_February, 1890._
Mrs. Browning’s advice to women, much needed as it is at the present
time, was somewhat harsh and unpractical at the time she gave it, more
than thirty years ago. At that time it would not have been possible
for a woman “to prove herself a leech and cure the plague”; for on the
one hand she was debarred from obtaining the necessary qualifications,
and on the other she was prohibited from practicing without them.
The hospitals and lecture rooms were closed to her by prejudice, and
practice was therefore forbidden her by Act of Parliament. Even had
she obtained admittance to the dissecting room and hospital by quiet
perseverance and tried ability, she could not have hoped by such
means alone to remove the obstacles which were placed in her path by
legislation. The charters necessary to empower the Universities to
confer degrees on women could never have been obtained, except through
determined agitation; and if the agitators themselves did not seem
competent to exercise the powers which they wished conferred on women,
they performed the work for which they _were_ most competent and made
the path clear for those who could not have removed the obstacles
themselves. The poet and the novelist had no such difficulties to
contend with. Such women had no greater hardships to endure than men.
If men disbelieved that a woman could write a powerful novel, she
had only to do it to convince them of the contrary. But, generally
speaking, women were prohibited from doing what they could, on the
ground that they could not if they would. It was not universally so;
in many cases girls who showed mathematical or logical power, for
instance, were discouraged from exercising it, because reasoning power
was considered undesirable in women and likely to hinder their chances
of marriage. But, on the whole, women’s incapacity for intellectual
work was put forward as a reason for forbidding them to attempt it. The
futility of forbidding women to do what they were incapable of doing
was never perceived by the opponents of the movement for the higher
education of women, who based their opposition on this ground. Nor
did it avail much to point this out. Behind this asserted disbelief
in the power of the educated woman to compete even with the average
schoolboy, lay a real conviction, that if she could do so successfully,
the more desirable it was to prevent her having the chance of proving
it. It is on record that in the days of King Ahasuerus, more than 2,000
years ago, great terror was excited lest “the deed of Vashti should
come abroad unto all women, so that they should despise their husbands
in their eyes, when it should be reported that the King Ahasuerus
commanded Vashti, the queen, to be brought in before him, but she came
not. And in order that all wives should give to their husbands honour,
both to great and small, Ahasuerus sent letters into all the King’s
provinces, that every man should bear rule in his own house.” As in the
days of King Ahasuerus, so thirty years ago it was felt that humility
in women should be cultivated at all costs, and if they became aware
that all men were not necessarily their intellectual superiors they
would break out into open revolt. Women had been told that they should
obey their husbands because the latter knew best. If that were denied,
the claim to obedience would have to rest on the possession of might
instead of right.
This reiterated assertion of their inferiority has rankled in women’s
hearts. For the last forty years it has been the source of most of
the bitterness expressed openly on the platform, and the cause of
invidious comparisons leading to mutual and undignified recriminations.
It has affected the direction towards which the efforts of educational
enthusiasts have been turned. Their one aim and object has been to show
that capacities supposed to be essentially masculine are possessed by
women also; to make it possible for women to compete on equal terms
with men and to prove that they are not always the last in the race.
That the question of equality or inferiority was a wholly irrelevant
one was not their fault; they had to answer the arguments of those
who held the keys, and they were not to blame if these arguments
were foolish. We owe much to the women who, at the risk of great
unpopularity and much social loss, fought the battles by which the
doors were opened, through which others passed without one effort of
their own. It is because their work has been successful, not from any
depreciation of its value, that I maintain that it is time to review
the outcome of the last ten or twelve years, during which women have
been free to compete with men in the College and the University, and
to take a new departure. London and Cambridge have admitted them to
examinations on equal terms, although the latter still refuses them the
hall-mark of the degree. Newnham and Girton have had to extend their
premises; Lady Margaret and Somerville have been established and have
obtained some concessions from Oxford; University College, London,
Mason’s College, Birmingham, the Welsh Colleges, and other men’s
colleges, admit women to their class rooms on equal terms with men.
