Part 9 (1/2)
Friends are just beginning to discuss giving higher education to girls.
This is a fact especially significant in our discussion, because it has always been claimed that the Quaker doctrine that ”souls have no s.e.x” led them to place woman on an ”equality” with man before other sects had thought of allowing that they were equals. Lucretia Mott, Susan Anthony, Abby Kelley, and a great body of the women who adopted the resolution that set forth the uselessness of educating woman until she could vote, and who clamored for her entrance to men's inst.i.tutions, were all of this sect that has kept its women generally far behind in the acquisition of knowledge.
In 1845 Mrs. Willard was invited to address the Teachers' Convention that met in Syracuse. She prepared a paper in which she set forth the idea that, ”women, now sufficiently educated, should be employed and furnished by the men as committees, charged with the minute cares and supervision of the public schools,” but declined the honor tendered her of delivering it in person. Sixty gentlemen from the convention visited her at the hotel, and, at their earnest request, she read the essay, which met with their emphatic approval of the plan she proposed. The employment of women in the common schools, and the system of normal schools, were projected by her.
A Teachers' Convention was held in Rochester in 1852. Miss Anthony, though a teacher, was not in attendance upon it, but she records that she went in and listened for a few hours to a discussion of the causes that led to their profession being held in less esteem than those of the doctor, lawyer, and minister. In her judgment, the kernel of the matter was not alluded to, so she arose and said: ”Mr. President.” She records that ”at length President Davies stepped to the front and said in a tremulous, mocking tone,” ”What will the lady have?” ”I wish, sir,” she said, ”to speak to the question.” ”What is the pleasure of the convention?” asked Mr. Davies. A gentleman moved that she be heard; another seconded the motion; whereupon, she records, ”a discussion, pro and con, followed, lasting full half an hour, when a vote was taken of the men only, and permission was granted by a small majority.” She adds that it was lucky for her that the thousand women crowding that hall could not vote on the question, for they would have given a solid ”No.” The president then announced ”The lady can speak.” ”It seems to me, gentlemen,” said she, ”that none of you quite comprehend the cause of the disrespect of which you complain. Do you not see that, so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? Would you exalt your profession, exalt those who labor with you. Would you make it more lucrative, increase the salaries of the women engaged in the n.o.ble work of educating our future Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen.”
Several thoughts arise in regard to this scene, which was so strongly in contrast with the conduct of Mrs. Willard or any of the great educators.
Miss Anthony gave no reason for her belief that the entrance of woman upon the other professions would raise either the status or the wages of those engaged in the teacher's profession, and as a matter of fact they have not done so. It was not the society that cast scorn at woman's ”lack of brains” which a.s.sisted to remove the natural prejudice against her a.s.suming duties that had been deemed unsuited to her physique and her necessary work.
Meantime, one year before the Rochester meeting was held, the first college for women had been chartered at Auburn, New York, under the name of ”Auburn Female University.” In 1853 it was transferred to Elmira, and it was formally opened in 1855. It was placed under the care of the Congregational Church, but its charter required that it should have representative trustees from five other denominations. Its course of study for the degree of A. B. was essentially the same that was then pursued in the men's colleges of the State. It was expected to rely upon endowment, which put woman's education upon a new and more secure footing.
Suffrage leaders lose no opportunity to represent the Church as an enemy to woman's advancement. Nothing can be further from the truth; and in striking evidence stand the colleges, which, while unsectarian in spirit and in method, have been established and cared for by special religious denominations. Dr. Jacobi, in her book ”Common Sense,” takes up the tale and says: ”The Mount Holyoke Seminary, the immediate successor of that at Troy, was opened in 1837 by Miss Lyon, in spite of the opposition of the clergy.” Many besides the clergy were opposed to the plan for which Miss Lyon was endeavoring to raise money. Her idea that the entire domestic work of the establishment could be done by pupils and teachers, was thought unwise and hopeless. In that n.o.ble school, where thousands of women have been educated, a great number have become missionaries. When a Suffrage convention in session in Worcester wrote to Miss Lyon, asking her to interest herself in the wrongs of her s.e.x, she answered, ”I cannot leave my work.” Neither was Va.s.sar College founded from any impulse or suggestion of Suffrage agitators, but in a spirit exactly the opposite.
