EDUCATION OF WOMEN.
Among the subjects concerning which my husband advanced with a quicker
and firmer step than that of the society around him in general, stands
that of the higher education of women. It may be difficult for the
present generation to realise what an amount of dogged opposition and
prejudice the pioneers of this movement had to encounter only some
twenty-five years ago. We have made such rapid strides in the direction
of women’s education, that we almost forget that our ladies’ colleges,
higher examinations, and the various honours for which women compete
so gallantly with men, are but of yesterday. Miss Clough called at our
house in Liverpool one day in 1867, to ascertain the state of mind
of the Principal of the Liverpool College in regard to the beautiful
schemes, which were even then taking shape in her fruitful brain for
the benefit of her fellow-women. I think she was heartily glad to find
herself in a house where not a shadow of prejudice or doubt existed, to
be argued down or patiently borne with until better days. My husband
even went a little further, I believe, than she did at that time,
in his hopes concerning the equality to be granted in future in the
matter of educational advantages for boys and girls, men and women.
An active propagandist work was started soon after by James Stuart,
of Trinity College, Cambridge, who made Liverpool his head-quarters
during his first experiment in establishing lectures for ladies, which
developed into the University Extension Scheme. It was arranged that
the first course should embrace four of the most important towns of the
North of England, constituting a sort of circuit. It seemed desirable
that a man of experience and weight in the educational world should
inaugurate this experiment by a preliminary address or lecture, given
to mixed audiences, in each of these four towns. My husband undertook
this task. His first address was given at Sheffield, where he was the
guest of Canon Sale, who approved heartily of the movement. Without
unnecessarily conjuring up spectres of opposition in order to dismiss
them, he carefully framed his discourse so as to meet the prejudices of
which the air, at that time, was full. It was generally imagined that
a severer intellectual training than women had hitherto received would
make them unwomanly, hard, unlovely, pedantic, and disinclined for
domestic duties, while the dangers to physical health were dolorously
prophesied by medical men and others. In concluding his inaugural
address, my husband said: “A community of women, established purposely
to educate girls and to train teachers, was not known in Christendom
till the institution of the Ursulines by Angela dà Brescia, in 1537.
So unheard of at this time was any attempt of women to organise
a systematic education for their own sex, that when Françoise de
Saintange undertook to found such a school at Dijon she was hooted
in the streets, and her father called together four doctors learned
in the laws, ‘pour s’assurer qu’instruire des femmes n’était pas un
œuvre du démon.’ Even after he had given his consent, he was afraid to
countenance his daughter, and Françoise, unprotected and unaided, began
her first school in a garret. Twelve years afterwards she was carried
in triumph through the streets, with bells ringing and flowers strewed
in her path, _because she had succeeded_. Her work lived and grew
_because it was right_. So take courage, ladies, struggling now at this
day for the right to cultivate to their full extent the faculties and
gifts which God has bestowed upon you. You must fight your own battles
still. At all times reforms in the social position of women have been
brought about by efforts of their own, for their own sex, supplemented
by men, but always coming in the first instance from themselves.”
The visit of Miss Clough to the Butlers, already referred to, led
to the formation at the end of 1867 of the North of England Council
for promoting the Higher Education for Women, a body representing
associations of school-mistresses in several large northern towns.
Josephine Butler was President of this council from 1867 to 1873,
and Miss Clough was Secretary for the three first strenuous years
of its existence. The first work of the Council was to organise
lectures for women, which had already been begun by Mr. Stuart, to
whose genius the inception of the University Extension Movement was
due. Mr. Stuart’s first course on astronomy was given, in the autumn
of 1867, in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, and was
attended altogether by five hundred and fifty women. These lectures
were followed by other similar courses organised by the Council, and
the idea rapidly spread. In 1868 Mr. Stuart gave his first lectures
to working-men at Crewe. These two independent tributaries, lectures
to women and lectures to working-men, combined into one stream,
which grew into the University Extension system first adopted by the
University of Cambridge in 1873. The North of England Council was one
of the bodies which memorialised the University, at the end of 1871,
in favour of the lecture system being taken up and put on a permanent
basis by the University. Their memorial urged the proposal not only
on behalf of women, but also on behalf of working-men, who had alike
shown their desire for higher education by attending in large numbers
the lectures already given.
