Part 13

It seems to me peculiarly important that women should have a share in these studies. They often have time enough. It takes more time for a woman to make herself charming than to make herself learned, Sydney Smith says; and he thinks it a pity that she should often hang up her brains on the wall in poor pictures, or waft them into the air in poor music, when they might be better employed. Yet a great physician, Dr. Currie, says in his letters that he always preferred to have an ignorant patient bring his wife with him, because he could always get more careful observation and quicker suggestions from the woman. This point lies directly in the line of medical education.

The study lies also directly in their path as prospective wives and mothers, and this alone would furnish a sufficient reason for it. A woman of superior gifts, who had studied medicine, but never adopted it as a profession, told me that the mere domestic use of her knowledge had more than repaid her for all the trouble it had cost. For a man who should thus abandon the pursuit, it would be of comparatively little service, apart from the general training; but for a woman, if she fulfills the commoner duties of a woman’s life, this early knowledge will always be a source of direct strength. This applies in a degree to surgery also; and I have always wondered, in view of the old proverb that a surgeon should have “a lion’s heart and a lady’s hand,” why our professors do not oftener aim at developing this heart, if need be, in those who have the hand without training.

LVIII. SEWING IN SCHOOLS.

Mr. N. T. Allen, of West Newton, Mass., who has had much experience and success as a teacher of both sexes, has been visiting the German public schools. He has lately given an interesting report of his observations to the Middlesex County Teachers’ Association. The reporter says (the Italics being my own),—

“Mr. Allen paid particular attention to the Dorf Schule of the cities, and the Bürger Schule of the country, both being of the lower grades; and contended that the educational system of Germany was far from being perfect, and was inferior in certain respects to that adopted in some of our own States, and carried into successful operation in several towns and communities. It was compulsory and autocratic, in that parents were not allowed any choice in the education of their children; _it was unjust toward girls, in establishing and perpetuating the idea of their great mental inferiority to the boys_; it was undemocratic, in having different schools for different castes and classes of society; and it was extremely sectarian and bigoted in the religious dogmatic instruction prescribed and forced upon all.”

It is well known that in the German schools a certain number of hours are given by the girls to sewing, and that their course of study, as compared with that of the boys, is narrowed to make room for this. It is for this reason that I, for one, dread to see sewing brought into our public schools. So strong is still the disposition in many minds to put off girls with less schooling than boys, that it seems unsafe to provide so good an excuse for this inequality.

The whole theory of industrial schools is liable to a similar danger,—that of introducing class distinctions into our education. It tends toward that other evil of the German system, described by Mr. Allen, “having different schools for different castes in society.” I hold to the old theory of providing all boys and girls, whatever their parentage or probable pursuit, with a good basis of common-school education, and then trusting the intellectual faculties, thus sharpened, to help them in the struggle for life. Just as it was found in the army that a well-educated young man who had never handled a musket soon overtook and passed a comrade of inferior brains who had been in the militia from boyhood, so is it found to be with those whose minds have been well taught in our public schools. But whether this criticism holds, or not, against industrial schools, as such, it certainly holds when we further make an industrial discrimination against all girls. This we do, if we take an hour of their time for sewing, when the boys give that hour to study.

But it will be said, Ought not girls to be taught to sew? Undoubtedly. All boys ought to be taught the use of hammer and plane and screw-driver, and, for that matter, plain sewing also. Girls need sewing no doubt; and they should be taught it at home, or at school, or wherever they can find a teacher. But, for all this, to assign to sewing any thing like the same relative importance that belonged to it a hundred years ago, or even twenty years ago, is to overlook the changed conditions of modern society. Let us consider this a moment.

The Old-World theory was that all imaginable hard work was to be done by human hands. But the New-World theory is—for it is a New World wherever the theory is recognized—that all this work should be done, as far as possible, by human brains. Napoleon defined it as his ultimate intention for the French people, “to convert all trades into arts,” the head doing the work of the hands. This applies to woman’s work as much as any other. The epoch of private spinning and weaving was an epoch of barbarism; the vast mills of Lowell and Fall River now do that toil. The sewing-machine does a day’s work in an hour. But all this machinery came out of somebody’s brain, and is adapted to a race of women with brains. The treasurer of half a dozen manufacturing corporations told me last week, that, though the mills were filled with French and Irish, the superiority of American “help” was just as manifest as ever, and the manufacturers would gladly keep them if they could: they could almost always tend more looms, for instance. Those who have tried to teach the use of the sewing-machine to the Southern negroes or poor whites know how hard it is. A sewing-machine is a step in civilization: its presence in a house, like that of a piano, proves a certain stage of advancement. Its course runs parallel with that of the common-school; and an agent for this machine, like those who sell improved agricultural implements, would instinctively avoid those regions where there are no schoolhouses.

