Section III: Some Exceptions

Chapter XI: The Phantom of the Learned Lady

"Women are free to adorn their persons, but if they seek to cultivate their minds, it is treason against the prerogative of man."

—Sarah Josephine Hale, 1868.

"Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression."

—Epistle of Paul to Timothy.

Nothing is more unaccountable in the attitude of Nineteenth-Century society toward women than its unreasoning fear of the effect of freedom and education upon their natures. As the diffusion of knowledge had been resisted in preceding centuries lest it should corrupt the common man and undermine the accepted forms of dogma, so in our own country there was set up a sort of straw-woman—the learned female—an unsexed, monstrous perversion of the traditional model of femininity. Women's rights and anti-slavery in the United States were, indeed, merely later phases of those class and race struggles which had agitated civilized Europe. One historian illustrates the modern apprehension by the tale of Saint Avila, who was said to have gained renown by a marvel of self-control. Once when frying fish in a convent she was seized with religious ecstasy, but she did not drop the gridiron, nor let the fish burn. At the beginning of the last century most men, even men of intelligence and generosity, were convinced that an educated woman would drop her gridiron.

In 1819, when Emma Willard petitioned the New York Legislature to endow institutions for girls equal to those already established for boys, her greatest fear was that "the phantom of the college-learned lady would rise up to destroy every good resolution in her favor." Some men thought women so inferior to men mentally as to be quite incapable of reasoning; others, though granting a degree of capacity, were sure that higher thinking was wholly incompatible with the domestic and family duties for which God and Nature had designed them. These two theories really inconsistent with each other-which were traceable partly to a military society, in which women and non-combatants had always been held in contempt; and partly to the degeneracy and sentimentalism of Eighteenth-Century England, had become the ruling traditions of the American Colonies. Not until the political and social revolutions of the end of that period had definitely broken the ties between the old and new society were they likely to be questioned. Education is necessarily an art of peace, and not until the American states had entered upon an era of nationalism was there leisure for its promotion.

Aside from the prevalent tradition of women's inferiority, other social influences delayed the provision of educational privileges for girls. Learning had always been associated with the idea of aristocracy, and was certainly not to be offered to women while still denied to ordinary men. In the Colonies the chief motive for the education of a select class of men had been to provide a learned ministry capable of interpreting the Scriptures. Both the Pauline and the Puritan interpretation taught the subjection of women, and the current secular philosophy of the time corroborated it. Rousseau's dictum—"She is to know but little and the little she knows is to be pleasing to man"

—was as acceptable to free-thinkers as the theory that her subordination was "ordained by God" would naturally be to an always conservative clergy.

The safety of a democratic nation must lie in diffusion of intelligence—but this commonplace of our day was not at once recognized by the states as an inevitable consequence of their ideal phrase, "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness." Even when the movement for public schools began to gather headway, English traditions still pervaded them to the exclusion of girls; and when, here and there, it was realized that girls required something more than desultory home training, their schooling was often fearfully and grudgingly granted. Throughout the century, as grammar and high schools, academies and seminaries, semi-colleges and full-grown colleges, and at last true universities were founded, the sharing of such opportunities by girls and women was steadily resisted. Even when that resistance was gradually broken down, girls were often prevented from making use of them by the general opinion which still prevailed, that women did not need for domestic purposes an education as thorough or as extensive as that of men. When girls, in process of time, came to be taught at all, it was not simultaneously with boys, but during vacations, before and after the regular hours of sessions, by inferior and overworked teachers, and with a limited range of studies. Although constantly gaining opportunities for higher study, they were yet, at the very end of the so-called "woman's century," weighted with limiting conditions.

While the active resistance to the equal admission of girls to educational privileges was made by the men who controlled taxation, endow ments, and school equipment, it must be acknowledged that a far more subtle and effective check lay in the tradition current among women themselves, that intellectual attainments in their sex were both improper and unattractive. The same elusive and belated convention, which still prevents the general adoption by women of bifurcated garments, prevented them earlier from taking advantage of the higher education. Women who had themselves attained a degree of culture were often doubtful of its usefulness to their sex generally. The accomplished Mrs. Barbauld thought young ladies ought only to have "such a general tincture of knowledge as to make them agreeable companions to a man of sense, and ought to gain these accomplishments in a more quiet and unobserved manner, from intercourse and conversation at home, with father, brother, or friend." If women at this time ever consciously reasoned out their situation, the logic must have run something like this: It is the business of women to please and to serve men—men do not like women to know as much as themselves, nor does a servant need education. Since learning adds nothing to our attractiveness, let us not appear intellectual, even though we may have inadvertently acquired a little knowledge.

The legacy of advice left by Dr. John Gregory to his daughters in 1774, was still quite appropriate in the middle of the following century:

"Be even cautious in displaying your good sense. But if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated understanding."

