GIRLS, WIVES, AND MOTHERS.
A WORD TO THE MIDDLE CLASSES.
There may be theoretically much to sympathise with in the cry for the yet higher culture of the women of our middle classes, but at the same time not a little to find fault with in practice. While it is difficult to believe that there can be such a thing as over-education of the human subject, male or female, there may yet be false lines of training, which lead to a dainty misplaced refinement, quite incompatible with the social position the woman may be called to fill in after-life, and which too often presupposes, what even education has a difficulty in supplying—a subsistence in life. Where we equip, we too frequently impede. In the hurry to be intelligent and accomplished, the glitter of drawing-room graces is an object of greater desire than the more homely but not less estimable virtues identified with the kitchen. Our young housewives are imbued with far too much of the æsthete at the expense of the cook; too much of the stage, and too little of the home. In abandoning the equally mistaken views of our grandfathers on women’s up-bringing, we have gone to the opposite extreme, to the exclusion of anything like a means to an end; and in the blindest disregard of the recipients’ circumstances in life, present and prospective.
In considering what the aim of female education ought to be, it is surely not too much to expect that of all things it should mentally and physically fit our women for the battle of life. Its application and utility should not have to end where they practically do at present—at the altar. While it is necessary to provide a common armour for purposes of general defence, there certainly ought to be a special strengthening of the harness where most blows are to be anticipated; and if not to all, certainly to middle-class women, the years of battle come after, not before marriage. Every one of them, then, ought to be trained in conformity with the supreme law of her being, to prove a real helpmate to the man that takes her to wife. Make sure that she is first of all thoroughly qualified for a mother’s part, in what may be called a working sphere of life; then add whatever graces may be desirable as a sweetening, according to taste, means, and opportunity. It is in this happy blending of abstract knowledge with the economy of a home, that true success in the education of middle-class women must be sought.
In the training of our boys, utility in after-life is seldom lost sight of. Why should it be too often the reverse in the education of our girls, whose great vocation in life, as wives and mothers, is a birthright they cannot renounce, which no lord of creation can deprive them of, and which no sticklers for what they are pleased to call the rights of women can logically disown? No doubt, among the last-named there are extreme people, who cannot, from the very nature of their own individual circumstances, see anything in wifely cares save the shackles of an old-world civilisation. In their eyes, motherhood is a tax upon pleasure, and an abasement of the sex. With them, there need be no parley. There is no pursuit under the sun that a woman will not freely forsake—often at a sacrifice—for the wifely cares that supervene on marriage; and therein, few will deny, lies her great and natural sphere in life. Than it, there is no nobler. In it, she can encounter no rival; and any attempt to divest herself of nature’s charge can have but one ending. The blandishments of a cold æstheticism can never soothe, animate, and brighten the human soul, like the warm, suffusive joys which cluster round the married state.
Here we may briefly digress to remark, that in our opinion, no valid objections can be urged against women entering professional life, provided they stick to it. They already teach, and that is neither the lightest nor least important of masculine pursuits. Why should they not prescribe for body and soul? why not turn their proverbial gifts of speech to a golden account at the bar? It would be in quitting any of these professions, and taking up the rôle of wife and mother, which they would have to learn at the expense of their own and others’ happiness, that the real mischief of the liberty would lie. In nine cases out of ten, their failure in the second choice would be assured, thereby poisoning all social well-being at its very source.
The woman not over- but mis-educated is becoming an alarmingly fruitful cause of the downward tendencies of much of our middle-class society. She herself is less to blame for this, than the short-sighted, though possibly well-meant policy of her parents and guardians, who, in the worst spirit of the age, veneer their own flesh and blood, as they do their furniture, for appearance’ sake. Let us glance at the educational equipment they provide their girls with, always premising that our remarks are to be held as strictly applicable only to the middle ranks of our complex society.
Our typical young woman receives a large amount of miscellaneous education, extending far through her teens, and amounting to a very fair mastery of the Rs. If she limp in any of these, it will be in the admittedly vexatious processes of arithmetic. She will have a pretty ready command of the grammatical and idiomatic uses of her mother-tongue; a fairly firm hold of the geography of this planet, and an intelligent conception of the extra-terrestrial system. She will have plodded through piles of French and German courses, learning many things from them but the language. She will have a fair if not profound knowledge of history. She can, in all likelihood, draw a little, and even paint; but of all her accomplishments, what she must imperatively excel in is music. From tender years, she will have diligently laboured at all the musical profundities; and her chances in the matrimonial market of the future are probably regarded as being in proportion to her proficient manipulation of the keyboard. If she can sing, well and good; play on the piano she must. If, as a girl, she has no taste for instrumental music, and no ear to guide her flights in harmony, the more reason why she should, with the perseverance of despair, thump away on the irresponsive ivories, in defiance of every instinct in her being. The result at twenty may be something tangible in some cases, but extremely unsatisfactory at the price.
During all these years, she has been systematically kept ignorant of almost every domestic care. Of the commonplaces of cookery she has not the remotest idea. A great educationist, whose statement we have good reason to indorse, asserts that there are thousands of our young housewives that do not know how to cook a potato. This may seem satire. It is, we fear, in too many cases, true, and we quote it with a view to correct rather than chastise.