The real impetus to its founding came from Milo Parker Jewett, who was born in Vermont in 1808, and was graduated at Dartmouth College and at Andover Theological Seminary. He was active in the formation of the common-school system of Ohio, and in 1839 he founded The Judson Female Inst.i.tute in Marion, Alabama. He established a seminary for girls in Poughkeepsie in 1855. He had studied law, and became the friend and legal adviser of Matthew Va.s.sar, who, being unmarried, was casting about for a method of disposing of his fortune. He suggested to Mr. Va.s.sar an endowed college for women, and visited the universities and libraries of Europe with a plan of organization in mind. Mr. Va.s.sar gladly accepted this great enlargement upon an idea that had lain dormant in his own mind, and Va.s.sar College was founded, Dr. Jewett becoming its first president in 1862.
I may claim to have been beside the cradle of Va.s.sar College; for when Dr.
Jewett resigned the presidency in 1864, my father named the successor who was appointed, Dr. John H. Raymond, his life-long friend. Dr. Raymond came to Rochester to discuss a plan of work, and, knowing my father's interest, I was on tiptoe to hear about the new college. At my earnest solicitation, he and Dr. Raymond and Prest. Anderson permitted me to be present at their discussions. I learned to comprehend the value of womanliness to the world by the estimate that those n.o.ble educators put upon it. It was evident that they were arranging for those for whose minds they felt respect. They made no foolish remarks about the superiority, inferiority, or equality of the s.e.xes, and had no contempt to throw upon the old education of tutor, and library, and young ladies' seminary. They did not sneer at the ”female mind,” but they did talk of the feminine mind as of something as distinct in its essence from the masculine mind as the feminine form is distinct in its outlines. To ”preserve womanliness” was a task they felt they must fulfil, or the women for whose good they labored would one day call them to account. The dictum so frequently in the mouths of Suffrage leaders, ”There is no s.e.x in brain,” would have been abhorrent to them. In their view, there was as much s.e.x in brain as in hand; and the education that did not, through cultivation, emphasize that fact, would be a lower and not a higher product. They laid that intellectual corner-stone in love, and in the faith that the same womanly spirit which, when there was not college education enough to go round, had said, ”Give it to the boys, because their work must be public,” would find, through the glad return the boys were making, a way to teach the world still higher lessons of womanly character and influence. Since that time, college after college has arisen without a dream on the part of the founders, faculties, or students that ”every effort to educate woman, until you accord to her the right to vote, is futile and a waste of labor,” and it may well be that the women educated in these colleges will decide that, because political rights do acknowledge s.e.x, therefore the word ”male” should not be stricken from any State const.i.tution.
Before the committee of the New York State Const.i.tutional Convention in 1894, Mr. Edward Lauterbach, who was arguing in favor of woman suffrage, said: ”It was only after the establishment of the Willard School at Troy, only after its n.o.ble founder, believing that women and men were formed in the same mould, successfully tried the experiment of educating women in the higher branches, that steps for higher education became generally taken.” If Mr. Lauterbach imagines that Mrs. Willard was in the most distant way an advocate of woman's doing the same work as man in the same way, he is unfamiliar with her life and work. Mrs. Willard, in setting forth her ideal of woman's education, said ”Education should be adapted to female character and duties. To do this would raise the character of man.... Why may not housewifery be reduced to a system as well as the other arts? If women were properly fitted for instruction, they would be likely to teach children better than the other s.e.x; they could afford to do it cheaper; and men might be at liberty to add to the wealth of the nation by any of the thousand occupations from which women are necessarily debarred.” Old-fas.h.i.+oned wisdom, but choicely good. Mr. Lauterbach further said: ”What wonder that, being so fully equipped in every mental attribute, in every intellectual qualification, they will be able not only to cast a vote but to take practical part in the administration of the government?”