In an old Ladies' Magazine of the ante-bellum type, advice of precisely the same tenor is given:

"She ought to present herself as a being made to please, to love, and to seek support; a being inferior to man and near to Angels."

It was, indeed, almost as improper a century ago for a lady publicly to display an intellectual interest as it would now be for her to attend a prize-fight or drink at the hotel bar. Until after 1830 women were not expected to attend any public lecture except those of a religious character, nor to avail themselves of public collections of books and pictures. The shy and eager-minded Hannah Adams, "who learned Greek and Latin from some theological students boarding in her father's house, and who had written books," was the first woman to scandalize Boston by making use of the Public Library.

Without rehearsing in detail the formal steps in the growth of education for girls, it is amusing to recall what was considered desirable for a young woman to know before the days of public schools and seminaries. One of the most cultivated women of her time, Abigail Adams, the wife of the President, said in her old age:

"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 further than writing and arithmetic, and in some few and rare instances, music and dancing."

A quarter of a century later girls were still not generally admitted to the public schools, and the education thought necessary for them consisted of reading, writing, spelling, the first rule of arithmetic—addition—good manners, needlework, and knitting. To this the best educated girls added no more than music, grammar and rhetoric, and geography. Even fifty years later Thomas Wentworth Higginson complained:

"When you hear of a young lady as 'splendidly educated' it commonly turns out that she speaks several languages admirably, and plays on the piano well, or sketches well. It is not needful for such an indorsement that she should have the slightest knowledge of mathematics, of logic, of rhetoric, of metaphysics, of political economy, of physiology, of any branch of natural science, or of any language or literature or history except those of modern Europe."

The progress of education for girls was further checked by the deference which local communities paid to the opinions of the ministers of their churches. They continually emphasized the idea that the mission of women in the world was exclusively moral, not intellectual, and that the possession and pursuit of worldly knowledge was incompatible with the higher womanly destiny. Their line of reasoning was carefully presented in the preface to the Woman's Record, a biographical compilation published soon after the close of the Civil War. The author, after disclaiming all sympathy with the woman's rights movement, assures her readers that the book is not designed to assert any intellectual equality with man, but to demonstrate her distinctively moral mission by means of historical examples:

"I believe and I trust I shall make it apparent, that woman is God's appointed agent of morality, the teacher and the inspirer of those sentiments and feelings which are termed the virtues of humanity; and that the progress of these virtues and the permanent improvement of our race, depend upon the manner in which her mission is treated by man. . . . Man by the fall was rendered incapable of cultivating by his own unassisted efforts, any good propensity or quality of his nature. Left to himself his love becomes lust; patriotism, policy; and religion, idolatry. He is naturally selfish in his affections . . . but woman was not thus cast down. To her was confided, by the Creator's express declaration, the mission of disinterested affection; her 'desire' was to be to her husband—not to herself. . . . Truly she was made ' for man' . . . she was not made to gratify his sensual desires, but to refine his human affections, and to elevate his moral feelings . . . and her soul was to help him where he was deficient —namely, in his spiritual nature."

This "covert glory of the womanly nature," as the Reverend Horace Bushnell called it, was to be the compensation of women for mental inferiority and for the denial of freedom and opportunity.

But in this, as in many other instances in history, while the most plausible arguments were being invented to prevent the admission of another class to an equal opportunity, social and economic forces were steadily undermining the accepted tradition. As the public-school system expanded under the impetus of national prosperity, the demand for teachers could not be supplied from the ranks of pioneer young men, who saw a thousand better openings. The religious awakening, which found expression in foreign and home missionary enterprises, could not be carried on without the aid of the missionary wife, who must add, to housewifely and motherly cares, the duties of teacher, nurse, and exemplar to heathen women and children. Even temperance leaders were compelled to call in the assistance of female organizers and financiers. Then suddenly it was perceived that the demand for women of some education in social work outside the home was increasing faster than their educational opportunities. And at the same time it began to be realized that, even for a purely moral career, women needed something more by way of training than ethical platitudes deduced from distorted Scripture lessons.

The demand for better educated teachers found response in the establishment of Normal schools and in the general admission of girls to high schools, to Oberlin Collegiate Institute, and to the small denominational schools—called colleges—founded chiefly by the highly democratic sect of the Methodists. While the pioneers of the Middle West were thus preparing the way for the acceptance of co-education in the state colleges which arose after the Civil War, Emma Willard and Mary Lyon were struggling to provide girls with an education approaching that open to boys, but free from the dangers of defeminization. The Troy Female Seminary laid especial emphasis on "domestic instructions" adapted to the softer sex; and it was pointed out that women, if given a proper training, could teach children better and cheaper than men, thus releasing them to pursue "the thousand occupations from which women are necessarily debarred." Mt. Holyoke Seminary, more than any other school, expressed the passion for knowledge and for the conversion of the souls of mankind of which its founder, Mary Lyon, was possessed. When the General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts refused to indorse her plan for the higher education of girls, her clerical friends advised her to see in the rejection "The hand of the Lord;" but Mary Lyon replied:

"I may be fifty years in advance of the age, but the work is of God and must surely go on."

