Women of England

by Bartlett Burleigh James

Before the educational revolution occurred, women were making their mark in intellectual spheres. In 1835 the names of two women, Mary Somerville and Caroline Herschell, were enrolled as members of the Astronomical Society. In its report containing the recommendation of the election of these ladies, the council of the society observed: "Your Council has no small pleasure in recommending that the names of two ladies distinguished in astronomy be placed on the list of honorary members. On the propriety of such a step from an astronomical point of view, there can be but one voice: and your Council is of opinion that the time is gone by when either feeling or prejudice, by whichever name it may be proper to call it, should be allowed to interfere with the payment of a well-earned tribute of respect. Your Council has hitherto felt that, whatever might be its own sentiment on the subject, or however able and willing it might be to defend such a measure, it had no right to place the name of a lady in a position the propriety of which might be contested, though upon what it might consider narrow grounds and false principles. But your Council has no fear that such a difference could now take place between any men whose opinion would avail to guide that of society at large, and, abandoning compliments on the one hand, and false delicacy on the other, submits that while the tests of astronomical merit should in no case be applied to the works of a woman less severely than to those of man, the sex of the former should no longer be an obstacle to her receiving any acknowledgment which might be held due the latter. And your Council, therefore, recommends this meeting to add to the list of honorary members the names of Miss Caroline Herschell and Mrs. Somerville, of whose astronomical knowledge, and of the utility of the ends to which it has been applied, it is not necessary to recount the proofs."

Mrs. Somerville suffered from the educational limitations of her day, and when she desired to learn Latin, in order that she might study the Principia, she referred to Professor Playfair with regard to the propriety of her doing so, and was assured by him that there was no impropriety involved for the purpose she had in mind. At that time there were many women with the best of education, acquired outside of university halls, but such were usually brought up by scholarly parents possessed of well-stocked libraries. To-day, the position of Ruskin is a commonplace of experience. In his lecture on the Queen's Gardens, he advised that women have free access to books, and asserted that they would find out for themselves the wholesome and avoid the pernicious with an instinct as unerring as that which directs the browsing of sheep in pasture lands. It has been sufficiently demonstrated that wholesome-minded girls are ever less in danger of contamination from literature than are their brothers.

The opening of Queen's College in 1848 marked the beginning of an attempt to give a wider education to women. This college grew out of the Governesses' Benevolent Institution. It was a training school for teachers, a normal institute; but, besides this, it was open to all who cared to enter. The name of that leader in modern educational movements, Frederick Denison Maurice, was identified with this departure. In the face of hostile comment, he defended the system which was adopted by himself and his brother professors, all of whom had come from King's College. The educational opportunities offered by this college were exceptional; the fees were low, and many students hastened to avail themselves of the new privilege.

It was twenty years later, however, before there was fought out the issue through which women came to be admitted to the universities. In 1856, Miss Jessie Merriton White was applying vainly for admittance to the matriculation examination of the University of London. In 1869, Girton College, the building of which cost fourteen thousand seven hundred pounds sterling, was established largely through the efforts of women. It was intended to afford training for women along university lines, and the plan of study was modelled on that of Cambridge University; the idea in the adoption of this parallel course was to establish beyond doubt women's fitness for pursuing the same studies as men. Other colleges of the same nature were founded soon after.

In the last century, the old theory that women were not capable of higher education on account of the "moisture of their brains" was not one of the pleas upon which was based the opposition to the higher education of women. The more plausible ground was taken that women ought to avoid certain lines of study which are a part of a university course. But it is coming to be realized that the proprieties of knowledge do not reside in the subject or in the sex of the student—that whatever is important for higher investigation is worthy of the pursuit of women as well as men, and can be pursued by them at the point of ripened discretion to which they have arrived when capable of meeting the requirements for entrance into a university.

The high-school system that has developed in England during the last quarter of a century has done much for the education of the middle classes, affording sound instruction and mental discipline for all. At the present day, poor girls, who, if they were dependent upon their personal resources, would never acquire an education, have wider facilities than were enjoyed by the women of the aristocracy a century earlier.

Of those who promoted the secondary education for girls, perhaps no name among female educators in England stands higher than that of Frances Mary Buss. Her splendid powers of organization and administration raised to such a degree of efficiency the private school which she had established in the north of London, that, when the Brewers Company desired to invest a sum of money for the education of girls, it entered into negotiations with Miss Buss and acquired her establishment, retaining her as head mistress.

Voluminous as are the works of women in the realm of fiction, it is nevertheless a field little exploited by them until recent years. In the eighteenth century the sex had produced few historians, poets, or essayists who could be compared with the group of romance writers which included such names as Catherine Macauley, Eliza Haywood, Elizabeth Carter, Fanny Burney, Mrs. Inchbald, and Mrs. Radcliffe; but when we pass to the nineteenth century, while women as romanticists are more prominent than women as authors in any other field, there is no limit upon the versatility which they exhibit, and all branches of literature have felt their moulding impress. To take the names of women out of the list of authors of the nineteenth century would be to diminish the glory of the literary skies by blotting out the lustre of some of its brightest constellations.

Beginning with Jane Austin and continuing to Mrs. Humphry Ward, the line of literary descent in the realm of fiction is a roll of honor for womankind; but it is a far cry from these to that earliest of women novelists, Mrs. Aphra Behn, who, at the direction of Charles II., wrote her novel Oronooko, the purpose of which was not dissimilar to the social end which Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe had in mind in her Uncle Tom's Cabin. Thus, the sixteenth century is brought into touch with the nineteenth, although the connecting links were few and slight until the middle of the latter. The number of women novelists indicates that women have found in fiction the line of literary pursuit which is most agreeable to their tastes and adapted to their natures. There seems to be absolutely no limit to the range of subjects which women are capable of working up in romance; whether in novels of incident or novels of character, treating historical or social subjects, didactic or imaginative themes, with the plot in any period of time, among any people or set of conditions, women writers appear to be equally at home.

While the vast majority of literary women have been writers of fiction, every branch of literature numbers in its promoters the names of eminent females. In poetry and in dramatic literature women have not achieved the fame of men. Lord Byron gave as the reason for women's apparent lack of imaginative and creative power that they had not seen and felt enough of life. As translators, editors, compilers, as writers on social topics and current questions, as well as on educational subjects, memoirs, travels, literary studies, they have been prolific and excellent workers. Besides which, they have given to journalistic and magazine work their special capabilities.