“Yes, go and take counsel with your sister. Has she given you her confidence?”
“I do not understand,” said Laura. “I do not wish to understand.”
“That is untrue. I have told you that it has pleased my husband, in his singular zeal for yours, to let Mrs. Hawkesley know that which Mr. Berry, had he the feelings of ordinary men, would have died rather than have told. I doubted whether he had gone so far until your sister entered this room, but I have read her face and I doubt no longer. What has she told you of me?”
“Nothing, but that—”
“Do not hesitate. I can bear it.”
WHAT WOMEN ARE EDUCATED FOR.
Among the observances of the London summer are now the annual meetings of the authorities of the Ladies’ Colleges, which are a new feature in English society. The kinds of attention paid to these meetings, and of comment made upon them are very various. I am at present concerned with only one of the many points of view from which these institutions are regarded.
At the recent annual meeting of Queen’s College (for Ladies), Harley Street, the chair was filled by the Right Honourable W. Cowper. The Dean of the College, and some of the Professors, several clergymen, and many friends of the pupils were present, as well as the main body of the pupils. Having had opportunity to see, through a long life, what men have, at this age of the world, been thinking for two generations about the education of women, I always read with interest the reports of such annual meetings as that at the Harley Street College, and amuse myself with marking the progress of opinion disclosed by the speakers. On the late occasion (July 4th), the chairman’s speech was perhaps better understood in its bearings by some hearers and readers than by himself. My experience of men’s minds on this particular subject satisfies me that Mr. Cowper believed himself to be exceedingly liberal in his views, so that he was doing something virtuous,—something that would win gratitude from one sex, if it did not inspire respect for his courage in the other, in asserting the claims of women to a good education. I have usually traced in the gentlemen present at such meetings a happy complacency, an air of amiable magnanimity, which it was unnecessary to find fault with,—it was so natural and so harmless;—a keen sense of the pleasures of generous patronage, in seeing that women have a fair opportunity of a better cultivation than had been given before; but it is not often that the complacency is so evident, and so self-confident, as in Mr. Cowper’s speech of the 4th instant. He has evidently no misgiving about the height of his own liberality when he assumes that the grand use of a good education to a woman is that it improves her usefulness to somebody else. This is the turn that praise of female enlightenment has always taken among men till very lately, when one here and there ventures to assume that the first object of a good education is to improve the individual as an individual. Mr. Cowper has not got beyond the notion of the majority of the friends of female education, who think they have said everything when they have recommended good intellectual training as fitting women to be “mothers of heroes,” “companions to men,” and so on. No great deal will be done for female improvement while this sort of sentiment is supposed to be the loftiest and most liberal.
Girls will never make a single effort, in any length of school years, for such an object as being companions to men, and mothers of heroes. If they work, and finally justify the pains taken for them in establishing such colleges as these, it will be for the same reasons that boys work well, and come out worthy of their schooling;—because they like their studies, and enjoy the sense of mental and moral development which is so strong in school and college years; and because their training is well adapted to educe, develop, and strengthen their powers, and render them as wise and good as their natures, years, and circumstances permit.
Till it is proposed, in educating girls, to make them, in themselves and for their own sakes, as good specimens of the human being as the conditions of the case allow, very little will be effected by any expenditure of pains, time, and money. I am assured of this by what I have constantly heard in the world from all the parties concerned; and anybody else may learn the same fact by listening to what all parties have to say.
The founders, managers, or authorities in all such institutions may be found at times talking over the inconceivable and incredible meanness of the parents of pupils or candidates for admission. The common plea is that the boys are so expensive that there is not much to spare for the girls’ education. This is no particular concern of the college managers; but there are parents who seem to think that they are doing something virtuous in coming to bargain and haggle for the greatest amount of instruction for the smallest possible sum. They would not think of haggling with the master of the public school their boys go to. They pay down their hundred or two a-year for each boy; but, when it comes to the girls, they contrive, and assume, and beg, till they get in one or two younger girls on cheap terms, or send the governess to sit by as guardian, and pick up a lesson without pay. The mothers are apt to take credit for such management, on the ground of the trouble they have with the fathers to get any money out of them for college-lessons, when a governess (if they could find a paragon of one for a reasonable salary) might “educate” any number of girls for the same terms as one. It does not particularly concern the college managers what the fathers say at home about family plans: but they hear a good deal about it, through the expositions the mothers think fit to make of their own virtue and ability in contriving to get their daughters’ education done as cheaply as possible.
But this may not be a true account of the fathers’ notions, I may be reminded. I rather think it is, in the majority of cases. It is not only in newspapers, in angry letters called forth by some new phase of female education or employment, that fathers inquire what possible use there
