Part 2

It might have been expected that the religious zeal which brought these earnest New England pilgrims to a strange, wild country, would hold in check any tendency to undue display, especially when supplemented by the severe restrictions of their domestic life, which were relieved only by compulsory attendance on protracted services, held in unwarmed churches, to listen to metaphysical sermons on foreordination, reprobation, and infant damnation, and to prayers an hour long.

Yet it appears that while no provision was made for their instruction, they were sometimes arraigned for wearing “wide sleeves, lace tiffany, and such things,” while “those given to scolding were condemned to sit publicly, with their tongues held in cleft sticks, or were thrice dipped from a ducking-stool.”

It would have been better, perhaps, that their tongues had been trained by instruction to becoming speech, or that they had been permitted to drink at the fountain of learning.

Sentiment in favor of the practical skill of women seems not to have been wanting. They cooked and washed, and the law required them to spin and gather flax, and on one notable occasion women exhibited their skill at the spinning wheel, publicly, on Boston Common. As soon as they could get around to it they no doubt matched the skill of their English kindred whom Hollingshed described a half century earlier. He says, “The females knit or net the nets for sportsmen:

“‘Fine ferne stitch, finny stitch, new stitch, and chain stitch, Brave broad stitch, fischer stitch, Irish stitch, and queen stitch, The Spanish stitch, rosemary stitch and mowse stitch; All these are good, and these we must allow, And these are everywhere in practice now.’”

Aside from their belief in the primary importance of religious training, it may be conceded that the men of colonial times did not lack the sagacity which led Charlemagne in the eighth century to require that the children of those who were to participate in the government should be educated, “in order that intelligence might rule the Empire.” The application of this principle in his limited empire opened education to the ruling class; in America it opened it to the ruling sex.

How small were the opportunities for instruction, outside the free schools, may be known from the fact that the committee for supervising them enjoined upon the selectmen to take care that no person should open a private school except upon their recommendation.

In 1656 a Mr. Jones having opened a private school was visited by the magistrates, who exacted a promise from him to give up the school at the close of the winter term. Apparently he was reluctant in so doing, for it is recorded that the next spring Mr. Jones was sent for by the selectmen “for keeping a Schoole, and required to perform his promise to the Towne in the Winter, to remove himselfe and familye in the Springe, and forbiden to keep Schoole any longer.”

The first opportunities for girls in the colonies were in the “Dame-School,” in which some woman was hired to gather the little children about her knee to teach them their letters from the New England Primer. They were required to commit to memory the shorter catechism, and sometimes were taught to read enough to decipher it for themselves, from the last pages of their only book, the famous Primer. Training in manners was made of prime importance.

In some cases, as is reported, old women who were a town charge were set to this useful employment. Sometimes these “dames” were housewives, in which case two frequently alternated in caring for the children. In this way, according to the town records of Woburn, in 1635, “Joseph Wright’s wife and Allen Converse’s wife were able to divide between them £0. 10s. 0d., for a year’s work.” It is to be inferred that the acquirements of these mistresses were limited, as the next year, October, 1674, the town “agreed with Jonathan Tomson to tech bigger children and Allen Converse’s wife to teach leser children.”

In the old graveyard in Cambridge, opposite Harvard College, it is recorded that Mrs. Murray died 1707, aged sixty-two years. The title “Mrs.” was honorary, as she was unmarried. This betokens the esteem in which she was held, as does the following inscription upon her tombstone:

“This good school dame No longer school must keep, Which gives us cause For children’s sake to weep.”

Later, especially in the old seaport towns, the children’s schools, for girls as well as for boys, were frequently in the hands of women of much refinement. Of such, Miss Hetty Higginson, of Salem, was famous as an instructor about 1782. The record says that, “being asked what she taught, she laughingly replied, ‘ethics,’ yet to a superficial observer it might seem that she taught nothing. Her manners were courtly, and her conversation was replete with dignity, kind feeling, and sound sense.”

Some improvement upon this state of education, or want of education rather, gradually crept in; whether because of the need of teachers for the boys, which had come to be felt, or because in the home there was much early association of the child with the mother, and so some education on her part might prove indirectly advantageous, or whether there was some dawning consideration of her own personal needs, it is impossible to determine. Perhaps there was difficulty in withholding other books from the girl after she could read the catechism, or, later, in drawing a sharp line between the acquisition of the first and the second rule in arithmetic.

Suffice it that by the close of the eighteenth century, most towns in New England had made some slight provisions for educating girls; how slight, almost any early town history will show.

