Bluestockings (5 page)

Other girls, less exalted, were now able to go to school without joining a religious community first. Some convents ran boarding schools for the (lay) daughters of the rich, where the curriculum might include embroidery, herbal medicine, and sacred singing, as well as reading. Yorkshire-woman Mary Ward (1585–1645) founded a teaching order of women missionaries, nicknamed ‘the Galloping Girls’, which still flourishes today as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Her first ‘Institute of English Ladies’, a boarding school in Munich, was opened in 1609; she never managed to establish one in her own country. In England the first private school for girls, ‘Ladies Hall’, appeared in Deptford in 1617. Others
opened at Hackney, Chelsea, and Putney, and eventually in the provinces. A few grammar schools offered places to girls, with women teachers as well as men, as did the odd charity school (the first being Red Maids, Bristol, in 1634). Dame schools – so called because they were run by women – operated as child-minding services for working parents; there, boys were sketchily taught to read and write, and girls to sew and be good. In all these institutions the girls’ curriculum was limited, even for quick-witted pupils, and rarely matched what was offered to boys.

Pioneers in the fight for educational equality were quick to point this out. Bathsua Makin (
c.
1600–
c.
1676), ‘the greatest scholler, I thinke, of a woman in England’,
⁹
grew up in her father’s school; produced a volume of Greek and Latin verse at sixteen; went on to found schools of her own for boys and girls; and during the 1640s was appointed Royal Tutor to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Charles I. She had about a dozen children of her own, too. In 1673, her
Essay to Revive the Antient Education of Gentlewomen
was published: a brilliantly logical apologia for a new kind of academy. In it she explains why girls have not been offered a sound education before, and – like her devotee Wollstonecraft – she pulls no punches. What is to blame is a mixture of habit and an inherent male predilection for bestiality:

Custom, when it is inveterate, has a mighty influence: it has the force of Nature itself. The Barbarous custom to breed Women low is grown general amongst us, and has prevailed so far, that it is verily believed (especially amongst a sort of debauched sots) that Women are not endued with such Reason, as Men; nor capable of improvement by Education, as they are…

Had God intended Women only as a finer sort of Cattle, he would not have made them reasonable… Monkies, (which the Indians use to do many Offices) might have better fitted some men’s Lust, Pride, and Pleasure; especially those that desire to keep them ignorant to be tyrannized over…
¹⁰

She acknowledges that some girls are dispatched to schools, but what pitiful schools they are, where the pupils are only expected to ‘trifle away so many precious minutes meerly to polish their Hands and Feet, to curl their Locks, to dress and trim their Bodies; and in the meantime to neglect their Souls’.
¹¹
It is intriguing that, throughout the book, Mrs Makin equates a woman’s soul with her intellect. She does not deny that the odd accomplishment is an asset, such as needlework or looking ‘comely and decent’, but spending time and money on teaching females to frisk about on the dance floor with painted faces and fussy clothes is profligate. Why not invest in the mind? ‘Seeing Nature produces Women of such excellent Parts, that they do often equalize, some-times excel men, in what ever they attempt; what reason can be given why they should not be improved?’

Mrs Makin knows very well what reason. In fact, there are several, which she proceeds to enumerate.
No one will want to marry an educated woman, because she will mock her husband’s ignorance and make a fool of him.
That is a clear case of double standards, retorts the forthright Mrs Makin. Just as a man likes to sleep around, then marry a virgin, he wants education for himself but not his wife. But throughout history wise women have been a good influence on all around them, and surely it is sensible to make an informed teacher of your children’s mother?

Education will make women vain.
Why? Just because a woman gains knowledge, it does not mean she will automatically lose some other quality. Education is not a question of balancing credits and debits. Women, like men, can
be clever
and
humble, wise
and
virtuous. In fact the deeper their knowledge, the less likely they are to be ‘puffed up and proud’.

