EXPERIENTIA DOCET
Wife of Two Years' Standing: "Oh yes! I'm sure he's not so fond of me as at first. He's away so much, neglects me dreadfully, and he's so cross when he comes home. What shall I do?"
Widow: "Feed the brute!"
"Punch's" Misgivings
From the 'eighties onward physical culture plays an ever-increasing part in the education of girls. Punch went astray in assuming in 1883 that bicycling was impossible for women, but in this and the next year we find him encouraging gymnastics for girls, though there is a touch of satire in Du Maurier's fashionable mother, who boasts to an eligible aspirant that every one of her daughters can knock their father down. The invasion of the domain of pastime and athletics by women and girls will be noted later on. For the moment I am concerned with their intellectual rather than their physical development. Little is said of girls' schools, though an interesting sidelight is shed on the methods of the old-fashioned boarding-school in the picture of the charming girl who explains to a Frenchman her fluency in his tongue: "At school the girl who sat next me at dinner used to eat my fat, and I used to do her French exercise for her; so I got lots of practice." Girls were becoming more studious, more highly educated, but they were not all female Admirable Crichtons. In 1885 Punch chronicles the ingenuous remark of a young lady to her friend, "Only fancy! As You Like It is by Shakespeare!" He welcomed the admission of lady graduates to the Convocation of the University of London in 1884, but misgiving mingles with admiration in his forecast of the omniscient "Woman of the Future" in the same year:—
The Woman of the Future! She'll be deeply read, that's certain,
With all the education gained at Newnham or at Girton;
She'll puzzle men in Algebra with horrible quadratics,
Dynamics, and the mysteries of higher mathematics;
Or, if she turns to classic tomes a literary roamer,