A female Solon would be a woman still, and in a democracy the intellectual is not the only qualification needed. This certainly was the belief of Mrs. Willard, and in 1868, when the Suffrage leaders were holding a convention in Was.h.i.+ngton, and were urging that Congress should pa.s.s a sixteenth amendment admitting women to suffrage, Almira Lincoln Phelps, sister of Mrs. Willard, herself an educator and an author of text-books, wrote to Isabella Beecher Hooker: ”Hoping you will receive kindly what I am about to write, I will proceed without apologies. I have confidence in your n.o.bleness of soul, and that you know enough of me to believe in my devotion to the best interests of woman. I can scarcely realize that you are giving your name and influence to a cause which, with some good, but, as I think, misguided women, numbers among its advocates others with loose morals.... If we could with propriety pet.i.tion the Almighty to change the condition of the s.e.xes, and let men take a turn in bearing children and in suffering the physical ailments peculiar to women, which render them unfit for certain positions and business, why, in this case, if we really wish to be men, and thought G.o.d would change the established order, we might make our pet.i.tion; but why ask Congress to make us men? Circ.u.mstances drew me from the quiet domestic life while I was yet young, but success in labors which involved publicity, and which may have been of advantage to society, was never considered as an equivalent to my own heart for such a loss of retirement. In the name of my sainted sister, Emma Willard, and of my friend Lydia Sigourney, and, I think I might say, in the name of the women of the past generation who have been prominent as writers and educators (the exception may be made of Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances Wright, and a few licentious French writers) in our own country and in Europe, let me urge the high-souled and honorable of our s.e.x to turn their energies into that channel which will enable them to act for the true interests of their s.e.x.”
In a woman's club, last winter, a New York teacher, Miss Helen Dawes Brown, a graduate of Va.s.sar College, founder of the Woman's University Club and also one of the founders of Barnard College, in a speech said in part: ”The young girl who doesn't dance, who doesn't play games, who can't skate and can't row, is a girl to be pitied. She is losing a large part of what Chesterfield calls the 'joy and t.i.tivation of youth.' If our young girl has learned to be good, teach her not to disregard the externals of goodness. Let our girls, in college and out, learn to be agreeable. A girl's education should, first of all, be directed to fitting her for the things of home. We talk of woman as if the only domestic relations were those of wife and mother. Let us not forget that she is also a granddaughter, a daughter, a sister, an aunt. I should like to see her made her best in all these characters, before she undertakes public duties. The best organization in the world is the home. Whatever in the education of girls draws them away from that, is an injury to civilization.”
At the close of an article in the ”Outlook,” written by Elizabeth Fisher Read, of Smith College, she said, speaking of their last adaptation of athletics: ”From the beginning, the policy of Smith College has been, not to duplicate the means of development offered in men's colleges, but to provide courses and methods of study that should do for women what the men's courses did for them. Emphasis has been put, not on the resemblances between men and women, but rather on the differences. The effort has not been to turn out new women, capable of doing anything man can do, from walking thirty miles to solving the problems of higher mathematics.
Instead of this, the college has tried to develop its students along natural womanly lines, not along the lines that would naturally be followed in training men.”
This sounds strangely like Mrs. Willard, who would be the first to rejoice in the new education and in the old spirit that it can develop. Of course Suffrage claims to have the same end in view. Every college woman must decide for herself where she will stand on the question. So far, there never has been any open affiliation between the colleges and the Suffrage movement. We wait to hear a final verdict.
A contributor to the Suffrage department of the Woman's Edition of the Rochester ”Post-Express,” March 26, 1896, said: ”Will Rochester give to its daughters the same advantages as to its sons, or will it say to the girls who have no money to leave home and seek in Smith and Wellesley the culture they cannot procure here: 'You cannot be thoroughly educated; you have no money; you can have no education; sit and spin; bake and brew--but don't bother about higher education,' or will the University of Rochester recognize the one splendid opportunity that awaits it, the one last chance to take its proper place and become all that the highest American standards demand for a University?”