I do not undervalue the use of the hands, or the need of physical training for both boys and girls. But, after all, the hands must be kept subordinate to the head. If industrial training is to be the first thing, then every Irish parent who takes his ten-year-old girl from school, and sends her to the factory, is in the path of virtue. If, on the other hand, it be found that some time can be advantageously taken from books, and given to some handiwork, without loss of intellectual progress, that is a different thing. That is only an intellectual eight-hour bill or five-hour bill; and, for one, I should gladly favor that. But let it be done as securing the best education for all; not as a class-education, or as merely utilitarian: and let it be done as rigidly for boys as for girls. Let us not set out with the theory that a boy may avail himself of all the divisions of labor in modern society, but that every girl must still spin her own cloth, and sew her own seam.

LIX. CASH PREMIUMS FOR STUDY.

On looking over the Harvard College catalogue, I am struck with the great pecuniary inducements which are held out to tempt young gentlemen to study. There are, to begin with, one hundred and seventeen “scholarships;” yielding incomes ranging from $40 to $350 annually, but averaging $225. The total income of these is $19,635. Then there are “loan” and “beneficiary” funds, amounting to $4,700 annually, and given or lent in sums from $25 to $75. Then there are “monitorships,” yielding $700 per annum; and various money prizes, amounting to some $1,200. The whole amount that is or may be paid in cash to undergraduates every year is more than $25,000, which may perhaps reach a hundred and fifty young men. No wonder that the catalogue asserts that “The experience of the past warrants the statement that good scholars of high character, but slender means, are seldom or never obliged to leave college for want of money.”

Probably one-sixth of the eight hundred undergraduates of Harvard College receive direct pecuniary aid in studying there; and, as scholarship is an essential in securing most of this pecuniary aid, it is probable that half the high scholars in every class are thus directly helped. Observe that this is in addition to the general value of the college endowments to all students, over and above what they pay for tuition,—an amount lately estimated by the academical authorities at one thousand dollars, at least, for every graduate. Apart from all this, I was told many years ago, by that very acute observer, the late President James Walker of Harvard University, that in his opinion one-quarter of the undergraduates were maintained in college through the personal self-denial and sacrifices of mothers and sisters.

But what a tremendous protective tariff, what an irresistible “discriminating duty,” is this! While boys are thus bribed largely, year by year, to come to Cambridge, and study,—so that the influence of all this promise of pecuniary aid is felt through every academy and high school in the land,—we find, on the other hand, that every girl who wishes to pursue similar studies is expected to pay at the full market rates for all she gets, and even then cannot enter Harvard College. In some of our normal schools her board may be paid, I believe, on condition that she becomes a teacher; but I know of no place where she herself is paid, as young men are paid, merely to come and study. Ex-Gov. Bullock founded one scholarship at Amherst, of which the income is to be given by preference to a woman—when a woman is admitted! But unfortunately that time has not come. And yet those who sit by the banks of this golden stream, and monopolize all its benefits, have a tone of sublime contempt for those who are not permitted to approach it, and never can quite forgive the impecunious condition of these outcasts! “Your scholarship is not to be compared to ours,” they say to women. “Certainly not,” the women may fairly reply: “we were never paid salaries that we might become scholars.”

The thing that perpetually neutralizes all claims of chivalry, all professions of justice, all talk of fairness, as between the sexes, is this class of facts. Woman is systematically excluded from training, and then told she must not compete; if admitted to compete, she is so weighted by artificial disadvantages, that it is hard for her to win. If her brain is inferior, she should be helped; if her natural obstacles are greater, all other hinderances should be the more generously swept away. Give girls a chance at a high school, they use it, and they there equal boys in scholarship; in our academies, in our normal schools, there is no deficiency on their part. Even in our colleges they ask, as yet, only admittance, not cash premiums. Only admit them, and see if they do not hold their own unpaid, with the young men to whom you pay, collectively, twenty-five thousand dollars a year to stay there. Only a seat in a recitation-room, to be paid for at the full price,—is this so very much for a young girl to ask? Do be at least as generous as that school committee in a Massachusetts town which shall be nameless, who said seriously in their report, speaking of a certain appointment, “As this place offers neither honor nor profit, we do not see why it should not be filled by a woman”!