The rate of progress in a thriving Massachusetts town, Newburyport, is given in Smith’s History, as follows: “... When speaking of schools we must be understood as referring to boys’ schools only.” So far as education of females by the town was concerned they were sadly deficient. As late as 1790, a proposition to provide schools for girls was put aside without action, by the town, and deferred for another year, and when they did set about the work it is curious to note of how little consequence they considered it as compared with the provision to be made for boys.

At first three or four schools were suggested for girls between five and nine years of age, which were “to be furnished with dames to learn them good manners and proper decency of behavior.” These were the essentials, but in addition they were to be taught “spelling and reading sufficient to read the Bible, and, if the parents desired it, needlework and knitting.”... The sessions of the school were to be from April to October.... But a later petition being presented to the town, that some arrangement might be made for the instruction of girls over nine years of age, the town graciously voted, March, 1792, that “during the summer months, when the boys in the school had diminished, the master shall receive girls for instruction in grammar and reading, after the dismission of the boys, for an hour and a half.”

Even to this poor privilege there were limitations. No person paying a tax of over three hundred pounds was permitted to send his daughters to these supplementary schools. But the scheme for the larger girls did not work well for the boys, so the masters were directed “not to teach females again.”

As late as 1804 we find the female children, over nine years of age, as great a burden on the hands of the school committee of the town as ever. In answer to another petition, of eleven persons, that this class of girls might be taught, by the town, arithmetic and writing, four girls’ “schools were established, to be kept six months in the year, from six to eight o’clock in the morning, and on Thursday afternoons.” So that, in addition to their other accomplishments, they were in a fair way of being taught early rising.

It was not until 1836 that the school committee decreed “that one female grammar school be kept through the year.” This is probably the time of which it is recorded “that, when a school was started for girls in Newburyport, a taxpayer objected to it, and applied for an injunction, bringing out Judge Shaw’s celebrated opinion on that point.” (Cushing _vs._ Newburyport.)

In 1788 the town of Northampton voted “not to be at any expense for schooling girls.” Upon an appeal to the courts the town was indicted and fined for its neglect. In 1792 it voted “to admit girls, between eight and fifteen, to the schools from May 1 to October 31.”

Within the memory of a recent resident of Hatfield, an influential citizen, whose children were girls, appealed in townmeeting for the privilege of sending them to the public school, which he helped by his taxes to support. An indignant fellow townsman sprang to his feet and exclaimed, “Hatfield school _shes_? Never!”

The gentleman who narrated this fact lived to witness, also, the foundation and endowment of a college for girls at Northampton by Miss Smith of Hatfield, one of the sex, and probably one of the girls contemptuously forbidden a common-school education.

For a long time after summer schools were provided for girls, in many of the New England towns they were not supported, by a general tax, as were the winter schools for boys, but by tuition fees.

Josiah Quincy, in his “Municipal History of Boston,” says “After the peace of 1783, a committee on schools ‘laments that so many children should be found in the streets, playing and gaming in school hours.’” There seems as yet to be no search for girls who are losing school advantages.

In 1789 great educational advance was made in Boston. A system was adopted which provided “a ‘Latin School’ for fitting boys of ten years old and over, by a four years’ course, including Greek and Latin, for the University; also three reading and writing schools.”

Boys had the right to attend these all the year round; girls from the twentieth of April to the twentieth of October. This was the first admission of girls to the “free schools.”

Provision was made this year that “arithmetic, orthography, and the English language shall be taught, in addition to reading and writing.” It is to be hoped that this applied to the summer sessions, open to girls, as well as to the all-the-year-round sessions for boys.

When, however, early in the nineteenth century, arithmetic and geography were generally added to the courses of studies in schools, it was only for the winter months, such knowledge being thought quite unnecessary for girls. “All a girl needs to know is enough to reckon how much she will have to spin to buy a peck of potatoes, in case she becomes a widow,” was the repulse of a too ambitious girl in the early part of this century.

An old lady, sitting beside the present writer, well remembers that in her youth, having outreached the prescribed limits of the girl’s class in arithmetic, she grappled alone with the mysteries of “interest.” Meeting some difficulty she appealed to her older brother, who had been duly instructed. His scornful reply was, “I am ashamed of a girl who wants to study ‘interest’!”

The need of more teachers led gradually to the employment of women in “those schools where, besides morals, the only requirements were reading, sewing, and writing if contracted for.”

In the law of 1789 the expression “master and mistress” makes recognition of women as teachers for the first time. Hitherto women so employed could not legally collect their wages; the receipt of their dues depended upon the honor of their employers.