The time has not yet fully come when these same sentimentalists shall say to the faculty and trustees of Va.s.sar, Wellesley and Smith: ”Will you not give to the boys of Poughkeepsie, Northhampton, and Wellesley the same advantages as to the girls? Or will you say to them: 'You cannot be thoroughly educated; you have no money; you can have no education; work in the shop or on the farm, but don't bother about higher education.'” This is Suffrage logic, and there is no more reason why the educational inst.i.tutions in which men study from the age of eighteen to twenty-two should be invaded by women of that age, than why women's inst.i.tutions should be invaded by men. Yet this would be the destruction of our women's colleges. When Miss Anthony headed a delegation that went bodily to force co-education on Rochester University, she was told that cla.s.ses open to women had been connected with the college for years.
The kind of education best suited to the idea of Suffrage is a training in political history and present political issues; but the women who have talked loudly and vaguely of the right of suffrage for years have been the last to present such knowledge. I have read their ”History,” attended their conventions, glanced at their magazines, but never have come upon the discussion of a single public issue. I think those most familiar with it will bear me out if I make the statement that their princ.i.p.al periodical, ”The Woman's Journal,” edited by Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, Mr. Blackwell, and Alice Stone Blackwell, has not contained any presentations of questions of public policy in the past ten years.
Those whose names are signed to the Suffrage Woman's Bible, and who are therefore responsible for that disgraceful effusion, have little right to claim to be intelligent instructors of their s.e.x. With an ignorance that is monumental, Frances Ellen Burr glories in the fact that ”the Revising Committee refer to a woman's translation of the Bible as their ultimate authority for the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew text,” and they add that ”Julia Smith, this distinguished scholar,” is the only person, man or woman, who ever made a translation of the Bible without help. They say: ”Wycliff made a translation from the Vulgate a.s.sisted by Nicholas of Hereford. He was not sufficiently familiar with Hebrew and Greek to translate from those tongues. Coverdale's translation was not done alone. Tyndale, in his translation, had the a.s.sistance of Frye, of William Roye, and also of Miles Coverdale. Julia Smith translated the whole Bible absolutely alone, without consultation with any one”! Again they say, ”King James appointed fifty-four men of learning to translate the Bible. Seven of them died, and forty-seven carried the work on. Compare this corps of workers with one little woman performing the Herculean task without one suggestion or word of advice from mortal man ”! Yes, compare it! Uncultured Julia Smith, stirred by the Millerite prophecies, did the best she could to enlighten her own mind, and should be honored for so doing; but what is to be said of the women who in this day, in cool print, are willing to show that they have no comprehension of her grotesque errors or of the difficulties that beset a real scholar in his n.o.ble task? Protest at woman's educational deprivation comes with ill-grace from those who have thus revealed their own lack of knowledge of the oldest literature in the world, the model of poetry and prose, the guardian of the purity of our English speech.
Educated women desire that woman should do all that strength and time allow in the care of the public schools. The school suffrage ought to be a boon for them. But it does not, so far, look as if women could make it so.
The figures of the school vote of women in Connecticut, for three years, occasion serious question whether the use of the ballot is the way in which woman is to effect anything. In Staten Island, ignorance in women voted out education, and a tremendous effort had to be made to vote it in again. The number of men who voted at the last general election in Connecticut was about 164,000. The women outnumber the men, but the following table represents the school vote in the State of Emma Willard.
It certainly does not represent the amount of interest taken in education, nor in the common schools:
COUNTIES. 1893. 1894. 1895.
Hartford. 1293 1186 689 New Haven. 973 949 570 New London. 364 873 185 Fairneld. 273 198 126 Windham 176 182 148 Litchfield 159 85 50 Middles.e.x 60 136 101 Tolland 372 137 37
This gives the results from all but three or four towns in the State.
Aside from any other considerations, the uncertainty attending the vote of an element whose first call is elsewhere than at the polls, is a menace to the welfare of the schools as well as of republican inst.i.tutions.
One of the grievances of the Suffrage leaders lay in the fact that the literary women of the country would express no sympathy with their efforts. Poets and authors in general were denounced. Gail Hamilton, who had the good of woman in her heart, who was better informed on public affairs than perhaps any woman in the United States, and whose trenchant pen cut deep and spared not, always reprobated the cause. Mrs. Stowe stood aloof, and so did Catherine Beecher, though urged to the contrary course by Henry Ward Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker. In a letter to Mrs.