Outcome of education not foreseen
A second limitation is that the ultimate outcome of any greatly increased intellectual freedom for women was but dimly descried. If women were permitted to pursue learning into remote fastnesses, if they were allowed to thread their difficult way through the entanglements of philosophical disputations, if they were encouraged to look out upon the follies of life with satiric or reformatory intent, further steps in independence would seem an inevitable sequence. But such steps were not only not taken, they were not even foreseen. Nor did the most advanced men and women make any claims extending beyond the freedom to read, write, and think according to their own desires. Home duties and relationships remained unchanged. Bathsua Makin said that higher education was not designed to make wives self-assertive, but more reasonably and intelligently submissive. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Mary Astell, the two most advanced and independent women of their day, are at one with the theory of the divinely ordained headship of man. Their bitterness of tone contains no thought of change, no hint of rebellion. Women were still under the dominion of fathers and husbands. The difference was that these fathers and husbands were in numerous instances willing to accord a very much enlarged freedom. But the next step was not taken by virtue of which the final right of decision as to her own thought and action would have belonged to the woman herself.
There was, furthermore, no claim made by women for any part in public life. Mary Wollstonecraft's suffrage programme of 1791, mild as it was, would have seemed to Mary Astell an incredible overturning of feminine ideals. Mary Astell and her congeners could not see that the putting of educational weapons into the hands of women was a concession carrying with it all later demands of feminism. The advocates of higher education for women were blind to the potentialities of the situation. There was no immediate following-up of theory into action. The idea of woman as a self-sufficing, self-directing individuality, responsible for her own destiny, and capable of playing an important part in civic and national affairs, did not come into clear outline until two centuries after Mary Astell's pronunciamento. In the period before 1760 we become aware of a moving on the waters. We are conscious of a great stir of preparation as for a crisis. Many paths converge towards one goal, but no goal is reached. Plans and achievements and favorable utterances seem to halt in mid-air.
A detailed study of the various ways in which women sought for fuller and richer intellectual life shows in what isolation they worked, with what lack of leadership, with what a depressing sense of the futility of their uncoördinated efforts. The beginnings of the new ideals for women were so modest and unassuming, so casual, so without self-consciousness, that at the time they could hardly be recognized as beginnings. Evidences of a new vitality appear in the retrospect as numerous and promising, but in reality each thinker of new thoughts stood out alone, a solitary champion, scarcely realizing that in other parts of the field other champions were fighting under the same banners. We can now bring together many rather advanced statements in favor of educating girls. But these were often mere passing isolated utterances. There was nothing like an organized propaganda, no body of public opinion growing steadily in mass and power till it became dominant. There are hundreds of blades pushing up through the dark earth, but the field is never quite ripe for harvest. There is so much reasoning, so much able thought, so much sincerity of feeling and aspiration, and there are so many women reaching out into new mental realms, that a decisive revolution of opinion seems often imminent. But the world listens unconvinced, and in the actual affairs of life apparently applies the old standards.
What was actually accomplished in the century before 1760 was a lavish sowing of seed, a steady infiltration of new ideas, a breaking up of old certainties as to woman's place in domestic and civic life, and an accumulation of examples proving women capable of the most varied intellectual aptitudes and energies.
THE END