There are two kinds of learned ladies represented in the comedy. In the case of young, lovely, and well-dowered girls, learning was but a foible. When convinced of its absurdity, these desirable maidens put aside their big folios and became the properly humble, adoring, and ignorant wives of the heroes whose sound good sense had shown them their folly. The unpleasanter elements of the comic portraits belong to dissatisfied wives whose souls were still bent on amorous adventure; to obsolescent ladies unwilling to confess the decay of their charms; to the old and the homely whom no bravery of attire and no battery of glances and graces could restore to the marriage market. To ladies of both classes Platonism is a name to conjure with. All physical manifestations of love are abhorrent to them. The mystic union of souls is as much as the truly refined can tolerate. To the young learned ladies this doctrine of austerity has at first a genuine appeal, but is quickly proved impracticable and fallacious. To the other ladies virtue is but a screen to mask their discredited charms.
The knowledge of the learned ladies is as spurious as their virtue. They profess an intimate knowledge of Latin and Greek, and French seems their native tongue. They are at ease in the jargon of philosophical systems. They follow the telescope with the ardor of the Royal Society itself. Their studies are full of mathematical books and instruments. The scalpel and microscope lead them along the path of anatomical research. But in all this parade of learning there is no real scholarship. The ladies are pretentious and conceited, flaunting their false Latin and Greek before all comers, claiming to have explored the depths of knowledge when their short swallow-flights have scarcely brushed the surface.
The comedy may be said to embody the ordinary view as to the unsuitableness of learning for women. This implied critical negation is given a positive analogue in the actual training given to girls. Their early education was not neglected as is shown by the numbers of masters and tutors provided for the young daughters of good families. And from six to fourteen many girls were sent to the numerous boarding schools for young misses. But whether at home or in school the teaching included little more than deportment, accomplishments, and housewifery. These were what, in the language of Mr. Verney, would render a girl "considerable in the eyes of God and man." Hannah Wood's school was the most advanced of these minor schools for girls, and Sarah Fielding's Little Female Academy depicts the best that was done for younger girls. In any case education apparently ceased at fifteen or sixteen.
The schools provided for girls represent what it was in general thought that they needed. The comedy represents the absurdity of trying to pass these limits. Confirmatory of these views would be many private expressions by both men and women. There were, of course, hundreds of intelligent men to whom any change in the status of women seemed hostile to the best interests of society. And there were hundreds of women who flouted all thoughts of learning as essentially, eternally unfeminine. The Spectator records that at a certain period in the court of France it was counted a mark of ill-breeding to pronounce hard words right and that ladies not infrequently took occasion to use such words "that they might show a Politeness in murdering them." And the diatribes in the English feminist pamphlets from Bathsua Makin to "Sophia" show how many women in high circles boasted of ignorance as one of their charms.
Advanced opinions of a minority
But we come to quite a different state of affairs when we consider the opinions of the progressive minority. The proposed schemes for higher education, although without immediate practical result, are notable indications of a new era of thought. Bathsua Makin's was the first formulated plan. But her effort to graft new fruit on the old stock resulted in a singular mixture. Her impassioned desire to induct girls into the excellencies of higher learning was hampered in various ways. She could not lessen the attention paid to the accomplishments; she could not venture to push the school age beyond sixteen; and she could not make her beloved linguistics compulsory. What she did accomplish was not in the establishment of an ordered system. It was rather the impress of her tastes and advanced ideas on the minds of individual pupils. The girls who went from the Tottenham High Cross School to various distinguished homes in England had no alarmingly fluent or exact knowledge of Latin, Greek, or Hebrew. But they had all at least been invited to look within the portals of the palace of learning and some had found it rich and alluring. To all had come a new conception of the learning possible to women. Mrs. Makin's court prestige, her reputation for prodigious scholastic attainments, her courage, originality, and independence, made her a dignified and an authoritative figure. It is a matter of regret that full annals of her school were not preserved.
The education proposed by Dr. Hickes in his remarkable sermon in 1683, ten years after Mrs. Makin established her school, was not analyzed into details. But when he suggested for women seminaries of learning similar to Oxford and Cambridge with only such changes in the instruction and the regimen as might be found advisable to fit them for their lives as women, and when he urged rich and childless women to make their wealth serve humanity by founding such colleges for girls, he was too far ahead of his time to meet any immediate practical response, or even any opposition.
The next plan came from Mary Astell. This was a matured scheme. Her college was to be a sort of conventual retreat without vows and with an emphasis on the intellectual as well as the religious life. Publicity, college honors, degrees, were not thought of. There were to be no required studies, nor does she suggest even an orderly progression of lectures. The heterogeneous character of her proposed clientèle forbade any rigidity of plan. Mary Astell seems to have looked about her and found many women to whom the customary régime offered no satisfactory place. There were widows who did not choose remarriage, spinsters unwelcome in the homes allotted them by kinship, girls with dowries too slender to make an advantageous marriage probable, young heiresses subject to the too adventurous pursuit of impecunious lovers and so in need of a haven pending marriage. All these uncoördinated needs were to be met by the new institution. The plan was to provide agreeable surroundings wherein women could tranquilly and without hostile criticism work out their own salvation. Practical beneficence, teaching, study in various realms, religious meditation, were the avenues open to individual choice. To the women who remained permanently in the college a life of dignified achievement was possible. Upon the young women who were destined to be wives and mothers in important homes would be exerted an influence tending to ennoble them in their domestic relations, and the learning they had gained would prove a resource amidst the distractions and trials of life. The plan included too much, and the adjustments rendered necessary by its captivating flexibility would have taxed any organizer to the utmost. Perhaps it is as well that the scheme was not put to the test of practice. Mary Astell's contribution was in the idea she set forth and in her eloquent defense of that idea.
It is surprising that Defoe's plan for a woman's college should have been coincident with Mary Astell's, yet independent of it. Defoe's fertile imagination creates curious buildings in which to house his Academy. He evidently considers Mary Astell's plan as too loose in general structure and too religious in tone to be practicable. He narrows his work down to such studies as are given in public schools.
After Defoe we hear of no further plans for higher education. But the idea lingered in the minds of many. Richardson in Clarissa Harlowe suggests such an institution, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu says that it was her youthful ambition to be foundress of a college. In Mrs. Centlivre's Basset Table the learned young Valeria is advised to found a woman's college in which the pupils shall be called "Valerians." The most curious and interesting embodiment of the scheme was that by Thomas Amory. The fullness and realistic precision of detail in his account of the "Hertfordshire Religious Retirement" were such as to make his heroine, the foundress, accepted as an historical personage. The fictitious narrative is, however, of especial significance as showing the persistence of Mary Astell's abortive plan.