Whether it is owing to the prevailing confusion of ideas as to the objects of female education, or to whatever cause it may be attributed, there can be little doubt that the thing itself is held in slight esteem. No one indeed would go so far as to say that it is not worth while to educate girls at all. Some education is held to be indispensable, but how much is an open question; and the general indifference operates in the way of continually postponing it to other claims, and, above all, in shortening the time allotted to systematic instruction and discipline. Parents are ready to make sacrifices to secure a tolerably good and complete education for their sons; they do not consider it necessary to do the same for their daughters. Or perhaps it would be putting it more fairly to say, that a very brief and attenuated course of instruction, beginning late and ending early, is believed to constitute a good and complete education for a woman.
It is usually assumed that when a boy’s school education has once begun, which it does at a very early age, it is to go on steadily till he is a man. A boy who leaves school at sixteen or eighteen, either enters upon some technical course of training for a business or profession, or he passes on to the University, and from thence to active work of some sort or other. In other words, he is in statu pupillari until general education and professional instruction are superseded by the larger education supplied by the business of life. In the education of girls no such regular order appears. A very usual course seems to be for girls to spend their early years in a haphazard kind of way, either at home, or in not very regular attendance at an inferior school; after which they are sent for a year or two to a school or college to finish. The heads of schools complain with one voice that they are called upon to ‘finish’ what has never been begun, and that to attempt to give anything like a sound education, in the short time at their disposal, is perfectly hopeless. But, to take the most favourable case,—that of a girl so well prepared that she is able to make good use of the teaching provided in a first-rate school,—just at the moment when she is making real, substantial progress, she is taken away. At sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, as the case may be, her education comes to an abrupt pause. When she marries, it may be said to begin again; but between leaving school and marriage there is usually an interval of at least three or four years, if not a much longer period. These years a youth spends, as has been before said, in preparation for his future career. In the case of girls, no such preparation seems to be considered necessary.
Is this reasonable? Apart from immediate pecuniary necessity, is it desirable that the regular education of women should be considered as finished at the age of eighteen? If we are to take the almost universal practice as an answer, it is a very decided affirmative. Even girls whose parents must be fully aware that they will eventually have to maintain themselves, seldom receive any adequate training for their future work. Those whose fathers intend to provide for them, are still less likely to be supposed to want any further education after they leave school.
So fixed and wide-spread a custom must have had, at some time or other, even if it has not now, a meaning and a justification. And this may perhaps be found in the fact that our mothers and our grandmothers were accustomed to undergo at home, after leaving school, what was in fact an apprenticeship to household management. It seems indeed at one time to have been customary to apprentice girls of what we now call the middle class, to trades,—as we find George Herbert urging his Country Parson not to put his children ‘into vain trades and unbefitting the reverence of their father’s calling, such as are taverns for men and lacemaking for women,’—but even where there was no apprenticeship to a specific business, the round of household labours would supply a very considerable variety of useful occupation. An active part in these labours would naturally devolve upon the daughters of the house, who would thus be forming habits of industry and order invaluable in after life.
Probably a great many fathers, profoundly ignorant as they are of the lives of women, cherish a vague imagination that the same kind of thing is going on still. If Providence should at any time lead them to spend a week in the society of their daughters, under ordinary circumstances—not when illness has altered the usual current of affairs—they would find that this is very far from being the case. That great male public, which spends its days in chambers and offices and shops, knows little of what is going on at home. Writers in newspapers and magazines are fond of talking about the nursery, as if every household contained a never-ending supply of young children, on whom the grown-up daughters might be practising the art of bringing up. Others have a great deal to say about the kitchen, assuming it to be desirable that the ladies of the house should supersede, or at least assist, the cook. In that case, where there is a mother with two or three daughters, we should have four or five cooks. The undesirableness of such a multiplication of artists need scarcely be pointed out.[1] Needlework, again, occupies a much larger space in the imagination of writers than it does in practical life. Except in families where there are children, there is very little plain needlework to be done, and what there is, many people make a point of giving out, on the ground that it is better to pay a half-starved needlewoman for work done, than to give her the money in the form of alms.
Having mentioned needlework, cookery, and the care of children, we seem to have come to an end of the household work in which ladies are supposed to take part. If young women of eighteen and upwards are learning anything in their daily life at home, it must be something beside and beyond the acquirement of dexterity in ordinary domestic arts.
Many fathers, however, are no doubt aware that their daughters have very little to do. But that seems to them anything but a hardship. They wish they had a little less to do themselves, and can imagine all sorts of interesting pursuits to which they would betake themselves if only they had a little more leisure. Ladies, it may be said, have their choice, and they must evidently prefer idleness, or they would find something to do. If this means that half-educated young women do not choose steady work when they have no inducement whatever to overcome natural indolence, it is no doubt true. Women are not stronger-minded than men, and a commonplace young woman can no more work steadily without motive or discipline than a commonplace young man. It has been remarked that ‘the active, voluntary part of man is very small, and if it were not economised by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null. We could not do every day out of our own heads all we have to do. We should accomplish nothing; for all our energies would be frittered away in minor attempts at petty improvement.’ The case of young women could scarcely have been better stated. Every day they have to do out of their own heads nearly all that they have to do. They accomplish little; for their energies are frittered away in minor attempts at petty improvement.
How true this is, the friends and counsellors of girls could abundantly testify. There is no point on which schoolmistresses are more unanimous and more emphatic than on the difficulty of knowing what to do with girls after leaving school. People who have not been brought into intimate converse with young women have little idea of the extent to which they suffer from perplexities of conscience. ‘The discontent of the modern girl’ is not mere idle self-torture. Busy men and women—and people with disciplined minds—can only, by a certain strain of the imagination, conceive the situation. If they at all entered into it, they could not have the heart to talk as they do. For the case of the modern girl is peculiarly hard in this, that she has fallen upon an age in which idleness is accounted disgraceful. The social atmosphere rings with exhortations to act, act in the living present. Everywhere we hear that true happiness is to be found in work—that there can be no leisure without toil—that people who do nothing are unfruitful fig-trees which cumber the ground. And in this atmosphere the modern girl lives and breathes. She is not a stone, and she does not live underground. She hears people talk—she listens to sermons—she reads books. And in her reading she comes across such passages as the following:—
‘It is a real pleasure to me to find that you are taking steadily to a profession, without which I scarcely see how a man can live honestly. That is, I use the term “profession” in rather a large sense, not as simply denoting certain callings which a man follows for his maintenance, but rather a definite field of duty, which the nobleman has as much as the tailor, but which he has not, who having an income large enough to keep him from starving, hangs about upon life, merely following his own caprices and fancies; quod factu pessimum est.’[2]