CHAPTER LVI(43)

OBJECTIONS TO THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN

(_continued_)

In France all our ideas about women are got from a twopence-halfpenny catechism. The delightful part of it is that many people, who would not allow the authority of this book to regulate a matter of fifty francs, foolishly follow it word for word in that which bears most nearly on their happiness. Such is the vanity of nineteenth-century ways!

There must be no divorce because marriage is a mystery--and what mystery? The emblem of the union of Jesus Christ with the Church. And what had become of this mystery, if the Church had been given a name of the masculine gender?[1] But let us pass over prejudices already giving way,[2] and let us merely observe this singular

[Pg 237] spectacle: the root of the tree sapped by the axe of ridicule, but the branches continuing to flower.

Now to return to the observation of facts and their consequences.

In both sexes it is on the manner in which youth has been employed that depends the fate of extreme old age--this is true for women earlier than for men. How is a woman of forty-five received in society? Severely, or more often in a way that is below her dignity. Women are flattered at twenty and abandoned at forty.

A woman of forty-five is of importance only by reason of her children or her lover.

A mother who excels in the fine arts can communicate her talent to her son only in the extremely rare case, where he has received from nature precisely the soul for this talent. But a mother of intellect and culture will give her young son a grasp not only of all merely agreeable talents, but also of all talents that are useful to man in society; and he will be able to make his own choice. The barbarism of the Turks depends in great part on the state of moral degradation among the beautiful Georgians. Two young men born at Paris owe to their mothers the incontestable superiority that they show at sixteen over the young provincials of their age. It is from sixteen to twenty-five that the luck turns.

The men who invented gunpowder, printing, the art of weaving, contribute every day to our happiness, and the same is true of the Montesquieus, the Racines and the La Fontaines. Now the number of geniuses produced by a nation is in proportion to the number of men receiving sufficient culture,[3] and there is nothing to prove to me that my bootmaker has not the soul to write like

[Pg 238] Corneille. He wants the education necessary to develop his feelings and teach him to communicate them to the public.[4]

Owing to the present system of girls' education, all geniuses who are born women are lost to the public good. So soon as chance gives them the means of displaying themselves, you see them attain to talents the most difficult to acquire. In our own days you see a Catherine II, who had no other education but danger and ...; a Madame Roland; an Alessandra Mari, who raised a regiment in Arezzo and sent it against the French; a Caroline, Queen of Naples, who knew how to put a stop to the contagion of liberalism better than all our Castlereaghs and our Pitts. As for what stands in the way of women's superiority in works of art, see the chapter on Modesty, article 9. What might Miss Edgeworth not have done, if the circumspection necessary to a young English girl had not forced her at the outset of her career to carry the pulpit into her novel?

What man is there, in love or in marriage, who has the good fortune to be able to communicate his thoughts, just as they occur to him, to the woman with whom he passes his life? He may find a good heart that will share his sorrows, but he is always obliged to turn his thoughts into small change if he wishes to be understood, and it would be ridiculous to expect reasonable counsel from an intellect that has need of such a method in order to seize the facts. The most perfect woman, according to the ideas of present-day education, leaves her partner isolated amid the dangers of life and soon runs the risk of wearying him.

[Pg 239] What an excellent counsellor would a man not find in a wife, if only she could think--a counsellor, after all, whose interests, apart from one single object, and one which does not last beyond the morning of life, are exactly identical with his own!

One of the finest prerogatives of the mind is that it provides old age with consideration. See how the arrival of Voltaire in Paris makes the Royal majesty pale. But poor women! so soon as they have no longer the brilliance of youth, their one sad happiness is to be able to delude themselves on the part they take in society.

The ruins of youthful talents become merely ridiculous, and it were a happiness for our women, such as they actually are, to die at fifty. As for a higher morality--the clearer the mind, the surer the conviction that justice is the only road to happiness. Genius is a power; but still more is it a torch, to light the way to the great art of being happy.

Most men have a moment in their life when they are capable of great things--that moment when nothing seems impossible to them. The ignorance of women causes this magnificent chance to be lost to the human race. Love, nowadays, at the very most will make a man a good horseman or teach him to choose his tailor.

I have no time to defend myself against the advances of criticism. If my word could set up systems, I should give girls, as far as possible, exactly the same education as boys. As I have no intention of writing a book about everything and nothing, I shall be excused from explaining in what regards the present education of men is absurd. But taking it such as it is (they are not taught the two premier sciences, logic and ethics), it is better, I say, to give this education to girls than merely to teach them to play the piano, to paint in water-colours and to do needlework.

Teach girls, therefore, reading, writing and arithmetic by the monitorial(44) system in the central convent

[Pg 240] schools, in which the presence of any man, except the masters, should be severely punished. The great advantage of bringing children together is that, however narrow the masters may be, in spite of them the children learn from their little comrades the art of living in the world and of managing conflicting interests. A sensible master would explain their little quarrels and friendships to the children, and begin his course of ethics in this way rather than with the story of the Golden Calf.[5]

No doubt some years hence the monitorial system will be applied to everything that is learnt; but, taking things as they actually are, I would have girls learn Latin like boys. Latin is a good subject because it accustoms one to be bored; with Latin should go history, mathematics, a knowledge of the plants useful as nourishment or medicine; then logic and the moral sciences, etc. Dancing, music and drawing ought to begin at five.

At sixteen a girl ought to think about finding a husband, and get from her mother right ideas on love, marriage, and the want of honesty that exists among men.[6]

[1] Tu es Petrus, and super hanc petram Ædificabo Ecclesiam meam. (See M. de Potter, _Histoire de l'Église_.)

[2] Religion is a matter between each man and the Divinity. By what right do you come and place yourself between my God and me? I accept a proctor appointed by the social contract only in those matters which I cannot do myself.

Why should not a Frenchman pay his priest like his baker? If we have good bread in Paris, the reason is that the State has not yet ventured to declare the provision of bread gratuitous and put all the bakers at the charge of the Treasury.

In the United States every man pays his own priest. These gentry are compelled to have some merit, and my neighbour does not see good to make his happiness depend on submitting me to his priest. (Letters of Birkbeck.)

What will happen if I have the conviction, as our fathers did, that my priest is the intimate ally of my bishop? Without a Luther, there will be no more Catholicism in France in 1850. That religion could only be saved in 1820 by M. Grégoire(49): see how he is treated.

[3] See the Generals of 1795.

[4] As regards the arts, here we have the great defect of a reasonable government as well as the sole reasonable eulogy of monarchy _à la_ Louis XIV. Look at the literary sterility of America. Not a single romance like those of Robert Burns or the Spaniards of the thirteenth century. See the admirable romances of the modern Greeks, those of the Spaniards and Danes of the thirteenth century, and still better, the Arabic poetry of the seventh century.

[5] My dear pupil, your father loves you; this makes him give me forty francs a month to teach you mathematics, drawing--in a word, how to earn your living. If you were cold, because your overcoat was too small, your father would be unhappy. He would be unhappy because he would sympathise, etc., etc. But when you are eighteen, you yourself will have to earn the money needed to buy your overcoat. Your father, I have heard, has an income of twenty-five thousand francs, but there are four of you children; therefore you will have to accustom yourself to do without the carriage you enjoy while you live with your father, etc., etc.

[6] Yesterday evening I listened to two charming little girls of four years old singing very gay love-songs in a swing which I was pushing. The maidservants teach them these songs and their mother tells them that "love" and "lover" are words without any meaning.

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