Home Life and the Higher Education of Women.
by Mrs. Creighton.
Volume 7, 1896, pgs. 401-413
"Education is not an end in itself, it is but a means to enable us to live our lives more fully and more usefully."
A Lecture delivered in University College, Liverpool.
There no doubt exists in the minds of many a fear, if not a conviction, that higher education will unfit women for home life. And in truth, few would be inclined to deny that higher education is, in reality, likely to make a woman unwilling to restrain her activities within the very limited sphere of what are currently supposed to be home duties. A woman who has discovered that she possesses a mind, and has been enabled to do something towards training that mind, will not gladly spend her life in ordering dinner, writing notes, arranging flowers and paying calls, nor, still less, in merely assisting her mother in these important duties. Unfortunately, as soon as anything of this kind is said, people are up in arms at once, and accuse education of unfitting girls for home life; so that it is difficult to resist the conviction, that home life is believed by many to consist in writing notes and arranging flowers. To fulfil these duties, no doubt higher education is not needed. At present everyone is agreed that, as the conditions of our population render it necessary for a large number of women to remain unmarried, and for many of these to earn their livelihood, it is well that there should be facilities for them to be trained in such a manner as may fit them to be independent; but for the mass of women, school-room education is considered enough. If this is so, the higher education of women will touch only a small number, who will really stand outside their sex, almost as a class apart, and do little to raise the whole standard of women's education. This is at present, to some extent, the state of things in German. The ordinary girl's intellectual education finishes at the age of sixteen, or thereabouts; whilst for those who intend to be teachers, careful courses of more advanced study are arranged, each successive stage being marked by its appropriate examination. And, if it is safe to generalize about the state of things in another country, the excellence of the teachers does little to improve the general culture of the women, indeed, it may almost be said to have a harmful effect, for the ardent teacher, knowing that a girl's chance of acquiring knowledge is confined to a very short period of years, is anxious to cram into that period far more teaching than can be usefully absorbed.
If we are forced to the conclusion that higher education, whilst it fits certain women for an independent life, yet is likely to unfit them for home life, it will necessarily follow that the benefits which would flow from the higher education of women are much smaller than was hoped. Its promoters did not wish simply to create a small body of highly educated women, fitted for certain special tasks; they wished to raise the standard of women's education as a whole, and by so doing, to increase the usefulness of women to the community, as well as the consideration in which they are held. It must always be a minority of women, just as it is a minority of men, who go to college; but that minority sets the standard for the rest, not only because of its influence on the course of the earlier studies, but also because it provides what has been called "a surrounding medium of wise appreciation," and points out the way to those whose opportunities or whose intellectual gifts make advanced study possible. If this minority is to have its proper influence, it must be drawn from all classes and must penetrate into every sphere of life. The highly educated woman must be fit not only to become a high-school teacher, a guardian of the poor, a physician, a member of a school-board, but a wife, a mother, a sister in a religious community, a sick-nurse, a useful daughter at home, even a lady of leisure. Have we any reason to suppose that higher education unfits her for these duties? It sometimes seems as if it were made to bear the blame of all the faults that any one chooses to find in the young woman of the present day. The modern woman, or as some prefer to call her, the new woman, is supposed to be the highly educated woman. I have never been able to arrive at a definition of the "new woman," but as a general rule, I think we may assume that she is the woman who does the things which the speaker does not think a woman should do. However this may be, she is generally objectionable, and if so, I think I may safely add, seldom educated. The loud, self-assertive girl, who reads the most modern novel and goes to the most modern play, who smokes and talks slang, is not often a college girl. She is, no doubt, profiting by the independence won for women by those who have proved that women can share in the more serious work of society; and sometimes, alas, all the gratitude that she shows to those whose unceasing effort and often bitter struggle, have won for her that independence, is to demonstrate by her conduct, that some women, at any rate, do not know how to use independence.
The college girl is, as a rule, very like other girls, quiet, unobtrusive; her foes used to call dowdy, but she is ceasing to deserve that reproach. How like other girls she is may be judged from an anecdote in the biography of Miss Buss, which tells how a girl who had just won her B.A. went to a dance, and was introduced to a partner who, not knowing who she was, began to make game of girl graduates, saying, "There is always something quite unmistakeable about them, don't you know, you can't fail to spot them at a glance." The girl had the good sense merely to answer, "Do you think so?"