The Council also interested itself in the question of examinations for
women, and in 1868 presented the following memorial to the University
of Cambridge, signed by five hundred and fifty teachers, and three
hundred other ladies:
“We, the undersigned, being either connected with or engaged in the
education of girls, desire to bring under your consideration the
great want which is felt by women of the upper and middle classes,
particularly by those engaged in teaching, of higher examinations,
suitable to their own needs. The Local Examinations, to which by a
Grace of the Senate, passed April, 1865, girls under eighteen have now
for three years been admitted, have proved of the greatest advantage
in stimulating and steadying the work in Girls’ Schools. Students
above eighteen are not, however, admissible to these examinations,
nor are they of a sufficiently advanced character to meet the wants
of such students, especially of those who have adopted, or wish to
adopt, teaching as a profession. We therefore beg that, taking into
consideration the grave necessities of the case, you will be pleased,
either by extending the powers of the Syndicate for conducting the
Local Examinations, or in some other way to make provisions for such
examinations as shall adequately test and attest the higher education
of women.”
Josephine Butler by her personal efforts obtained many of the
signatures to this memorial, and herself went to Cambridge in support
of it. Miss Clough wrote of this expedition that “the charm Mrs.
Butler put into all the details she gave, showing the desire of women
for help in educating themselves, made the subject, which might have
been considered tedious, both interesting and attractive, and thus
drew to the cause many friends.”[2]
[2] _Memoir of Anne J. Clough_, by Miss B. A. Clough, 1903 (Edward
Arnold) p. 129.
To friends in the North.
_June, 1868._
One of our friends at Cambridge amused himself with counting up the
number of gentlemen who talked privately and kindly to me about
it—there were forty-eight. So you see there is a great deal of
sympathy there. It is not so easy for me to tell you what I felt,
as what actually happened. I felt the reality of the good that must
come from this movement. It would have pleased you, I feel sure, as
it pleased me, to see the grave and kindly tone of these dons. I was
talking to one elderly Professor with grey hair and a somewhat stiff
expression, and I happened to speak of the struggle which the lives
of many women of the middle classes is, and of the gratitude we felt
when men of weight and real goodness came forward to help us, and
this elderly don was deeply moved. The tears came into his eyes, and
he could scarcely answer me. He said: “I fear we get selfish here,
and forget how much there is of work and sorrow in the world outside
of us.” Professor Maurice came to my room one day and talked a long
time to me. He said at leaving: “If there is anything else which you
and your friends think Cambridge could do to be of use, I trust you
will suggest it; it does _us_ more good than it does to anyone else.”
I trust that a time is coming when barriers between men and women
and one class and another may give way before the influence of true
Christian charity, and a desire to help and be helped.
The memorial met with a ready response from the University by the
establishment in the following year of the Examinations for Women,
which a few years later were called the Higher Local Examinations, and
were open to men as well as women.
“These two things—the organisation in the northern towns of lectures
given, by University men, which led to University Extension, and the
establishment of an examination for women which led to the Cambridge
lectures, and so to Newnham College—were the Council’s most striking
achievements; but it had a hand in various other important educational
enterprises.”[3]
[3] _Ibid._ p. 131.
For instance the Council worked hard, and with some success, in
endeavouring to induce the Endowed Schools Commissioners to secure
that some part of the endowments of Public Schools should be devoted
to the education of girls. “Mrs. Butler made an able as well as
a zealous President of the Council, and while she herself took an
active part in almost everything that was undertaken, she also did
good service in kindling the enthusiasm of others by her eloquence
and enthusiasm.”[4] Although she retired from the Presidency in
1873 on the ground of ill-health, she attended its last meetings at
York in 1874, when she read a paper on _Economic Science as a part
of the Education of Girls_. In that year the Council was dissolved,
having finished its pioneer work, and feeling that the movement could
henceforth be carried on by other organisations, which had by that
time come into existence.
[4] _Ibid._ p. 135.