London, Ireland, and Edinburgh admit them to their medical degrees;
the Women’s School of Medicine is prosperous, and they have admission
to a few hospitals. At London and Cambridge they have done themselves
credit in every branch. So far as receptive power is concerned, it
is now at least admitted that the rather-above-the-average woman is
quite on a level with the average man. So far, so good. But although
our self-respect may be considerably increased, what is our economic
position? There are not yet 800 women graduates of London and
Cambridge. Of these the majority are assistant mistresses in public
or private schools, visiting teachers, lecturers, or head mistresses.
There were in 1881, according to the census of that year, 123,000 women
teachers, and over 4,000,000 girls between the ages of five years and
twenty; and yet already this little handful of graduates is told that
it is in excess of the demand and that it must take lower salaries in
consequence. In our public high schools not one in four teachers is a
graduate; in private schools the proportion is much smaller. I do not
propose to discuss this question, and will only make two remarks on
it. The first, that after an expensive college course, which is only
less expensive than that of a man because a woman is less extravagant
in her personal expenditure, a Girton or Newnham student who has
taken a good degree may hope for an initial salary of £105 to £120
non-resident, rising by very slow degrees to about £140 to £150 a year.
Secondly, that every graduate should remember that when she accepts
a lower rate still, she is making it easier to lower the salaries of
the great majority below her. If all women graduates, and they are not
many, agreed to a minimum, less than which they would not accept, the
mass of teachers, already underpaid, could not be told as they are at
present, that graduates could easily be obtained for the sum they ask.
The teacher with a higher local certificate could hold out for her £90
a year, little enough in all conscience, because she would know that no
graduate would take less than £100.
But the head mistress engages so few graduates, not merely because of
the higher salary demanded, but because she is quite content, or rather
because the British parent is quite content, that his daughter should
be taught by less competent persons. If we look for the cause of this
indifference, we shall find that he does not attach the slightest value
to the education which she is receiving. For some unknown reason girls
seem to think it absolutely necessary to learn Latin; he does not wish
his daughter to be at any disadvantage with other girls; therefore he
lets her learn Latin. If other girls are taught well, his daughter
must be taught well; but if other girls are taught badly, he is quite
content that his daughter should be so also. He perhaps learned Latin
himself for some similar reason at school, and so far as he knows he
derived no benefit from it, and he is quite certain he derived no
enjoyment from it. The mass of parents do not wish their daughters
to be teachers; and they pertinently ask, what good are classics and
the higher mathematics and advanced natural science to girls unless
they intend to teach? A few can answer honestly, “We enjoy the study.
It is delight to us. Plato, Sophocles, Æschylus speak to us with a
more living voice than any of our modern thinkers. Mathematics is
not merely a discipline to us but an absorbing occupation, taking us
completely out of ourselves for the time being. A natural science is to
us not a mere mass of ascertained facts unrelated to each other, but a
system of interdependent laws giving a new meaning to life; its very
incompleteness is a charm, for it gives us the opportunity of being
ourselves discoverers.” A few can say this honestly; several, under the
influence of a teacher whom they adore with that schoolgirl devotion so
common in our high schools, persuade themselves that they feel some of
the enjoyment that a properly-constituted mind would feel. What they
really enjoy is the teacher’s enjoyment, which is infectious. There is
no subject so dry or so useless that a living, healthy, human teacher
cannot persuade girls to think it interesting for the time being. But
the majority of girls--and boys too for that matter--are Philistines
and care for none of these things. They do their work conscientiously
enough, because it is their work. They derive benefit from it as
from a kind of mental gymnastics, and so far as their school days
are concerned no harm is done, and they have benefited by the mental
discipline.
When a girl or boy is about seventeen, the future career is considered.
In the case of a son, the father to some extent takes into account the
boy’s natural bent, and also the chances of obtaining a post for him.