Mr. [William Edward Hartpole] Lecky, in his recent work on "Liberty and Democracy" says: "In the modern type of woman we may expect to find more judgment, more self-control, more independence, a far wider range of interests and sympathies than in the past. She will become less credulous and superstitious, but she will also become a little colder and a little harder . . . the emotional, the impulsive, the romantic elements of character with their dangers and their charms will become less prominent." If this be true, I do not think that education will have much share in producing the change; it is not educated men, but shrewd, business men, who are hard; and it is the practical, business-side of women which makes them hard. Indeed, on this point, I think men, as a rule, have been under a delusion; they have confused softness and tenderness, and believed that because it was the fashion for women to be soft and yielding like Amelia [Vanity Fair], therefore they were tender. Tenderness is a virtue which is confined to neither sex, and which seems to spring from the wide sympathy which comes through knowledge. The hardness of women, when it has an opportunity of being displayed, comes as a surprise to many, but I believe that it is the result of their strong inherent practical sense, and will be modified in no way so wisely as by greater knowledge. Mr. Lecky's view that the romantic elements of character will become less prominent in the modern woman, is certainly not true at present of college students, for those who know most of college life will tell us how common are romantic friendships, driven sometimes to the verge of absurdity; we hope this may be a comfort to those who like women to be absurd. Speaking generally, I think it would be true to say that what thoughtful persons judge to be the defects of the modern girl, are likely to be removed by a wider diffusion of higher education; they are defects which come from crudeness, self-assertion, the pursuit of pleasure and excitement, the restlessness springing from the want of a serious aim in life. To understand what knowledge is, and to pursue it, will make women humble as it makes men, and, as they come to know, they will cease to be content with a life which is either meaningless or merely a pursuit of pleasure.
But even those who hope the most from the spread of higher education among women, cannot but be conscious that there are many difficulties connected with it. Not only the difficulties concerned with the nature of the education in itself, and the manner of its diffusion, but difficulties as to the relations between the highly educated woman and the ordinarily accepted round of home duties. That these difficulties do exist, and exist more largely than some had anticipated, it is impossible to deny. The question is, are they real and permanent, or are they such as belong to a period of transition, of readjustment of duties, perhaps of the creation of a new standard by which to judge the home life of women.
It is difficult to realise how great a change the latter half of this century has seen in the standard of women's education. No doubt in the past there have been many individual women who have attained intellectual eminence. We know of the studies of Lady Jane Grey, of Queen Elizabeth, and other ladies of her time. The Italian renaissance had its learned women--amongst those who gathered round Mrs. Thrale, at Streatham Common, was Sophie Streatfield, famous as well for her knowledge of Greek as for her power of causing beautiful pearl-like tears to roll down her cheeks without any contortion of countenance. But we are not concerned with the exceptional women, who because of their position were treated exceptionally, nor with those whose intellectual gifts were such as to enable them to make a way for themselves under the most adverse circumstances, but with the ordinary women, and with the kind of education which was considered necessary to fit them for their duties in life. Sidney Smith, writing in 1809, says:--"A decided and prevailing taste, for one or another mode of education, there must be. A century past it was for house-wifery, now it is for accomplishments . . . if the whole of life were an Olympic game, if we could go on feasting and dancing to the end of this might do; but . . . the system of female education as it now stands, aims only at embellishing a few years of life . . . and then leaves the rest of existence a miserable prey to idle insignificance." And again, he speaks of the need "to turn the attention of women from the trifling pursuits to which they are now condemned, and to cultivate faculties which, under the actual system of management, might almost as well not exist . . . It is not easy to imagine that there can be any just cause why a woman of forty should be more ignorant than a boy of twelve years of age. If there be any good at all in female ignorance, this is surely too much of a good thing." [Essay on Female Education. Works of Sydney Smith, pg 79-85.]
But there were those who considered this ignorance charming. "O how lovely," write Rousseau when speaking of Sophie, "is her ignorance! Happy is he who is destined to instruct her! She will never pretend to be the tutor of her husband, but will be content to be his pupil. Far from attempting to subject him to her taste, she will accommodate herself to his. She will be more estimable to him than if she were learned; he will have a pleasure in instructing her."
Mrs. [Mary] Somerville pursued her early studies in mathematics and classics secretly in a cold garret, using those of her brother's school-books of which she could get possession. Miss [Frances Power] Cobbe, in her autobiography, gives us an interesting account of the kind of education provided at what was then considered the best school, to which she was sent. She spent two years there, at a cost of £1,000; where, according to her later judgment, she learnt nothing, even though a carriage permanently propt up on wheels was provided, that the pupils might learn to get in and out with elegance.