This act of justice may have been the more appreciated as the wages of female teachers were evidently on a rising scale. Something less than a half century after Mistresses Wright and Converse had shared their year’s income of ten shillings, the following vote, passed in the town meeting of Lexington, shows an increased estimate of women’s services:

“At a meeting of the inhabitants, July 21, 1717, they agreed that Clerk Lawrence’s wife and Ephraim Winship’s wife keep school from ye day of ye date hereof until ye last day of October next following; and if they have not scholars sufficient as to numbers to amount to five shillings a week, at three pence a scholar a week, then ye towne to make up what is wanted of ye five shillings out of the treasury thereof; provided ye selectmen do not see cause to demolish sd schole before sd term be expired.”

Probably no deductions from the above specified wages were necessary for living expenses, which these mistresses of households may be supposed to have earned in their duties at home. When, in the course of the succeeding century, wages increased to seventy-five cents or even to a dollar a week, the teacher was expected to “board around,” though sometimes her board in one place was paid for from public funds. In the latter case, in many New England towns, the privilege of boarding the teacher, like that of boarding town paupers, was put up for public competition, and was struck off to the lowest bidder.

Up to 1828 girls did not go to the public schools in Rhode Island.

Antedating the earliest records here transcribed is the claim made that the first free school in America was made in Virginia in 1621. If so it struck no root, for, in 1671, Bishop Berkely, Governor of Virginia, wrote, “I thank God there are no free schools nor printing; and I hope we shall not have them these hundred years.” It was one hundred and seven years later, in 1778, that Thomas Jefferson introduced a bill in the Virginia legislature, designed to establish a system of public schools in that State, arguing that “the greatest sacrifice the people of the republic can make will fail to secure civil liberty to their posterity unless they provide for the education of youth.”

In the Dutch settlement of Manhattan a movement for schools was made which proved more successful than in Virginia, as befitted its source in the Netherlands, where, since the sixteenth century, “the fruitfulness of a wise and state-administered system of universal education” had been illustrated.

In 1630, the States-General of Holland issued orders to the Dutch East India Company in Manhattan to maintain a clergyman and a schoolmaster, and in 1633 arrived Adam Roelandsen, and the first school-tax ever levied in America was imposed on each householder and inhabitant. So Brooklyn had the first free public school in the United States. Until 1808, this school was in charge of the local congregation of the Dutch Reformed church; then a board of trustees was appointed. This school still continues.

In 1658, the Burgomasters petitioned for a fit person as Latin schoolmaster. This was granted, and so the first classical school was instituted.

Since it is time that the day of jubilation and self-gratulation should be over in America, and that the day of sober, earnest study of educational work should come in, it is not the part of wisdom to forget that the free school system did not originate in America. In an address to magistrates, in 1524, Luther urged that they should “at least provide the poor suffering youth with a schoolmaster”: and what “youth” meant to Luther appears in his plea that “solely with a view to the present, it would be sufficient reason for the best schools, both for boys and girls, that the world, merely to maintain outward prosperity, has need of shrewd and accomplished men and women.”

In Manhattan, the successor of Adam Roelandsen found time, outside his duties as teacher, to act as “gravedigger, bellringer, and precentor”; but if in place of these extra-official duties, the colonists had so profited by the wisdom of Luther as to cause him to take time for the instruction of girls, we may well believe that it would have changed the history of education in America.

Mr. Richard G. Boone reminds us, in his valuable work on “Education in the United States,” that “Charles and Gustavus Adolphus did for Sweden and their generations what America, with all her achievements, has failed to do since; they made education so common that in the year 1637, the year of the founding of Harvard, not a single peasant child was unable to read and write.”

There is pathetic contrast too, if it be fair to draw it, in the fact that while the colonial fathers were barricading the doors of the little schoolhouses against girls, so that a large part of the wills which women made in that period were signed with a cross, and even many wives of distinguished men could not sign their names, as appears by the registered deeds of the time, an Italian woman, Elena Lucrezia Coronaro, “poet, musician, astronomer, mathematician, and linguist,” received a Dr.’s degree at the university of Padua, and Novela d’Andrea, who was both learned and beautiful, occasionally lectured for her father, who was a law professor in the University of Bologna. To be sure, this was in line with a tradition in Italy for which England herself could furnish no parallel.

In that ancient seat of learning, Bologna University, which produced the most famous jurisconsults of the middle ages, women had been for centuries both students and professors.