LX. MENTAL HORTICULTURE.

There was once a public meeting held, at the request of some excellent ladies, to consider the question whether it might be possible for roses and lilies to grow together in the same garden. Many of the ladies were quite used to gardening, and had opinions of their own; but, as it was not proper for them to open their lips before people, they of course could not testify. So several respectable gentlemen—clergymen and professors—were invited to tell them all about it. Some of these gentlemen had seen a rose, and some had seen a lily, but it turned out that very few of them had ever happened to see a garden. Still, as they were learned men, they could give very valuable suggestions. One of them explained, that, as roses and lilies assimilated very different juices from the soil, they could not possibly grow in the same soil. Another pointed out, that, as they needed different proportions of sun and of air, they should have very different exposures, and therefore must be kept apart. Another, more daring, suggested, that, as God had put the two species into the same world, it was quite possible that they might grow in the same enclosure for a time, perhaps for about fourteen years, but that, if they were left longer together, they would certainly blight and destroy each other. All this seemed very conclusive; and the meeting was about to vote that roses and lilies should never be allowed to exist in the same garden, unless with a brick wall twenty feet high between.

But it so happened that a sensible gardener from a distant State was present, and got up to say a word before the debate closed. “Bless your souls, my good people, what are you talking about?” said he. “Roses and lilies are already growing together by the thousand, all over the country, and you may as well close your discussion.” Upon which the meeting broke up in some confusion: the brick wall was never built; but the clergyman went back to his study, the professor to his lecture-room, the physician to his patients, and all remained in the conviction that the gardener was a good sort of man, but strangely ignorant of scientific horticulture.

“Which things are an allegory.” The writer has been reading the report, in the Boston Daily Advertiser, of a recent debate on female education.

I suppose that those born and bred in New England can never quite abandon the feeling that this region should still lead the nation, as it once led, in all educational matters. For one, I cannot help a slight sense of mortification, when, in an assemblage of Boston professors, undertaking to discuss a simple practical matter, everybody begins in the clouds, ignoring the facts before everybody’s eyes, and discussing as a question of theory only, what has long since become a matter of common practice. The mortification is not diminished when the common-sense has to be at last imported from beyond the borders of New England, in the shape of a college president from Central New York. To him alone it seems to have occurred to remind these dwellers in the clouds that what they persisted in treating as theory had been a matter of daily experience in half the large towns in New England for the last quarter of a century.

What is the question at issue? Simply this: New England is full of normal schools, high schools, and endowed academies. In the majority of these, pupils of both sexes, from fourteen to twenty-five or thereabouts, study together and recite together, living either at home or in boarding-houses, or in academic dormitories, as the case may be. This has gone on for many years, without cavil or scandal. As a general rule, teachers have testified that they prefer to teach these mixed schools; at any rate, the fact is certain, that the sexes, once united in schools of this grade, are very seldom separated again; while we often hear of the separate schools as being abandoned, and the sexes brought together. Certainly the experiment of joint education has been very extensively tried in all parts of New England; indeed, for schools of this kind, in most regions, the association of the sexes is the rule, their separation the exception. Now, the only remaining question is: This being the case, will it make any essential difference if you widen the course of instruction a little, and call the institution a college?

This is really the only problem left to be solved; and yet on this question, thus limited, not a speaker at the above—except President White of Cornell University—had apparently a word to say. Every other speaker appeared to approach the general theme in as profound and blissful an ignorance as if he had lived all his life in Turkey or in France, or in some other country where no young man had ever recited algebra in the same room with a young woman since the world began.

EMPLOYMENT.

“The non-combatant population is sure to fare ill during the ages of combat. But these defects, too, are cured or lessened; women have now marvellous ways of winning their way in the world; and mind without muscle has far greater force than muscle without mind.”—BAGEHOT’S _Physics and Politics_, c. ii., § 3.

LXI. “SEXUAL DIFFERENCE OF EMPLOYMENT.”

I am at a loss to understand an assertion made by Rev. Dr. Hedge, at an educational meeting in Boston, that “the course of civilization hitherto has tended to develop and confirm sexual difference of employment.” He adds, according to the report in the Daily Advertiser, that, “the more civilized the country, the more the vocations of men and women divide: the more savage the nation, the more they blend and coincide.”

With due respect for Dr. Hedge on many grounds, and especially as having been the first man to demand publicly in presence of the Harvard alumni the admission of women to the university, I must yet express great surprise at his taking what seems to me so utterly untenable a position. To me it seems, on the contrary, that it is the savage period which is remarkable for the industrial separation of the sexes; and that every epoch of advancing civilization—as the present—blends them more and more. The fact would have seemed to me so plain as hardly to need more than simply to state it, but for the authority of Dr. Hedge upon the other side.