The lamented deaths of Miss [Anne Jemima] Clough and Miss [Frances Mary] Buss have led us to consider what these two by their indomitable perseverance and energy, did for the cause of women's education. It seems difficult to believe that the first Woman's College was only opened at Hitchin in 1869; that the Girls' Public Day School Company only came into existence in 1872. The movement for the Higher Education of Women is still very young, and cannot be expected to have got over the faults of youth. The first women who had the privilege of a college education are hardly old enough yet to have daughters to whom they can give the same privilege. We have yet to see what will be the result of several generations of highly educated women.
The success of the movement has in some ways been so brilliant, so overwhelming, that it is not surprising if its friends sometimes forget that it is to a certain extent still on its trial. I doubt whether the majority of men even now wish women to be as well educated as themselves; certainly fathers are seldom prepared to spend as much on the education of their daughters as on that of their sons, and many people of both sexes are still uncertain, whether learning and independence do not take away from what is considered to be true womanliness. They count the fact, that under existing circumstances so many women have to earn their own livelihood, as nothing but a misfortune, and hope at least that higher education may be only given to those for whom it is a necessity. From high schools we hear still the old complaint, that pupils are taken away too young, and that it is impossible to keep up a sixth form. Certainly the idea is prevalent that higher education destroys, or at least diminishes, a girl's chance of marriage, and makes it more difficult for her to live contentedly at home.
These considerations make it incumbent on the friends of the higher education of women to be still very careful how they act, to be on the watch for mistakes, to refrain from looking upon anything that has been achieved as final, and not to forget that they must still, in a certain sense, be missionaries. Those who are fortunate enough to receive a higher education must remember the greatness of their responsibility. They will be watched, criticised and judged; on their conduct, on their use of their opportunities, the future of the education of women will largely depend.
Those who live in university centres, or amongst highly cultivated people, hardly realise how little the movement for the higher education of women has as yet affected the intellectual life of women as a whole. It is curious to find how much of what was written by Sidney Smith in 1809, and W. B. Hodgson in 1864, on the education of women, still applies to our own days. There is no doubt no longer so great a difference between the value of the early education bestowed upon boys and girls as there used to be, and the success of women at the universities has shown that they are fully capable of entering upon the highest studies; but this improvement has not as yet sufficiently influenced the home life of women. The greater independence which has been won for women is used by too many simply for the freer pursuit of pleasure and amusement, now that the old ties and duties are relaxed; and therefore our day, side by side with all the new development of the activities and the usefulness of women, sees an equally marked development of frivolity and pleasure seeking. If it is true that amongst the most cultivated classes, men are quite ready to recognise in women their intellectual equals, and to appreciate the pleasure of intellectual intercourse and companionship with them, it is equally true that amongst many of the manufacturing classes, the tradesmen class and the working classes, women are still regarded as, in the main, intellectually inferior to men, unable to share their highest interests, and intended to be merely the ornament and the comfort of the home, not the intellectual companion of the husband. I do not expect that the majority of my hearers will agree with me in this assertion. They will be prepared to quote numberless exceptions known to them of highly cultured women in the classes I have mentioned, and I do not deny for a moment that there are very many such, but I am speaking of the general rule. I would ask you to consider how many manufacturers' wives you know, who wish or are allowed to take a real and effective interest in the women workers employed by their husbands, and in the conditions under which they labour; how many middle-class women of your acquaintance take an intelligent interest in politics, in the social questions of the day, know, for instance, that trades unions do not exist in order to bring about strikes, or that socialists are not the same as communists and anarchists; how many are engaged in any kind of serious reading, or indeed ever read anything beyond a novel or a magazine article. It is my lot to travel a great deal, and it is so uncommon for me to see a woman reading in the train, that if by any chance I come across such a rare specimen, I always try to notice what she is reading, and it is seldom anything more than one of those sixpenny magazines of short stories, which seem to have been invented only to destroy the capacity for reading anything else. I must own, however, that in this matter, men are quite as bad as women, except that as a rule they do at least read a newspaper, but the habit of reading books seems to be almost lost.