In 1868 Josephine Butler published her first pamphlet, _The Education
and Employment of Women_. Starting with the census figures of 1861,
she meets the old argument that woman’s sphere is the home, and only
the home, by pointing out that the proportion of wives to widows
and spinsters over twenty was only about three to two (in 1901 the
proportion was even less), and that over three million women were
earning or partly earning their living. This number had risen in 1901
to over four millions. She refers to the miserable wages received by
women workers, from the teaching profession downwards, due in part
to the comparatively low state of education among girls, and in part
to the restrictions upon their employment in various directions,
both causes being ultimately traceable to the fact that “they are
unrepresented, and the interests of the unrepresented always tend to
be overlooked.” Hence she pleads for the higher education of women and
the removal of all legal and other restrictions upon their employment.
She incidentally urges the mixed education of boys and girls. As
against the argument that the more extended employment of women would
injure men, she prophesies, in the words of F. D. Maurice, “Whenever
in trade or in any department of human activity restrictions tending
to the advantage of one class and the injury of others have been
removed, there a divine power has been at work counteracting not
only the selfish calculations, but often the apparently sagacious
reasonings of their defenders.” Surely this prophecy has been
fulfilled, as it appears from the Report of the Poor Law Commission
recently issued, that, taking a wide outlook of the whole industrial
situation, there has been no tendency in the past twenty years for
women workers to displace men. (Pp. 322-5.)
In 1869 Josephine Butler edited and wrote an introduction to a volume
of essays on _Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture_. The essays were
by Frances Power Cobbe, Jessie Boucherett, George Butler, Sophia
Jex-Blake, James Stuart, Charles H. Pearson, Herbert N. Mozley, Julia
Wedgwood, Elizabeth C. Wolstenholme, and John Boyd-Kinnear. In her
introductory essay she lays stress on the fact that any disabilities,
from which women suffer, cause injury and loss to men, no less than to
women themselves. She admits that woman’s sphere is _home_, but she
wishes the home idea to be realised in wider spheres than within the
four walls of a single household. She pleads that to grant the demands
of women for higher education, and for unrestricted liberty to engage
in any employment, will tend to the restoration of true home ideals;
first through the restored dignity of women, and secondly through the
opening out and diffusion of the home influence and character into the
solution of social problems, by the relegation to women of some of the
more important work of dealing with our vast populations. This she
illustrates in the following passage.
In the present pretty general realisation of the futility, if not
the positive harm, of many forms of private philanthropy, and the
often-repeated deprecation of meddling individuals, who pauperise the
community by their old-fashioned, lady-bountiful way of dispensing alms
and patronage, we do not perhaps quite foresee the reaction which is
setting in, with a tendency so strong in the opposite direction that it
brings us into the danger of once more missing the philosophy of the
whole matter. The tendency at present is to centralisation of rule, to
vast combinations, large institutions, and uniformity of system. I have
a doubt about any wholesale manipulation of the poor, the criminal,
scholars in schools, etc. I believe it to be so far from being founded
on a philosophical view of human nature and of society, that if
carried to extremes the last state of our poor will be worse than the
first. For the correction of the extreme tendencies of this reaction,
I believe that nothing whatever will avail but the large infusion of
home elements into workhouses, hospitals, schools, orphanages, lunatic
asylums, reformatories, and even prisons; and in order to attain
this there must be a setting free of feminine powers and influence
from the constraint of bad education, and narrow aims, and listless
homes where they are at present too often a superfluity. We have had
experience of what we may call the feminine form of philanthropy, the
independent individual ministering, of too mediæval a type to suit
the present day. It has failed. We are now about to try the masculine
form of philanthropy—large and comprehensive measures, organisations
and systems, planned by men and sanctioned by Parliament. This also
will fail if it so far prevail as to extinguish the truth to which the
other method witnessed in spite of its excesses. Why should we not try
at last a union of principles which are equally true? “It is not good
for man to be alone” was a very early announcement in the history
of the world. Neither is it good for man to work alone in any matter
whatsoever which concerns the welfare of the great human family; and
the larger the work be which he undertakes, unassisted by her whom God
gave to him for a helpmate, the more signal will be the failure in the
end.
We quote another passage from this essay to show how here, as always,
she founded herself on the appeal to Christ as the highest authority
in matters of principle and of action.