Thenceforth his education takes a definite direction. If intended for
one of the professions, the course is easily mapped out. In other cases
the boy may be sent to the University, not so much for an academic
as for a social training; very frequently he leaves school and at
once begins his training for business or mercantile pursuits. If his
father is a merchant, or large employer of labour, he will perhaps be
sent elsewhere to learn all parts of his business and then take some
responsible post in his father’s firm. If this is impossible, relatives
or friends or business connections may be able to offer him a post, and
no stone is left unturned. There is no question either of his being
content to have a low salary because he can live at home. Nor does
he, if he has any sense, deliberately choose to enter an overstocked
market, merely because the men who succeed in it are admitted to be men
of high intelligence. If he has a high opinion of his own talents, or
if he prefers shining by reflected light to earning an income, he does
perhaps become a barrister or a doctor, without much fitness for the
profession. But at least those who take up business prefer to enter a
labour market where there are comparatively few men of ability yet to
be found, and where the supply of them is not so great as the demand.
The girl of seventeen is never helped in the same way, in many cases
because it has never occurred to men that girls could be so assisted.
There are many other reasons, which I do not propose to dwell on here.
I am not addressing myself to those who do not wish women to earn
their living, but to those who, having accepted the fact that many
girls must work for a living, would be glad to help them in any way
that might be suggested; and I am also speaking to those women who
prefer, no matter what their private resources may be, to be trained
for some occupation which will call for the exercise of mental powers
which they know they possess. I am also confining my remarks to working
women educated for their work in life, and am not referring to the
large numbers of women who take up work without any other training
than the general education acquired at school. If the woman, who from
seventeen to twenty-two has been trained for her profession, cannot
obtain the salary which, as Mr. Pollard has shown, is necessary to keep
her in good health and provide for her old age, there is no need to say
that the untrained schoolgirl enters the labour market at a greater
disadvantage. Now, on what principles is a girl’s career determined?
In a large number of cases the parents take it for granted that she
will be married in a few years, and they feel they can support her
at home in comfort until then. Fortunately the girl herself does not
always take this view; she thinks it quite possible that she never
will be married, and she also sees that in that case she may in middle
life be left with an income quite inadequate and necessitating a total
change in her habits of living. If she has any public spirit, she will
not undersell her poorer competitors, and will see no reason why she
should not be paid the full worth of her services; she will be glad
to know that her services are really worth her living. But all that
she sees before her, unless she has exceptional talent, is teaching.
It is the same with girls who _have_ to earn their living and whose
parents can only afford to give them an expensive training in the
hope that a remunerative income may afterwards be obtained. They also
must be teachers; it is the only brain-work offered them, and badly
paid as it is, it is better paid than any other work done by women.
The result is that we see girls following the stream and entering the
teaching profession; after a few years, growing weary and sick of it,
tired of training intellects, and doubtful about the practical value
of the training, or altogether careless of it; discontented with a
life for which they are naturally unsuited, and seeing no other career
before them. We see others, who have a strong practical bent, giving
themselves up to purely intellectual studies, because they are the
only ones possible to them; and, on the other hand, clever girls,
who have no scholastic ambitions, are left to fritter away their
talents or exercise them with no aid but rule-of-thumb principles to
guide them. The prizes, the exhibitions, the glory are all given to
encourage scholarship. Brain-power is worshipped, and as people with
brains are not encouraged to exercise them in a practical direction,
the possession of brain-power is not ascribed to those who do not
display capacity or liking for classics or mathematics or the abstract
sciences. And the whole tendency is to compete with men where men are
strongest. And here, socially, morally, and economically, we are making
a great mistake. We are narrowing women to one kind of education,
which would cut off the majority of them from sympathy with the men
in their own class; they imbibe a false idea that culture means the
possession of useless knowledge; and because men in the commercial
world have a knowledge which enables them to perform services for
which others are willing to pay, they are regarded as necessarily
uncultured and mercenary. The leisured and professional classes take
the precedence in the girl-graduate’s eyes as being better educated and
having less sordid aims. But, fortunately for England, the majority
of men are neither leisured nor professional, and the organisation of
industry and the extension of commerce give scope for the exercise
of the highest powers. Socially, therefore, the educated woman at
present is isolated from her class and suffers in consequence. Morally
she suffers, for she is not developing her natural powers. A woman’s
emotional nature is different from a man’s, her inherited experience
is different, her tastes are different, and--greatest heresy of all
nowadays--her intellect is different. It is a common thing to say that
