The Education of Catholic Girls

by Janet Erskine Stuart

One advantage of the English mode of proceeding in these great questions is that the situation can be reconsidered from time to time without the discordant contentions which surround any proclamation of non-success in State concerns. We feel our way and try this and that, and readjust ourselves, and a great deal of experimental knowledge has been gained before any great interests or the prestige of the State have been involved. These questions which affect a whole people directly or indirectly require, for us at least, a great deal of experimenting before we know what suits us. We are not very amenable to systems, or theories, or ready-made schemes. And the phenomenon of tides is very marked in all that we undertake. There is a period of advance and then a pause and a period of decline, and after another pause the tide rises again. It may perhaps be accounted for in part by the very fact that we do so much for ourselves in England, and look askance at anything which curtails the freedom of our movements, when we are in earnest about a question; but this independence is rapidly diminishing under the more elaborate administration of recent years, and the increase of State control in education. Whatever may be the effect of this in the future, it seems as if there were at present a moment of reconsideration as to whether we have been quite on the right track in the pursuit of higher education for women, and a certain discontent with what has been achieved so far. There are at all events not many who are cordially pleased with the results. Some dissatisfaction is felt as to the position of the girl students in residence at the universities. They cannot share in any true sense in the life of the universities, but only exist on their outskirts, outside the tradition of the past, a modern growth tolerated rather than fostered or valued by the authorities. This creates a position scarcely enviable in itself, or likely to communicate that particular tone which is the gift of the oldest English universities to their sons. Some girl students have undoubtedly distinguished themselves, especially at Cambridge; in the line of studies they attained what they sought, but that particular gift of the university they could not attain. It is lamented that the number of really disinterested students attending Girton and Newnham is small; the same complaint is heard from the Halls for women at Oxford; there is a certain want of confidence as to the future and what it is all leading to. To women with a professional career before them the degree certificates are of value, but the course of studies itself and its mental effect is conceded by many to be disappointing. One reason may be that the characteristics of girls' work affect in a way the whole movement. They are very eager and impetuous students, but in general the staying power is short; an excessive energy is put out in one direction, then it flags, and a new beginning is made towards another quarter. So in this general movement there have been successive stages of activity.

The higher education movement has gone on its own course. The first pioneers had clear and noble ideals; Bedford College, the growth of Cheltenham, the beginnings of Newnham and Girton Colleges, the North of England Ladies' "Council of Education" represented them. Now that the movement has left the port and gone beyond what they foresaw, it has met the difficulties of the open sea.

Nursing was another sphere opened about the same time, to meet the urgent needs felt during the Crimean War; it was admirably planned out by Florence Nightingale, again a pioneer with loftiest ideals. There followed a rush for that opening; it has continued, and now the same complaint is made that it is an outlet for those whose lives are not to their liking at home, rather than those who are conscious of a special fitness for it or recognized as having the particular qualities which it calls for. And then came the development of a new variety among the unemployed of the wealthier classes, the "athletic girl." Not every one could aspire to be an athletic girl, it requires some means, and much time; but it is there, and it is part of the emancipation movement. The latest in the field are the movements towards organization of effort, association on the lines of the German Frauenbund, and the French Mouvement Feministe, and beside them, around them, with or without them, the Women's Suffrage Movement, militant or non-militant. These are of the rising tide, and each tide makes a difference to our coast-line, in some places the sea gains, in others the land, and so the thinkers, for and against, register their victories and defeats, and the face of things continues to change more and more rapidly.

It seems an ungracious task, unfair—perhaps it seems above all retrograde and ignorant—to express doubt and not to think hopefully of a cause in which so many lives have been spent with singular disinterestedness and self-devotion. Yet these adverse thoughts are in the air, not only amongst those who are unable to win in the race, but amongst those who have won, and also amongst those who look out upon it all with undistracted and unbiassed interest; older men, who look to the end and outcome of things, to the ultimate direction when the forces have adjusted themselves. Those who think of the next generation are not quite satisfied with what is being done for our girls or by them.

Catholics have been spurred hotly into the movement by those who are keenly anxious that we should not be left behind, but should show ourselves able to be with the best in all these things. Perhaps at the stage which has been reached we have more reason than others to be dissatisfied with the results of success, since we are more beset than others by the haunting question—what then? For those who have to devote themselves to the cause of Catholic education it is often and increasingly necessary to win degrees or their equivalents, not altogether for their own value, but as the key that fits the lock, for the gates to the domain of education are kept locked by the State. And so in other spheres of Catholic usefulness the key may become more and more necessary. But—may it be suggested—in their own education, a degree for a man and a degree for a girl mean very different things, even if the degree is the same. For a girl it is the certificate of a course of studies. For a man an Oxford or Cambridge degree means atmosphere unique in character, immemorial tradition, association, all kinds of interests and subtle influences out of the past, the impressiveness of numbers, among which the individual shows in very modest proportions indeed whatever may be his gifts. The difference is that of two worlds. Bat even at other universities the degree means more to a man if it is anything beyond a mere gate-key. It is his initial effort, after which comes the full stress of his life's work. For a girl, except in the rarest cases, it is either a gate-key or a final effort, either her life's work takes a different turn, or she thinks she has had enough. The line of common studies is adapted for man's work and programme of life. It has been made to fit woman's professional work, but the fit is not perfect. It has a marked unfitness in its adaptation for women to the real end of higher education, or university education, which is the perfecting of the individual mind, according to its kind, in surroundings favourable to its complete development.