The author of _Ecce Homo_ has set the example to those to whom it did
not occur to do so for themselves, of venturing straight into the
presence of Christ for an answer to every question, and of silencing
the voice of all theologians from St. Paul to this day, until we have
heard what the Master says. It may be that God will give grace to some
woman in the time to come to discern more clearly, and to reveal to
others, some truth which theologians have hitherto failed to see in its
fulness; for from the intimacy into which our Divine Master admitted
women with Himself it would seem that His communications of the deepest
nature were not confined to male recipients; and what took place during
His life on earth may, through His Holy Spirit, be continued now. It is
instructive to recall the fact that the most stupendous announcement
ever made to the world, the announcement of an event concerning which
the whole world is divided to this day, and which more than all others
is bound up with our hopes of immortality, the resurrection of Christ,
was first made to women. Nor can we wonder, looking back over the
ages since then, and seeing how any truths asserted by women, not at
once palpable to the outward sense or provable by logic, have been
accounted as idle tales, that of the first apostles it should have been
said, “The words of the women seemed unto them as idle tales,” when
they declared that Christ was risen. Among the great typical acts of
Christ, which were evidently and intentionally for the announcement
of a principle for the guidance of society, none were more markedly
so than His acts towards women; and I appeal to the open Book, and to
the intelligence of every candid student of Gospel history, for the
justification of my assertion that in all important instances of His
dealings with women His dismissal of each case was accompanied by a
distinct act of _Liberation_. In one case He emancipated a woman from
legal thraldom. His act no doubt appeared to those who witnessed it
as that of a dangerous leveller, for while He granted to the woman
a completeness of freedom from the tyranny of law which must have
electrified the bystanders, He imposed upon the men present, and upon
all men by implication, the higher obligation which they had made a
miserable attempt to enforce upon one half of society only, and the
breach of which their cruel laws visited with terrible severity on
women alone. They all went out convicted by conscience, while the
woman alone remained free; but, be it observed, free in a double
sense—free alike from the inward moral slavery, and from the harsh,
humanly-imposed judgment. The emancipation granted to another in the
matter of hereditary disabilities was signal. In a moment He struck
off chains which had been riveted by the traditions of centuries, and
raised her from the position, accepted even by herself, of a “Gentile
dog” to one higher than the highest of the commonwealth of Israel. In
another case His “Go in peace,” and words of tender and respectful
commendation to one who had been exiled from society, contrasted
solemnly with His rebuke to His self-satisfied host, who, while firmly
holding his place among the honoured of this world, marvelled that
Christ should not seem to be aware what manner of woman it was who
touched Him. To another, before ever she had spoken a word, He cried,
“Woman, thou art loosed!” and to objectors He replied, “Ought not this
woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound lo these
eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” The
tyrannies and infirmities from which He freed these persons severally
were various and manifold, and this does but increase the significance
of His whole proceeding towards them. Search throughout the Gospel
history, and observe His conduct in regard to women, and it will be
found that the word liberation expresses, above all others, the act
which changed the whole life and character and position of the women
dealt with, and which ought to have changed the character of men’s
treatment of women from that time forward.
While in His example of submission to parents, of filial duty and
affection, in His inculcation of the sacredness of marriage, and
of the duty of obedience to laws which _ought_ to be obeyed, His
righteousness far exceeded the righteousness of the Pharisees of
His own or of the present day, it seems to me impossible for anyone
candidly to study Christ’s whole life and words without seeing that the
principle of the perfect equality of all human beings was announced by
Him as the basis of social philosophy. To some extent this has been
practically acknowledged in the relations of men to men; only in one
case has it been consistently ignored, and that is in the case of that
half of the human race in regard to which His doctrine of equality was
more markedly enforced than in any other. It is no wonder that there
should be some women whose love for _this Saviour_ exceeds the love
which it is possible for any man to feel for Him, and that, retiring
from the encounter with prejudices which are apt to lurk even in the
minds of the most just and most generous of men, they should be driven
to cast themselves in a great solitude of heart before _Him_, for He
only is just, He only is holy, He only is infinitely tender.
In the same year, 1869, Josephine Butler published the _Memoir of
John Grey of Dilston_, a most interesting biography of a good man,
who faithfully served his native county throughout his life, and took
a keen interest in all the stirring political events of the first
half of the last century. An Italian translation of this Memoir was
published in Florence two years later.