there is no sex in intellect. If the upholders of this theory mean
that from two given premisses the same conclusion must be drawn by
men and women whenever they think rightly, of course no one can deny
it. But this purely deductive work can be done by machinery. The real
work of intelligence is the induction which supplies the premisses,
the selection of premisses suitable to the purpose in view and the
application of the conclusion. The working of intelligence is prompted,
strengthened, and directed by interest and emotion; and here it is
that men and women differ, and always will differ, a woman inheriting
as she does, with a woman’s nervous organization, a woman’s emotional
nature. It is on this difference between men and women, amidst much
which is common to both, that I build my hopes of women’s success in
the future. I do not urge women to compete with men because they can do
what men can, but because I believe they can do what men cannot; and
I believe that those branches in which men have attained the highest
pitch of excellence are those in which women are least likely to find
pleasure or excel. Creditable as have been their performances in
the Mathematical Tripos, I am glad to see that their success in the
Natural Science Tripos is much greater. Instead of glorying in having
once in a score of years a Senior Classic, I take pride in the fact
that in the four years since the Mediæval and Modern Language Tripos
was instituted, women have always been in the front rank, and I notice
with fear and trembling that, although during the first three years
there was always a woman in the first class, and no men, last year,
although there was no deterioration in the women’s work, they did not
have the first class all to themselves. I look forward to the day, but
I hope it will be long before it comes, when the men’s colleges shall
rejoice because they have a man in the first class without a woman to
share the honours. There are many things which men are doing alone,
which could be done infinitely better if educated women helped them;
and nowhere is this more obvious to me, although probably not to them,
than in business. While there is much that can be done well by the
human being, indifferently, whether man or woman, there is much that
can only be done well by the male human being, much that can only be
done well by the female human being, and much that can only be done
well by the two in conjunction. And if men in business only considered
their daughters’ future in the same light as that of their sons, they
would find many branches of business in which they could be most
useful, and earn a good income. Girls inherit, to some extent, their
intellectual capacities from their fathers, just as boys do from their
mothers. And many a bright, clever, lazy girl would suddenly develop
a most unexpected taste for study, if she had before her the prospect
of doing practical, and to her most interesting work, as one of her
father’s managers, or as foreign correspondence clerk, or as chemist or
artistic designer in a large manufactory; or as assistant steward on
her father’s property, or as a farmer on her own freehold, if (rents
having gone down) he is unable to leave her an income. For all these a
course of hard mental training is necessary or at least desirable; and
the girl would be receiving culture on the one hand, and would have
a chance of developing her natural gifts on the other. Many a girl,
accustomed to a country life, would much prefer the occupations and
life of a farmer to that of a teacher, provided she is allowed to have
the college life and the free intercourse with other girls which is
the main attraction of Girton and Newnham. The work would be far more
interesting to her if she came to it with the enthusiasm of a scientist
with theories to be tested. What is drudgery to an uneducated person
may often be pleasurable to an educated one.
No one can study the organisation of industry at the present time
without noticing that there is great room for improvement. Good
organisers are extremely rare; and even in the internal management of
a factory, perhaps the least important part of the work of a great
manufacturer, much could be done which is rarely done at present.
The admittance of educated women to a share in factory management
should really be regarded in the light of co-operation with men, not
competition with them. A man and a woman looking at a work-room are
struck by different features, and each can be suggestive to the other.
This is especially the case wherever women are employed.
The question of capacity is a more difficult one for me to answer,
but an easier one for the individual girl, if she is not afraid
of ridicule. And it is at this point that I would reiterate Mrs.
Browning’s advice. To any really clever girl who asked me for advice as
to her future work I should say, “What do you think you could do best
if it were possible for you to do it? Whatever that is, do your very
best to get training in it, to show by capacity at one stage that you
could master the next if you had the chance. If you do this, you will
find that the men who laughed at women for thinking of doing such work
will frequently be the very ones to make an exception in your favour
and to help you over the next difficulty. If you wish to be a farmer,
and to study every department of your work and be thoroughly grounded
in agricultural science, make the best of your opportunities where
you are, attend classes if possible in the technological department
of a good college; and if the agricultural colleges are closed to
women, when you have done everything you can without them, get one of
them to make an exception in your favour. Whatever it may be that you
wish to do, prepare yourself for it, and, instead of bemoaning the
ill-treatment of women in general, persuade those in authority of your
fitness in particular. And when you have gained your end help every
girl you can who shows similar capacities.”
