It is no new story. You have heard it many times. Do not reply in the stale maxims of political economy. Do not say that woman's labor is cheaper than man's, because it is more abundant. Unskilled labor, we will grant you, is more abundant; but such labor as is here offered must always be rare and valuable. To the applicants who came to fill her vacant place the committee said, "We do not expect to find another capable as she was. We have only to select one that will do." Yet they had not been ashamed to use that capacity without paying for it! Only ignorance and prejudice and custom stood in the way of its appreciation; only the want of that respect which a citizen can always command was at the bottom of her social isolation. She never complained; but we complain for her, sadly conscious, that, until men themselves perceive what is fit, the remonstrances of women will be fruitless. One such word as that spoken by the Hon. Joseph White at Framingham, in July, 1864, is worth more than all that women can say. Nevertheless, we women have our duty. It is to convince and stimulate men. Be on the watch, then, for such women; and claim for them their place and remuneration. Help society to understand its duty, to be frank and honorable. And if certain services are worth, as in this case, seventeen hundred and fifty dollars a year, pay for equal services, by whomsoever rendered, an equal sum.
Since I first began to speak upon this subject, a very great change has taken place: women are put in places which require higher culture and greater administrative capacity. They are also paid better wages: these wages are not yet in fair proportion to what are paid to men for the same work; and the shameful argument is still used, that we employ women, chiefly because men will not work for the same price. The Roxbury High School, the Shurtleff Grammar School in Chelsea, the Normal School at St. Louis, and the Normal School at Framingham, are now under the charge of women. In the list of teachers from the Oswego School, we find four who are paid one thousand dollars a year, and eleven who are paid seven hundred dollars. Our daily press is very well satisfied with this; but, since 1860, what portion of a decent living will seven hundred dollars provide to a cultivated woman? When the salaries of the St. Louis teachers were raised in 1866, the principal was obliged to express her indignation before her salary was raised to its present sum of two thousand dollars. Had she been a man, she would certainly have had as much as the principal of the High School; namely, twenty-seven hundred and fifty dollars. A graduate of Antioch College, assisting in the High School at St. Louis, has twelve hundred dollars, where a man would have seventeen hundred dollars. Miss Brackett's own assistants in the Normal School have eleven hundred dollars.
The appointment of Miss Johnson to the head of the Normal School at Framingham will open the way to a similar change in many quarters, if what Governor Bullock has not disdained to call the "policy of Massachusetts" is consistently carried out. I do not know what salary is offered to Miss Johnson; but, if it were equal to that of the man who preceded her, would not the newspapers have told us? The comparative value of these salaries is not shown by the figures. It depends on the prices of gold, and of food and provisions, each year. It cannot be half as great as an inexperienced person would think.
There is a great want of female teachers of Latin and French. School committees assure me, that proficients in language would be certain of good pay in our high schools. For the most part, women prefer to devote themselves to mathematics. I used to say, with a smile, in the Western States, that all the women could read the "Mécanique Céleste;" but they found Cæsar and Télémaque equally uninteresting. Later, Colonel Higginson bears witness to the impossibility of getting good classical teachers.
It is a common idea, that the standard of education is higher now than it was thirty years ago. It may be doubted. More things are taught in schools,—ologies, isms, and the like; but the most thorough teachers are not the most popular, and it may be questioned, whether in the best minds on the Continent, in England, or this country, so great progress has been made as has been generally claimed. There is much more liberality in regard to the general question, but no more in regard to the ideal standard.
In one of Niebuhr's letters to Madame Hensler, he says, in speaking of Klopstock: "The character of the women is a remarkable feature of the time of Klopstock's youth. The cultivation of the mind was carried incomparably farther with them than with nearly all the young women of our days; and this we should scarcely have expected to find in the cotemporaries of our grandmothers. It was not, therefore, the influence of our native literature; for that first rose into being along with, and under the influence of, the love inspired by these charming maidens. For some time after the Thirty Years' War, the ladies of Germany, particularly those of the middle classes, were excessively coarse and uneducated. This wonderful alteration must have taken place, therefore, during eighty years,—between 1660 and 1740; though we are quite ignorant how and when it began."