Atmosphere is a most important element at all periods of education, and in the education of girls all-important, and an atmosphere for the higher education of girls has not yet been created in the universities. The girl students are few, their position is not unassailable, their aims not very well defined, and the thing which is above all required for the intellectual development of girls—quiet of mind—is not assured. It is obvious that there can never be great tradition and a past to look back to, unless there is a present, and a beginning, and a long period of growth. But everything for the future consists in having a noble beginning, however lowly, true foundations and clear aims, and this we have not yet secured. It seems almost as if we had begun at the wrong end, that the foundations of character were not made strong enough, before the intellectual superstructure began to be raised—and that this gives the sense of insecurity. An unusual strength of character would be required to lead the way in living worthily under such difficult circumstances as have been created, a great self-restraint to walk without swerving or losing the track, without the controlling machinery of university rules and traditions, without experience, at the most adventurous age of life, and except in preparation for professional work without the steadying power of definite duties and obligations. A few could do it, but not many, and those chosen few would have found their way in any case. The past bears witness to this.

But the past as a whole bears other testimony which is worth considering here. Through every vicissitude of women's education there have always been the few who were exceptional in mental and moral strength, and they have held on their way, and achieved a great deal, and left behind them names deserving of honour. Such were Maria Gaetana Agnesi, who was invited by the Pope and the university to lecture in mathematics at Bologna (and declined the invitation to give herself to the service of the poor), and Lucretia Helena Gomaro Piscopia, who taught philosophy and theology! and Laura Bassi who lectured in physics, and Clara von Schur-man who became proficient in Greek, Hebrew, Syriac, and Chaldaic in order to study Scripture "with greater independence and judgment," and the Pirk-heimer family of Nuremberg, Caritas and Clara and others, whose attainments were conspicuous in their day. But there is something unfamiliar about all these names; they do not belong so much to the history of the world as to the curiosities of literature and learning. The world has not felt their touch upon it; we should scarcely miss them in the galleries of history if their portraits were taken down.

The women who have been really great, whom we could not spare out of their place in history, have not been the student women or the remarkably learned. The greatest women have taken their place in the life of the world, not in its libraries; their strength has been in their character, their mission civilization in its widest and loftiest sense. They have ruled not with the "Divine right of kings," but with the Divine right of queens, which is quite a different title, undisputed and secure to them, if they do not abdicate it of themselves or drag it into the field of controversy to be matched and measured against the Divine or human rights of kings. "The heaven of heavens is the Lord's, but the earth He has given to the children of men," and to woman He seems to have assigned the borderland between the two, to fit the one for the other and weld the links. Hers are the first steps in training the souls of children, the nurseries of the kingdom of heaven (the mothers of saints would fill a portrait gallery of their own); hers the special missions of peace and reconciliation and encouragement, the hidden germs of such great enterprises as the Propagation of the Faith, and the trust of such great devotions as that of the Blessed Sacrament and the Sacred Heart to be brought within the reach of the faithful. The names of Matilda of Tuscany, of St. Catherine of Siena, of Blessed Joan of Arc, of Isabella the Catholic, of St. Theresa are representative, amongst others, of women who have fulfilled public missions for the service of the Church, and of Christian people, and for the realization of religious ideals: true queens of the borderland between both worlds. Others have reigned in their own spheres, in families or solitudes, or cloistered enclosures—as the two Saints Elizabeth, Paula and Eustochium and all their group of friends, the great Abbesses Hildegarde, Hilda, Gertrude and others, and the chosen line of foundresses of religious orders—these too have ruled the borderland, and their influence, direct or indirect, has all been in the same direction, for pacification and not for strife, for high aspiration and heavenly-mindedness, for faith and hope and love and self-devotion, and all those things for want of which the world is sick to death.

But the kingdom of woman is on that borderland, and if she comes down to earth to claim its lowland provinces she exposes herself to lose both worlds, not securing real freedom or permanent equality in one, and losing hold of some of the highest prerogatives of the other. These may seem to be cloudy and visionary views, and this does not in any sense pretend to be a controversial defence of them, but only a suggestion that both history and present experience have something to say on this side of the question, a suggestion also that there are two spheres of influence, requiring different qualities for their perfect use, as there are two forces in a planetary system. If these forces attempted to work on one line the result would be the wreck of the whole, but in their balance one against the other, apparently contrary, in reality at one, the equilibrium of the whole is secured. One is for motor force and the other for central control; both working in concert establish the harmony of planetary motion and give permanent conditions of unity. Here, as elsewhere, uniformity tends to ultimate loosening of unity; diversity establishes that balance which combines freedom with stability.

Once more it must be said that only the Catholic Church can give perfect adjustment to the two forces, as she holds up on both sides ideals which make for unity. And when the higher education of women has flowered under Catholic influence, it has had a strong basis of moral worth, of discipline and control to sustain the expansion of intellectual life; and without the Church the higher education of women has tended to one-sidedness, to nonconformity of manners, of character, and of mind, to extremes, to want of balance, and to loss of equilibrium in the social order, by straining after uniformity of rights and aims and occupations.