One effect on the economic position of educated working women of such
an extension of employment would be to enable them to measure their
value. Teachers are paid out of fixed income, and their salaries are
almost entirely determined by standard of living. If employed in
business they would be employed for profit, and if they increased
profits their value would rise, and could be measured; they would be
paid according to their worth and not according to their standard of
living. Education would be better adapted to practical needs, and
teachers would be held in higher honour accordingly. Large numbers of
clever girls would be spurred to exertion, whose intellectual powers
have hitherto lain in abeyance, because no education was offered them
corresponding to their needs. There are other arts, which women already
practise, which it would be well for them to study on a scientific
basis. Not only the future wife, mother, and housekeeper needs a
knowledge of physiology, the laws of health, and domestic economy, but
to a still greater extent the future Poor Law guardian, Board School
manager, factory and workshop inspector, and sanitary officer; and both
household manager and public officer should study the relation between
domestic and national economics. Nor can any man do a greater injury
to women in this respect than by placing a woman in a responsible post
for which she has not been proved competent. The incapacity of a man
is referred to the man himself; that of a woman is credited to the
sex. But although a man may foolishly vote for a woman to be placed on
the School Board or Board of Guardians merely because she is a woman,
without knowing anything about her, I am not afraid that he will ever
give her a well-paid post in his own business unless she is fit for
it. Women who give their services for nothing are rarely told the
truth; it will be a good thing for them when they receive, instead of
flattery and thanks, criticism and payment.
I can only touch on one point more. I may be told that the effect
of encouraging all girls, who display strength of character or
intellectual power above the average, to make themselves pecuniarily
independent, and to devote their energies to some special and definite
occupation which will call forth their powers, will be to make them
too absorbed or unwilling to enter upon marriage, and that the next
generation must suffer from the strongest and most intellectual women
holding aloof from wifehood and motherhood. Others, on the other
hand, may say that their work will suffer, because the expectation of
marriage will hinder them from doing their best. The latter objection
will not, I think, be supported by those who are acquainted with the
work of women graduates. There is much truth in the former one. Women
who have been trained for a special work, and who like their work,
either do not marry at all or marry comparatively late in life, and it
may at first sight seem injurious to the race that this should be so.
But I think this is a mistake. The men and women of the most marked
individuality do not make the best husbands and wives, especially
if they marry before they have become aware of their own character.
Although a theory prevails to the contrary, I believe that women come
to intellectual maturity later than men. They have a magnificent power
of self-deception, of persuading themselves that they think and believe
the things which those they care for think and believe--they are so
little encouraged to think for themselves that many a woman, married
when but a girl, has later on discovered that she has a character
of her own, hitherto unrevealed to herself and unsuspected by her
husband. Marriage, as George Eliot has said, must be a relation of
sympathy or of conquest. But such women, if sympathy has not really
existed between them and their husbands, are never conquered; they
may be slaves or rebels, but never loyal subjects; and history is
full of records of the disastrous early marriages of clever women.
On the other hand, Hannah More, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Joanna
Baillie, Caroline Herschell, Harriet Martineau, all women of brilliant
intellect, have left their mark on history as good and happy women; and
we can all of us give a long list of such bright and contented lives
from the unmarried women of our own acquaintance who have found their
vocation. If they have missed the best in life, they have always been
true to themselves. The economic independence of women is as necessary
to men’s happiness as to women’s. Their true interests can never be
opposed or antagonistic, however much those of an individual man and
woman may be. There is no hardship to women in working for a living;
the hardship lies in not getting a living when they work for it. And
the great temptation from which all women should most earnestly strive
to be freed is that which presents itself to so many at one time or
another--the temptation to accept marriage as a means of livelihood and
an escape from poverty. And if men would escape the degradation of
being accepted by a woman in such a spirit, they should be anxious to
do all in their power to make women free, to remove all obstructions
raised by prejudice; and when a woman can do anything worth doing, “to
give her of the fruit of her hands and to let her own works praise her
in the gates.”