Friends in Council — First Series

by Sir Arthur Helps

But, supposing the deficiency we have been considering to be admitted, how is it to be remedied? Women’s education must be made such as to ensure some accuracy and reasoning. This may be done with any subject of education, and is done with men, whatever they learn, because they are expected to produce and use their requirements. But the greatest object of intellectual education, the improvement of the mental powers, is as needful for one sex as the other, and requires the same means in both sexes. The same accuracy, attention, logic, and method that are attempted in the education of men should be aimed at in that of women. This will never be sufficiently attended to, as there are no immediate and obvious fruits from it. And, therefore, as it is probable, from the different career of women to that of men, that whatever women study will not be studied with the same method and earnestness as it would be by men, what a peculiar advantage there is in any study for them, in which no proficiency whatever can be made without some use of most of the qualities we desire for them. Geometry, for instance, is such a study. It may appear pedantic, but I must confess that Euclid seems to me a book for the young of both sexes. The severe rules upon which the acquisition of the dead languages is built would of course be a great means for attaining the logical habits in question. But Latin and Greek is a deeper pedantry for women than geometry, and much less desirable on many accounts: and geometry would, perhaps, suffice to teach them what reasoning is. I daresay, too, there are accomplishments which might be taught scientifically; and so even the prejudice against the manifest study of science by women be conciliated. But the appreciation of reasoning must be got somehow.

It is a narrow view of things to suppose that a just cultivation of women’s mental powers will take them out of their sphere: it will only enlarge that sphere. The most cultivated women perform their common duties best. They see more in those duties. They can do more. Lady Jane Grey would, I daresay, have bound up a wound, or managed a household, with any unlearned woman of her day. Queen Elizabeth did manage a kingdom: and we find no pedantry in her way of doing it.

People who advocate a better training for women must not, necessarily, be supposed to imagine that men and women are by education to be made alike, and are intended to fulfil most of the same offices. There seems reason for thinking that a boundary line exists between the intellects of men and women which, perhaps, cannot be passed over from either side. But, at any rate, taking the whole nature of both sexes, and the inevitable circumstances which cause them to differ, there must be such a difference between men and women that the same intellectual training applied to both would produce most dissimilar results. It has not, however, been proposed in these pages to adopt the same training: and would have been still less likely to be proposed if it could be shown that such training would tend to make men and women unpleasantly similar to each other. The utmost that has been thought of here is to make more of women’s faculties, not by any means to translate them into men’s—if such a thing were possible, which, we may venture to say, is not. There are some things that are good for all trees—light, air, room—but no one expects by affording some similar advantages of this kind to an oak and a beech, to find them assimilate, though by such means the best of each may be produced.

Moreover, it should be recollected that the purpose of education is not always to foster natural gifts, but sometimes to bring out faculties that might otherwise remain dormant; and especially so far as to make the persons educated cognisant of excellence in those faculties in others. A certain tact and refinement belong to women, in which they have little to learn from the first: men, too, who attain some portion of these qualities, are greatly the better for them, and I should imagine not less acceptable on that account to women. So, on the other side, there may be an intellectual cultivation for women which may seem a little against the grain, which would not, however, injure any of their peculiar gifts—would, in fact, carry those gifts to the highest, and would increase withal, both to men and women, the pleasure of each other’s society.

There is a branch of general education which is not thought at all necessary for women; as regards which, indeed, it is well if they are not brought up to cultivate the opposite. Women are not taught to be courageous. Indeed, to some persons courage may seem as unnecessary for women as Latin and Greek. Yet there are few things that would tend to make women happier in themselves, and more acceptable to those with whom they live, than courage. There are many women of the present day, sensible women in other things, whose panic-terrors are a frequent source of discomfort to themselves and those around them. Now, it is a great mistake to imagine that harshness must go with courage; and that the bloom of gentleness and sympathy must all be rubbed off by that vigour of mind which gives presence of mind, enables a person to be useful in peril, and makes the desire to assist overcome that sickliness of sensibility which can only contemplate distress and difficulty. So far from courage being unfeminine, there is a peculiar grace and dignity in those beings who have little active power of attack or defence, passing through danger with a moral courage which is equal to that of the strongest. We see this in great things. We perfectly appreciate the sweet and noble dignity of an Anne Bullen, a Mary Queen of Scots, or a Marie Antoinette. We see that it is grand for these delicately-bred, high-nurtured, helpless personages to meet Death with a silence and a confidence like his own. But there would be a similar dignity in women’s bearing small terrors with fortitude. There is no beauty in fear. It is a mean, ugly, dishevelled creature. No statue can be made of it that a woman would like to see herself like.

Women are pre-eminent in steady endurance of tiresome suffering: they need not be far behind men in a becoming courage to meet that which is sudden and sharp. The dangers and the troubles, too, which we may venture to say they now start at unreasonably, are many of them mere creatures of the imagination—such as, in their way, disturb high-mettled animals brought up to see too little, and therefore frightened at any leaf blown across the road.

We may be quite sure that, without losing any of the most delicate and refined of feminine graces, women may be taught not to give way to unreasonable fears, which should belong no more to the fragile than to the robust.

There is no doubt that courage may in some measure be taught. We agree that the lower kinds of courage are matter of habit, therefore of teaching: and the same thing holds good to some extent of all courage. Courage is as contagious as fear. The saying is, that the brave are the sons and daughters of the brave; but we might as truly say that they must be brought up by the brave. The great novelist, when he wants a coward descended from a valorous race, does well to take him from his clan and bring him up in an unwarlike home. [126] Indeed, the heroic example of other days is in great part the source of courage of each generation; and men walk up composedly to the most perilous enterprises, beckoned onwards by the shades of the brave that were. In civil courage, moral courage, or courage shown in the minute circumstances of everyday life, the same law is true. Courage may be taught by precept, enforced by example, and is good to be taught to men, women, and children.

EDUCATION TO HAPPINESS.

It is a curious phenomenon in human affairs, that some of those matters in which education is most potent should have been amongst the least thought of as branches of it. What you teach a boy of Latin and Greek may be good; but these things are with him but a little time of each day in his after-life. What you teach him of direct moral precepts may be very good seed: it may grow up, especially if it have sufficient moisture from experience; but then, again, a man is, happily, not doing obvious right or wrong all day long. What you teach him of any bread-getting art may be of some import to him, as to the quantity and quality of bread he will get; but he is not always with his art. With himself he is always. How important, then, it is, whether you have given him a happy or a morbid turn of mind; whether the current of his life is a clear wholesome stream, or bitter as Marah. The education to happiness is a possible thing—not to a happiness supposed to rest upon enjoyments of any kind, but to one built upon content and resignation. This is the best part of philosophy. This enters into the “wisdom” spoken of in the Scriptures. Now it can be taught. The converse is taught every day and all day long.