monstrous effects, “putting into girls' heads the idea of going to college with the young men!” So little did he recognize as one impulse of the wave of the “woman movement,” what he had but now been so heartily commending! So often is the Babe of Bethlehem nurtured by those who, seeing him as he is, a fair and beautiful child, welcome and worship him; but who, looking through the mists of prejudice, especially fearing through him some subversion of their power, position, or interest, cry: “Away with him! crucify him! crucify him!”
At Beyrout I had several conversations with a most intelligent Armenian gentleman, from Constantinople, occupying an important governmental position. Having under my charge several young ladies travelling for study and instruction, our conversation very naturally turned upon our American educational systems, about which he was much better informed than many members of our public school boards. He had read our school reports, and his knowledge of our methods, courses of study, etc., surprised me. He discussed them, especially remarking upon the broadening influence of the increasing attention paid to the sciences in our schools, and the comparative effect of the positive sciences and the languages upon national character. And could it be possible that young men and young ladies pursued these studies together, he asked. The school reports which he had read would indicate this, yet he could hardly believe it possible. I must pardon him if he had seemed to observe the young ladies too closely, but he had been interested to study the influence of our ideas of education upon the first American girls he had ever met. And I could not imagine how the difference struck him—how it struck all Eastern men. Their freedom, their energy, their companionableness, was so different from women of the East. “And yet, they are perfectly modest!” he said. He had observed their anxiety to visit places of historical interest, getting up early in the morning and walking a long distance to do this. He had seen elegant, pleasing women in the East, women of graceful manners—the Eastern women were often that—but he had met few educated women. Their women were trained to please, but they were never educated to be a man's intellectual companion. No Eastern man ever thought of a companion in a wife. But stopping thoughtfully for a moment, and seizing one of our idioms in his hesitating English, he said, “Yet I can't see for the life of me why it would not be better that she should be.”