Why bother educating women if they cannot hold public office?
Let them learn, and then influence society through their husbands.
Women will forget the housework if their heads are full of knowledge.
Men get their work done, don’t they? And they are positively stuffed with egregious facts.
Who will have the time to teach women?
It will not take long. Boys are at school between the ages of seven and sixteen, yet only a quarter of them learn enough, even then, to get to university (for what it’s worth). Girls are quicker-witted, and the novelty of a sound education makes them eager to learn. A better method of teaching both boys and girls is what is needed – and Mrs Makin has developed just that. One last question:
What if girls don’t want to learn?
Well, show me a schoolboy who does…

The
Essay
closes cannily with an advertisement for Mrs Makin’s own school in Tottenham High Cross, London. It costs £20 a year (more for advanced students) and goes well beyond anything offered to girls before. The basics are attended to: the principles of religion, needlework, a little dancing and musical appreciation, learning how to write clearly, and enough arithmetic to keep accounts; these take up half the school week. The other half is spent more imaginatively in studying not only Latin and French, but Italian, Spanish, Greek, and even Hebrew. A ‘repository for visibles’, a superior sort of primary-school nature table, teaches them the names, properties, and uses of flowers and herbs, shrubs, trees, minerals, metals, and stones. As well as such culinary skills as pastry-making and preserving, girls can take astronomy, geography, and philosophy.

Here is a worthy forerunner of the great headmistresses of the Victorian era – Miss Buss and Miss Beale and their ilk (see
Chapter 2
) – who believed passionately in a girl’s right to learn
important
things, to be useful to herself and others; who knew the allure (to parents) of choice and a mixture of tradition and innovation, and who inspired by example. When King James I was given a copy of the virtuosic Latin and Greek verses Bathsua Makin published in 1616, he was mildly impressed. ‘But can she spin?’ he inquired. No doubt she could.

A contemporary of Bathsua Makin’s, Hannah Woolley (
c.
1623–
c.
1678), was another pioneer of educational equality. In her innocently titled conduct-book
The Gentlewomen’s Companion
(1675), she was just as damning as Makin about the custom of ‘breeding women low’, or keeping them ignorant, and filling the vacuum with vanity and silliness:

I cannot but… condemn the great negligence of Parents, in letting the fertile ground of their Daughters lie fallow, yet send the barren Noddles of their sons to the University, where they stay for no other purpose than to fill their empty Sconces and make a noise… Vain man is apt to think we were merely intended for the World’s propagation, and to keep its humane inhabitants sweet and clean; but… had we the same Literature [or learning], they would find our brains as fruitful as our bodies.
¹²

This last comment was recalled in a poem, ‘Elegy’, for Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, published the following year. The duchess had herself been an advocate of female ‘ingenuity’, or intellectualism, but a little too eccentric in behaviour and unguarded in expression to convince anyone. On the contrary: she was dubbed ‘Mad Madge’, and considered an embarrassment by her aristocratic peers. This poem, full of rhetorical frills and furbelows, reminds its readers that Madge was not like most wives. She had no children. Instead she left
a prodigious collection of writings – ‘the best Remains’. But she might have been better admired (the poet implies) had she conformed to the rest of her sex, who complacently enjoyed their allotment of ‘Fruitful Wombs but Barren Brains’.
¹³

The mention of university in
The Gentlewoman’s Companion
is significant. It reveals the common perception during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that many young men at Oxford and Cambridge wasted both time and money by going there. Mrs Woolley cannot seriously have imagined that women would benefit from going themselves. But the idea may have sewn a rogue seed in the fertile mind of another contemporary agitator, Mary Astell.

Miss Astell (1666–1731) was the first writer to blame her sex for their own ignorance. No wonder the world thinks women weak, she complains in
A Serious Proposal to the Ladies
(1694/7), when they settle so easily for silliness. ‘How can you be content to be in the World like Tulips in a Garden, to make a fine shew and be good for nothing; have all your Glories set in the Grave, or perhaps much sooner?’ she demands. ‘The Soul is rich and would, if well cultivated, produce a noble Harvest.’
¹⁴
All that is needed is application, and a little peace and quiet.