Passing over to France, we encounter the reputation of Madame de Sablé; a woman, let me remark, for the benefit of those who are afraid that the march of education will deprive them of their dinners, as celebrated for her exquisite cooking and delicate confections as she was for her literary ability. In speaking of her, Cousin says: "All the literature of maxims and thoughts, including those of La Rochefoucauld, grew up in the salon of a lovely woman withdrawn into a convent. Having no earthly pleasure but that of reliving her life, she knew how to impart her own taste to society, in which she met by chance an accomplished wit, whom she contrived to turn into a great writer." He is speaking of the early part of the seventeenth century; and, in spite of the notorious dissipation of the period, many gifted and many virtuous women crowded her salon,—the Princess Palatine, the Princesses of Condé, de Conti, de Longueville, and Schomberg, Anna de Rohan, and Mademoiselle herself. There the gentlemen carried the pages they wrote at home, and not only bore with, but accepted, the criticisms of the women. They had no compensation but their praises, unless, like La Rochefoucauld, they were cunning enough to demand a carrot pottage or some preserved plums in exchange for a page of literature. In England, it is not necessary to avail ourselves of an exceptional education, like that of Lady Jane Grey. Remembering the noble culture of Elizabeth Tudor and Mary Stuart, of the sturdy women of the Commonwealth, we might surely expect a greater progress in the national idea. But, if its average could be found, neither the wife of John Hampden nor Lady Russell would accept it. It would seem that our standard advances, if at all, by a series of Hugh Miller's parabolic curves. What we find, depends upon the point at which we happen to test the eccentric arc; and, when we enter the nineteenth century, we are forced to take refuge in analogy, and ask, "If the ancient Egyptians ever mastered the Copernican idea, why should Galileo be imprisoned to-day for insisting that the sun does not move round the earth?" The stimulating examples of noble and educated women, which now present themselves, do not cheer us as they should, while they remain exceptions. In making what Dickens would call an "indiscriminate and incontinent" excursion, into the regions of female thought and literature, we find its atmosphere in a somewhat unventilated condition, and are reminded of an opinion of the Druses which does not seem to have been wholly impertinent, that "literature is a mean and contemptible occupation, fit only for women." Twenty years ago, when ties of an almost filial tenderness linked us to the household of the late Judge Cranch, we have often followed him, unrecognized, of a Saturday afternoon, when, returning from the bench, he climbed Capitol Hill, one hand grasping the handle of some colored washerwoman's basket, or slinging her heavy bundle over his shoulder on a stick. The dear remembrance, sustained by all the sweet and delicate courtesies of his private life, has always lain side by side in our mind with that exquisite Essay of Elia to which he first directed our attention, in which a noble reverence to woman is inculcated, and we are taught to judge every man's respect for the sex by his demeanor towards its humblest representative. Yet, if Judge Cranch never swerved from his gracious dignity, Charles Lamb did. Woman had not gained, in his lifetime, such a hold upon her intellectual rights, that a dinner company dared chide him, when he said of Letitia Landon, "If she belonged to me, I would lock her up, and feed her on bread and water, till she gave up writing poetry. A female poet, or female author of any kind, ranks below an actress, I think."
We do not quote these words so much against Lamb himself,—for the lips of Mary Lamb's brother must have been thick with wine, when, with "stammering, insufficient sound," he included her in so sweeping a reprobation,—but to indicate the nature of that public opinion which is even now dwarfing the ideals of the best men; to show how little reliance is to be placed on the standard of the most generous, when a remark like this, uttered in a large literary circle, passes without criticism, and is recorded without conscious mortification,—recorded, too, by the father of that Coventry Patmore, who has known how to offer us, in later times, sugar-plums of his own coloring—let us add of his own poisoning also—under the alluring names of "betrothals" and "espousals." How far the facts are from the ideal standard, Mrs. Jameson, in a lecture lately delivered, will help us to show.
"With all our schools," she says, "of all denominations, it remains an astounding fact, that one-half of the women who annually become wives, in this England of ours, cannot sign their names in the parish register; and that this amount of ignorance in the lower classes is accompanied with an amount of ill-health, despondency, inaptitude, and uselessness in the so-called educated classes, which, taken together, prove that our boasted appliances are to a great extent failures."