It seems to me no more of an “experiment” than when a boy who has hitherto eaten up his whole apple becomes a little touched with a sense of justice, and finally decides to offer his sister the smaller half. If he has ever regarded that offer as an experiment, the first actual trial will put the result into the list of certainties; and it will become an axiom in his mind that girls like apples. Whatever may be said about the position of women in law and society, it is clear that their educational disadvantages have been a prolonged disgrace to the other sex, and one for which women themselves are in no way accountable. When Françoise de Saintonges, in the sixteenth century, wished to establish girls’ schools in France, she was hooted in the streets, and her father called together four doctors of law to decide whether she was possessed of a devil in planning to teach women,—”pour s’assurer qu’instruire des femmes n’était pas un œuvre du démon.” From that day to this, we have seen women almost always more ready to be taught than was any one else to teach them. Talk as you please about their wishing or not wishing to vote: they have certainly wished for instruction, and have had it doled out to them almost as grudgingly as if it were the ballot itself.
Consider the educational history of Massachusetts, for instance. The wife of President John Adams was born in 1744; and she says of her youth that “female education, in the best families, went no farther than writing and arithmetic.” Barry tells us in his History of Massachusetts, that the public education was first provided for boys only; “but light soon broke in, and girls were allowed to attend the public schools two hours a day.”[[10]] It appears from President Quincy’s “Municipal History of Boston,”[[11]] that from 1790 girls were there admitted to such schools, but during the summer months only, when there were not boys enough to fill them,—from April 20 to Oct. 20 of each year. This lasted until 1822, when Boston became a city. Four years after, an attempt was made to establish a high school for girls, which was not, however, to teach Latin and Greek. It had, in the words of the school committee of 1854, “an alarming success;” and the school was abolished after eighteen months’ trial, because the girls crowded into it; and as Mr. Quincy, with exquisite simplicity, records, “not one voluntarily quitted it, and there was no reason to suppose that any one admitted to the school would voluntarily quit for the whole three years, except in case of marriage!”
[10]. III., 323.
How amusing seems it now to read of such an “experiment” as this, abandoned only because of its overwhelming success! How absurd now seem the discussions of a few years ago!—the doubts whether young women really desired higher education, whether they were capable of it, whether their health would bear it, whether their parents would permit it. The address I gave before the Social Science Association on this subject, at Boston, May 14, 1873, now seems to me such a collection of platitudes that I hardly see how I dared come before an intelligent audience with such needless reasonings. It is as if I had soberly labored to prove that two and two make four, or that ginger is “hot i’ the mouth.” Yet the subsequent discussion in that meeting showed that around even these harmless and commonplace propositions the battle of debate could rage hot; and it really seemed as if even to teach women the alphabet ought still to be mentioned as “a promising experiment.” Now, with the successes before us of Vassar and Wellesley and Smith Colleges, of Michigan and Cornell and Boston Universities; with the spectacle at Cambridge of young women actually reading Plato “at sight” with Professor Goodwin,—it surely seems as if the higher education of women might be considered quite beyond the stage of experiment, and might henceforth be provided for in the same common-sense and matter-of-course way which we provide for the education of young men.
And, if this point is already reached in education, how long before it will also be reached in political life, and women’s voting be viewed as a matter of course, and a thing no longer experimental?
LIII.
INTELLECTUAL CINDERELLAS.
When, some thirty years ago, the extraordinary young mathematician, Truman Henry Safford, first attracted the attention of New England by his rare powers, I well remember the pains that were taken to place him under instruction by the ablest Harvard professors: the greater his abilities, the more needful that he should have careful and symmetrical training. The men of science did not say, “Stand off! let him alone! let him strive patiently until he has achieved something positively valuable, and he may be sure of prompt and generous recognition—when he is fifty years old.” If such a course would have been mistaken and ungenerous if applied to Professor Safford, why is it not something to be regretted that it was applied to Mrs. Somerville? In her case, the mischief was done: she was, happily, strong enough to bear it; but, as the English critics say, we never shall know what science has lost by it. We can do nothing for her now; but we could do something for future women like her, by pointing this obvious moral for their benefit, instead of being content with a mere tardy recognition of success, after a woman has expended half a century in struggle.
It is commonly considered to be a step forward in civilization, that whereas ancient and barbarous nations exposed children to special hardships, in order to kill off the weak and toughen the strong, modern nations aim to rear all alike carefully, without either sacrificing or enfeebling. If we apply this to muscle, why not to mind? and, if to men’s minds, why not to women’s? Why use for men’s intellects, which are claimed to be stronger, the forcing process,—offering, for instance, many thousand dollars a year in gratuities at Harvard College, that young men may be induced to come and learn,—and only withhold assistance from the weaker minds of women? A little schoolgirl once told me that she did not object to her teacher’s showing partiality, but thought she “ought to show partiality to all alike.” If all our university systems are wrong, and the proper diet for mathematical genius consists of fifty years’ snubbing, let us employ it, by all means; but let it be applied to both sexes.
That it is the duty of women, even under disadvantageous circumstances, to prove their purpose by labor, to “verify their credentials,” is true enough; but this moral is only part of the moral of Mrs. Somerville’s book, and is cruelly incomplete without the other half. What a garden of roses was Mrs. Somerville’s life, according to some comfortable critics! “All that for which too many women nowadays are content to sit and whine, or fitfully and carelessly struggle, came naturally and quietly to Mrs. Somerville. And the reason was, that she never asked for any thing until she had earned it; or, rather, she never asked at all, but was content to earn.” Naturally and quietly! You might as well say that Garrison fought slavery “quietly,” or that Frederick Douglass’s escape came to him “naturally.” Turn to the book itself, and see with what strong, though never bitter, feeling, the author looks back upon her hard struggle.