As we trace society back to savage life, what are the prevailing employments of the male sex? More and more exclusively, war and the chase. From these two vocations, monopolizing literally the whole active life of the savage man, the savage woman is almost absolutely excluded. Precisely at the point where the man’s sphere leaves off, in each of these pursuits, the woman’s sphere begins. Among American Indians, the man takes the captive, the woman tortures him. The man kills the deer, carries it till within sight of his own village, and then throws it down, that the squaw may go out and drag it in. Much that seems cruel and selfish in Indian life is the result, as Mrs. Jameson long since pointed out, of this complete separation of functions. The reason why the Indian woman carries the lodgepoles and the provisions on the march is that the man’s limbs may be left free and agile for the far severer labors of war and of the chase, from which she is excluded. The reason why she finally brings the deer to the camp is because he has had the more exhausting labor of hunting and killing it.

Contrast now this absolute “sexual difference of employment” with the greater and greater blending of civilized society,—a blending, observe, which proceeds from both sides, and not from woman only. It is hard to say which is more remarkable, within the last half-century,—the way in which women have encroached on men’s work, or the way in which men have encroached on women’s.

In many mechanical and commercial pursuits,—as printing and bookkeeping,—once almost monopolized by men, you now find a very large number of women. In some pursuits, as in education, the women have come to outnumber the men enormously, at least in America; in others, as telegraphy, they seem likely to do the same. We constantly hear of new channels opening. A friend of mine, the other day, just before addressing an audience on woman suffrage, stepped into a barber’s shop, and to his great amazement was shaved by a woman. On inquiry, he learned for the first time, that a good many of that sex, mostly Germans, pursued this occupation in New York and elsewhere. Thus do the vocations of men and women now “blend and coincide.” On the other hand, the leading dressmaker of the world is a man; our bonnetshops are largely conducted by men; the eminent hotel cooks, whose salaries exceed any paid by Harvard University, are men; and the lady who goes to rest in a sleeping-car on our railroads has her pillow smoothed and her curtains drawn, not by a chambermaid, but by a chamberman.

These are the facts which seem to me, I must say, quite fatal to Dr. Hedge’s theory. And there is one thing worth noticing in the very different criticisms passed on men and on women as to these invasions of each other’s province. If you call attention to the way in which men are everywhere taking part in women’s work, people say approvingly, “To be sure! greater energy, greater skill! they do even women’s work better than women themselves can.” But if you point out, that, on the other hand, women are also doing men’s work, and in some cases—as in literature and lecturing—are actually obtaining higher prices than most men can obtain, the same people shake their heads disapprovingly, and say, “Unsexed; out of their sphere!” Now, if we lived in an age of chivalrous protection of women, it would be a different thing; but, as we live in an age of political economy, there is no reason why men alone should have the benefit of its laws. If practical life is to be regarded as a game of puss-in-the-corner, I should recommend to each ejected puss to make for the best corner she finds open, without much deference to the theories of the sages.

LXII. THE USE OF ONE’S FEET.

Is it better to stand on one’s own feet, or to depend on those of other people? We need clear views on that matter, certainly; and there is not much doubt which theory will ultimately prevail.

For one, I believe the whole theory of a leisure-class, whether for man or woman, to be a snare and a delusion. It seems to me that there is one great drawback that a young American may encounter,—namely, the possession of an independent property; and that there is one great piece of good fortune,—to be thrown on one’s self for support. Of all influences for development or usefulness, I know of none so great as “the wholesome stimulus of pecuniary necessity.” Of all forms of social organization, that seems to me the most favorable which opens to all most freely the opportunity of early education, and then calls upon each to exert himself for his own support.

To be sure, it is hardly possible to overrate the value of cultivated companionship and refined association. In other countries it may be worth while, for the sake of these, to be born to wealth: it is so hard to get them without wealth. But the happiest and best American households are apt to be found among such as Miss Alcott, for instance, habitually describes, where there is plenty of refinement and very little money; where perhaps there has been wealth in times past, but it has been lost just in time for the good of the children. All that money can bring—all books, all travel, all art—are not worth so much as the power to stand on one’s own feet. It is an essential to the character, and it is certainly the greatest of delights. To have earned, for a single year, one’s own support, gives one, in a manner, the freedom of the universe. Till that is done, we are children: after that we are mature human beings.