Bettisia Gozzidina, LL.D., filled the juridical chair from 1239 till her death in 1249; Catalina and Novella Calderini lectured on law a century later; and in succeeding centuries other women became renowned in various departments, including mathematics and anatomical research.

To fill the pages of two centuries, blank, in America, as to female education beyond the merest rudiments of learning, let Abigail, wife of President John Adams, who was descended from the most illustrious colonial families, the Shepards, Nortons, and Quincys, sketch for us the intellectual opportunities for girls of her own rank in her time. Born in 1744, she wrote, in 1817, when past threescore and ten:

“The only chance for much intellectual improvement in the female sex was to be found in the families of the educated class, and in occasional intercourse with the learned of the day. Whatever of useful instruction was received in the practical conduct of life came from maternal lips: and what of farther mental development, depended more upon the eagerness with which the casual teachings of daily conversation were treasured up, than upon any labor expended purposely to promote it. Female education in the best families went no farther than writing and arithmetic, and, in some few and rare instances, music and dancing.”

Although at this time the number of post-offices in the country probably did not exceed half a hundred, Mrs. Adams notes a great letter-writing propensity in her circle. “These letters deserve notice,” says her biographer, “only as they furnish a general idea of the tastes and pursuits of the day, and show the evident influence upon the writers which study of “The Spectator” and of the poets had exerted.” This appears in the train of thought and structure of language, as in trifles of taste for quotation, and for fictitious signatures. “Calliope” and “Myra,” “Aspasia” and “Aurelia,” have effectually disguised their true names from the eyes of younger generations. Miss Smith’s signature appears to have been “Diana,” a name which she dropped after her marriage, without losing the fancy that prompted its selection.

Her letters written during the Revolution show clearly enough the tendency of her own thoughts and feelings in the substitute she then adopted of “Portia.”

The young ladies of Massachusetts, in the last century, were certainly readers even though only self-taught, and their taste was not for the feeble and nerveless sentiment or the frantic passion of our day, but was derived from the deepest wells of English literature. The superb flowering of native mental gifts in many women of the last part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries, under so slight stimulus of educational advantage, would almost force upon us the theory of Descartes, that “in order to improve the mind we ought less to learn than to contemplate”; and lead us to accept the dictum of Huxley, that “all the time we are using our plain common sense we are at once scientists and artists.”

Rev. William Woodbridge, a descendant of Rev. Jonathan Edwards, and for fifty years an honored educator, wrote, in the latter part of his life, to a correspondent: “You inquire how so many of the females of New England, during the latter part of the last century, acquired that firmness, and energy, and excellence of character for which they have been so justly distinguished, while the advantages of school education were so limited. The only answer is that it is not the amount of knowledge, but the nature of the knowledge, and, still more, the manner in which it is used to form character. Natural logic, the self-taught art of thinking, was the guard and guide of the female mind. The first of Watts’s five methods of internal improvement, ‘The attentive notice of every instructive fact and occurrence,’ was exemplified in practice. Newspapers were taken in a few families; books were scarce but freely lent; the Scriptures were much read; and, as for time, ‘where there is a will there is a way.’”

Since the women of that day left almost no record of their thought in print, the biography of Mrs. Adams, already quoted, may be called upon to illustrate the intellectual and moral characteristics attributed to them. Among the New England women of the early part of this century who are still remembered by the present generation, there was a noteworthy number who, in vigor of intellect and strength of character, might truly be called her peers.

While Mr. Adams was in Europe (from 1780) as Commissioner from the United States, Mrs. Adams was managing the family property, at a time of depreciation of paper money. Speaking of this period Mr. Charles Francis Adams says: “Her letters are remarkable because they display the readiness with which she could devote herself to the most opposite duties, and the cheerful manner in which she could accommodate herself to the difficulties of the times. She is a farmer, cultivating the land and discussing the weather and crops; a merchant, reporting prices current and the rates of exchange, and directing the making up of invoices; a politician, speculating upon the probabilities of peace or war, and a mother, writing the most exalted sentiments to her son. All of these pursuits she adopts together; some from choice, the rest from the necessity of the case; and in all she appears equally well.”

The complete sympathy of interest between Mrs. Adams and her distinguished husband in “seeking for political truth in its fundamental principles,” as Mr. Adams is said to have done, appears in her letters, and it may be questioned whether, barring the consideration of sex, the term “statesmanlike” might not apply to the views of both.

Just a month before the resolution declaring the independence of the colonies was offered in the Continental Congress by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia and seconded by John Adams of Massachusetts Mrs. Adams wrote to her husband, under date of May 7, 1776.