Is it not true that middle age is the critical, the testing period in everyone's life? Then we see what a man is, we can judge what he will make of his life; then, too, it generally is that a man is at the summit of his usefulness and in the fullest development of his capacities. Can we say this of the ordinary woman? Of course we can of any woman who has continued to develop her capacities in any direction; but of how many married women is it not true to say, that they consider marriage as an end in itself, and not as a means to a fuller life with endless possibilities. This comparison between a man and a woman's development, written in 1866, is true of only too many still, "The man is, at least, brought in contact with the interests of his kind in the business of bread winning; but the wife of his bosom and the partner of his dull joys, is not reminded, even in this way, that she is a member of complex and active society, and that there is a momentous and constant conflict of opinions and interests and ideas going on around her. There is something grand in the sublime stupor, the death-like apathy of women of this stamp about everything that goes on outside their doors. The most exciting and important political discussion rages about them, while they are lapped in the calmest unconsciousness. The most interesting discovery in science may take place without even their having heard so much as whether there be any science or not. To literature and thought, they maintain an attitude of positively stupendous ignorance." ["The Education of Girls; and The Employment of Women of the Upper Classes, Educationally Considered" by William Ballantyne Hodgson]
Of course much has happened in our present circumstances to break in upon the apathy described by this writer. In the fussy restlessness of the present day, almost everyone thinks it right to say that they have too much to do. Writing in 1858, Emily Shirreff speaks of leisure as "the precious but perilous possession of the whole mass of women of the upper and middle classes," and adds that it "too often leaves their uncultivated minds a prey to ennui, or to gossip and folly." [Intellectual Education and its Influence on the Character and Happiness of Women, pg 16] Somehow the leisure, or at least the sense of leisure has gone, except perhaps in the country, but it would be difficult to say what has taken its place, and what is needed now is not so much education to enable women to use their leisure time profitably, but education which will help them so to order their lives as to have leisure, and then show them how to use that leisure.
In the midst of the bustle in which men and women now-a-days choose to live, reading has gone out of fashion; ephemeral literature alone is widely read, and people study religious and social questions through the medium of novels, or at best, magazine articles. It is perhaps too much to expect that the business or professional man, should find time for any serious reading on subjects which do not concern his special work, but might it not be considered the province of his women-kind to do some reading for him, to use their leisure in cultivating their own minds, and so creating in the home an atmosphere of culture. I shall be told at once, that the women have no leisure, and that reading is as impossible for them as it is for the men. But the difference is, that the men's work is for the most part obligatory, whilst many of the women's tasks are self-imposed. Our standard of material comfort has been so much raised, that in middle-class homes an immense amount of time is spent in ordering the comfort and elegance of the home; people wish to have smart houses and do everything in the best style, and unless they can afford to keep the very best of servants, and know how to keep them when they have got them, they must attend to much of their domestic work themselves. This is far from being an evil, if they are busy with really necessary work, but a life devoted to keeping up a smart appearance, to consideration only of material needs, is very far removed from the ideal of plain living and high thinking, which rational human beings should keep before them. The increased conveniences of modern life have made housekeeping so much easier, that it should take but little time now for those who can afford to keep sufficient servants, and for all, some amount of leisure might be secured by greater simplicity in style of living and dressing. To attain this, of course, all members of the home circle must co-operate. What people want is a better sense of proportion, more capacity to see what are the really important things in life. It will help to give this if the higher education of women be made to influence the home more; and the first thing needed for this is to prolong education after school days, to make girls and their mothers realise that education is not a thing to be finished and done with, but must be a life work. This lesson must be learnt by all classes, by the working classes as well as by the upper and middle classes, since to the working-woman also are being offered opportunities of higher education, for I think we may call all that higher education which is above and beyond the necessary school curriculum, such as continuation schools and the technical classes provided under the county councils. These, like other schemes for higher education, cannot be a success unless they serve to raise as a whole the standard of education amongst the classes for whom they are intended, as well as to increase the usefulness to the community of the individuals they aim at benefiting. An education which takes an individual out of her own class only to make her an unsuccessful, or perhaps a moderately successful member of another class, is of little use either to the individual or to the community. As a rule, the result of education should be to make the individual a more useful member of that class to which his family and associations belong. It is better to be a good factory girl or housemaid, than to, what is falsely considered, rise to be a nursery governess or secretary. In the same way, that kind of higher education which we are more particularly considering must be judged a failure, if it be true, as some suppose, that it unfits a girl for home life, whether as daughter, sister, or wife. What foundation is there for this view?
