In some cases, as is reported, old women who were a town charge were set to this useful employment. Sometimes these “dames” were housewives, in which case two frequently alternated in caring for the children. In this way, according to the town records of Woburn, in 1635, “Joseph Wright’s wife and Allen Converse’s wife were able to divide between them £0. 10s. 0d., for a year’s work.” It is to be inferred that the acquirements of these mistresses were limited, as the next year, October, 1674, the town “agreed with Jonathan Tomson to tech bigger children and Allen Converse’s wife to teach leser children.”
In the old graveyard in Cambridge, opposite Harvard College, it is recorded that Mrs. Murray died 1707, aged sixty-two years. The title “Mrs.” was honorary, as she was unmarried. This betokens the esteem in which she was held, as does the following inscription upon her tombstone:
“This good school dame
No longer school must keep,
Which gives us cause
For children’s sake to weep.”
Later, especially in the old seaport towns, the children’s schools, for girls as well as for boys, were frequently in the hands of women of much refinement. Of such, Miss Hetty Higginson, of Salem, was famous as an instructor about 1782. The record says that, “being asked what she taught, she laughingly replied, ‘ethics,’ yet to a superficial observer it might seem that she taught nothing. Her manners were courtly, and her conversation was replete with dignity, kind feeling, and sound sense.”
Some improvement upon this state of education, or want of education rather, gradually crept in; whether because of the need of teachers for the boys, which had come to be felt, or because in the home there was much early association of the child with the mother, and so some education on her part might prove indirectly advantageous, or whether there was some dawning consideration of her own personal needs, it is impossible to determine. Perhaps there was difficulty in withholding other books from the girl after she could read the catechism, or, later, in drawing a sharp line between the acquisition of the first and the second rule in arithmetic.
Suffice it that by the close of the eighteenth century, most towns in New England had made some slight provisions for educating girls; how slight, almost any early town history will show.
The rate of progress in a thriving Massachusetts town, Newburyport, is given in Smith’s History, as follows: “... When speaking of schools we must be understood as referring to boys’ schools only.” So far as education of females by the town was concerned they were sadly deficient. As late as 1790, a proposition to provide schools for girls was put aside without action, by the town, and deferred for another year, and when they did set about the work it is curious to note of how little consequence they considered it as compared with the provision to be made for boys.