Astell proposes a safe, isolated place where women can gather together and be taught to understand, criticize, and perhaps even change the world in which they live. Not like the Bluestockings’ ‘Colledge’, which was too preoccupied with wittiness and fashion, and too public; more like a convent for lay sisters, where the mind is as important as the soul.

Daniel Defoe took up the idea, after reading the
Serious Proposal
. His contribution to the debate on women’s education has rather slipped through the net, hidden as it is in an early, obscure work,
An Essay Upon Projects
(1697), but it is well worth notice. Defoe’s
Essay
is a little like Mrs Makin’s,
in that it bewails contemporary attitudes to women’s moral and mental capacity. He, too, thinks it pitiful that women are denied the advantages of learning, yet blamed for their ignorance. What does it say about a nation’s leaders, he asks, that they deny God’s grace of education to the mothers of their sons? And what right has the clergy to encourage brutishness in the souls of half their congregation? Besides, he continues (somewhat lubriciously), a well-educated woman is ‘all Softness and Sweetness, Peace, Love, Wit, and Delight’.

On the other hand, Suppose her to be the very same Woman, and rob her of the Benefit of Education, and it follows thus…

Her Wit, for want of Teaching, makes her Impertinent and Talkative.

Her Knowledge, for want of Judgement and Experience, makes her Fanciful and Whimsical… And from these she degenerates to be Turbulent, Clamorous, Noisy, Nasty, and the Devil.
¹⁵

To avoid such domestic disaster, which has been recurring each generation since Eve, Defoe proposes the establishment of an ‘Academy for Women’. Like Astell’s, it would be isolated, carefully structured both architecturally and educationally, with a wide curriculum, and its own rules and regulations. But there would be nothing of the nunnery about it: no vows of celibacy would be required, and no guards at the doors; no spies. The students would be free to come and go, free to
learn
. An Act of Parliament would be passed, that whenever they chose to attend, no man would be allowed to enter – not even their husbands – so they could study in privacy and undisturbed (shades of Virginia Woolf’s
A Room of One’s Own
).

After implying that Eve was not evil after all, just uneducated, Defoe closes the work with the following paragraph:

I need not enlarge on the Loss the Defect of Education is to the Sex, nor argue the Benefit of the contrary Practice; ’tis a thing will be more easily granted than remedied: this Chapter is but an Essay at the thing, and I refer the Practice to those Happy Days, if ever they shall be, when men shall be wise enough to mend it.
¹⁶

Surprisingly, those Happy Days were not so far ahead.

2. Working in Hope

I want girls educated to match their brothers. We work in hope.
¹

In 1872, two generations before Trixie Pearson went to Oxford, a young woman from a very different background prepared to make history. Constance Louisa Maynard was a pioneer of Girton College, and the first woman to read philosophy (or ‘moral science’) at Cambridge. No women actually
graduated
from Cambridge until 1948; they just passed through the university as more or less welcome guests, sitting the requisite exams (if they chose to) without the right to formal recognition. At this stage, that hardly mattered. To Constance and her peers, unable to imagine being awarded a degree, it was the work that counted; the means rather than the end.

Despite her independent spirit, and the fact that she was twenty-three when she planned to go to college, Constance still needed her parents’ permission. The omens were not good: she was considered whimsical and rhapsodic, and was rarely taken seriously by her family. She had little formal schooling behind her and no need to make a living; why (argued Mr and Mrs Maynard) should she suddenly resolve to join some dubious establishment purporting to offer a university education to ladies? Reputation was more valuable an asset in life than learning.

At worst, the college was described as an ‘infidel place’;
²
at best it sounded more like something out of Tennyson’s
Princess
, with a comic cast of ‘sweet girl graduates’, ‘prudes for
proctors’ and ‘dowagers for deans’,
³
clamouring uselessly after learning like dainty little moths at a lamp. It was hardly the sort of place a respectable man would commit his daughter.