Amongst the middle classes it is still comparatively rare to send a girl to college, unless she is likely to have to earn her own living, and very few girls belonging to the highest ranks in society have so far been at any of our colleges. From statistics collected by Mrs. Henry [Eleanor Mildred] Sidgwick, and published in a pamphlet called "Health Statistics of Women Students," it appears that up till the year 1890, 77 per cent. of the students had engaged in teaching as a regular occupation after leaving college; and as of the remainder, some few were engaged in secretarial or philanthropic work, and about ten per cent. had married, we see that there remains but a small proportion to be accounted for as living at home. Probably the same thing would hold good now, for we learn that of the 61 students who left Newnham in 1895, 46 are teaching or intending to teach. It is therefore clear that it is still rare to send girls to college, unless they intend to take to teaching as an occupation; though, probably, in some cases, those who go without having, in the first instance, any intention or necessity to become teachers, may become inspired with the wish to enter the teaching profession by their life at college. But as a rule, college is not of much use to those who wish to earn their living unless they intend to do so as teachers, or perhaps as journalists or secretaries, for others it is of the nature of luxury, just as it is for those men who are not preparing for any career which makes the possession of a University degree either a necessity or a very decided advantage. It is a luxury which fathers are willing, and even anxious to give their sons, but see no reason to give their daughters. They give it to their sons very often because it is one way of getting over the years between eighteen and twenty-one, when young men are supposed to be troublesome, and it is difficult to know what to do with them; and sometimes because it is supposed to make them gentlemen, and give them gentlemanly friends. Daughters, on the other hand, are not troublesome at home, but have the blessed privilege of being always wanted to do odd jobs, and be companions to their parents; and as girls are always lady like, and have been given opportunities of making lady like and useful friends at school, they need not go to college to make friends. Indeed the average father, if he considered the possibility of such a thing at all, would be very alarmed at the idea of the kind of friends his daughter might make at college, she might meet girls with all kinds of extraordinary views, and even take up notions herself, and refuse to settle down at home like other girls after she left college. For, probably, the view most universally held about girl students, is that they do not get on well at home after college life. And it is this view which sometimes prevents parents of a more serious and thinking type from sending their daughters to college. But we must remember first that, probably, some of the students who went to college, went in the first instance because, for some reason or other, they could not get on at home, and these reasons are likely still to prevail after their return; though one such girl told me that she found it more possible to get on at home after the experience of college life than before. Still, it is clear that when a girl has had the opportunity at college of developing her own individuality, of learning the value of regular and systematic work, she will find it not altogether easy to settle to the ordinary home life, with its frequently petty occupations and small interests. There will have to be a good deal of forbearance on all sides, and some new problems will have to be bravely met. In a home where there is plenty of love and sympathy, the difficulties may be got over with comparative ease, but in, probably, a large number of cases, even in such homes, a girl will be obliged to lay aside her serious studies, unless she has very exceptional force of character, because almost everything in our social habits, ideas and arrangements is really opposed to a life of serious occupation for a young woman. I cannot help thinking that when, in a recent pamphlet, Prof. [Alfred] Marshall remarks that, though the work done in examination by the women whose papers he has looked over, would compare favourably with that of men, "the constructive work which has been done in after years by the women, has not been comparable with that done by the men," it is not quite fair to deduce from this fact that it is the special virtues of women which make them prepare well for examination, but a real intellectual difference which makes them inferior to men in constructive work. There are difficulties at present in the way of women doing constructive work, difficulties which, I hope, are not insurmountable. Mrs. Sidgwick, in a recent pamphlet, has said "that the whole course of the movement for the academic education of women is strewn with the wrecks of hasty generalizations as to the limits of women's intellectual powers." We hope that this last generalization of Professor Marshall's that, as Mrs. Sidgwick puts it, "the domestic qualities of women specially fit them for Tripos examinations of all kinds, but not for vigorous mental work afterwards," will share the fate of its predecessors. It is not that I am at all prepared to assert the identity of the intellectual capacities of men and women, but at present we have not sufficient basis on which to compare them freely, and discover the peculiar excellencies of each; for women have not as yet had what Mrs. Sidgwick claims for them, "unrestricted opportunities for cultivating whatever faculties they possess for receiving, transmitting, and advancing knowledge."
Girls who go back to their homes when college days are over, are not expected to spend days in study; everything is against them. Father, mother, brothers, society in general agree in expecting and wishing that a girl should be always available, at everybody's beck and call. It is doubtless true that it is much easier to be what is called obliging, that is, ready gladly to do whatever anyone else wants us to do, if we have nothing particular that we want to do ourselves; then, indeed, it is a kindness when someone else will supply us with occupation. So, to be obliging is not always antagonistic to natural selfishness in the case of the ordinary daughter at home, with nothing particular to do. But if she has learnt to love study and to wish to pursue it freely, she will naturally resent interruptions and fret at needless waste of time; and to satisfy the first claim of others, whilst finding time for her own work will become a difficult and delicate problem. Many girls in asserting their right to some control over the disposal of their time, become hard and ungracious. Is it not always impossible to assert our rights graciously? Others who have a strong feeling for their home duties give up the struggle to continue their studies.
(To be continued.)
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