In all the increasing provisions for the education of girls there was as yet no hint of courses identical with those offered to young men. The studies required of girls, though sometimes nominally equal, were neither so severe nor so respected as the classical trilogy. Even in coeducational institutions, "female" courses and "ladies" courses were substituted for the straight classical requirements, and often meas ured by inferior standards. The War, in this as in every phase of national life, made an abrupt cleavage in the lives of women. They came across it with minds broadened by nursing experience, and by the economic necessity they were under of replacing men in industry. Whereas all forms of culture had hitherto been emasculated to fit women, they now began to demand for themselves truly equal opportunities. With the foundation of the state colleges under the Morrill Act of 1862, and of the separate woman's colleges, there was definitely precipitated a struggle to make the standards of women's education not only equal to but identical with those of men's institutions. At the same time, and interwoven with it, arose a conflict of social ideals between co-education and segregate instruction, in which the phantom of the intellectual woman returned to terrorize anew the believers in strict feminine tradition. The sarcasm and hostility endured by Mary Lyon and the ridicule suffered by Mrs. Willard and other pioneers in the seminary movement, were as nothing when compared with the scorn and violence aroused by the attempt of women to prove themselves equal to men in the field of classic learning.

When the first few generations of college women, in spite of many limitations, had demonstrated their ability to reach a higher average standard than their competitors, there was still to be overcome the Giant Dreadful of Physical Incapacity. That strange old book, Clarke's Sex in Education, which proves conclusively that a woman is by virtue of her feminine functions a semi-invalid one week out of every month, and that she must, therefore, be unfitted for motherhood by the strain of systematic mental training, had a wide approval in the third quarter of the century. Dr. Clarke dwelt at length on the existence of a great number of "weak, neuralgic, dyspeptic, hysterical, menorrhagic, dysmenorrheic" girls and women, assuming that the chief cause of these conditions was their education by the same methods as boys. He declared that the identical education of the two sexes was "a crime before God and humanity, that physiology protests against and experience weeps over ... it emasculates boys, stunts girls, makes semi-eunuchs of one sex and agenes of the other." After devoting a whole chapter to the clinical details of seven cases of educated women who had come under his treatment for female diseases, he concludes:

"Physiology declares that the solution of it will only be possible when the education of girls is made appropriate to their organization. A German girl yoked with a donkey and dragging a cart, is an exhibition of monstrous muscular and aborted brain development. An American girl, yoked with a dictionary, and laboring with the catamenia, is an exhibition of monstrous brain and aborted ovarian development."

At the height of this controversy, it was customary for the college woman to be spoken of as "hermaphrodite in mind," and "divested of her sex," and to predict that she would lose not only her feminine attractions, but become incapable of performing her essential functions. All these predictions were quite a priori, and founded on fears rather than facts; for of the eight colleges in the Eastern States which at this time admitted women, only one had been open as long as four years, and of the separate institutions of collegiate rank, Vassar alone had been in existence as much as seven years. But the belief in the physical inability of girls to endure a regimen of regular, hard study, was so general that it compelled the promoters of their education to disarm it by special measures. Wellesley College announced at its opening in 1875 that it was not hard study, but violation of law, which injured young women, and that it would offer opportunities, equal to those of the best colleges for young men, "but with due regard to health."

Just as the word "female" had been superseded by the less suggestive term "woman," so the old ideal of physical delicacy as an essential and desirable feminine characteristic now began to be set aside. A systematic effort began to be made to develop women into beings robust enough for whatever family and social functions they might undertake. But even when it came to be evident, in the latter part of the century, that college girls were, on the whole, healthier than other girls of the same social station, the ghost of that same unsexed lady that had haunted us for a hundred years rose again. It was mournfully prophesied that such learned and vigorous creatures would not marry, and if, perchance, they did, they would not bear children. But even this later Shade had to vanish when, after a full generation, it was discovered that many such women had been marrying just like ordinary folk, and had produced, if anything, rather a larger proportion of healthy children than other women of their class.

There are always in any society a large number who prefer to trust what has been good rather than attempt what might be better. To such people co-education was a veritable boogie-woman of the most hideous sort. Though it had long been adopted from motives of economy and social convenience in the Middle and Western States, the discussion was continued by Eastern educators, who feared it might seriously endanger that fragile veneer of womanhood, the habits of femininity. When it could no longer be asserted that co-education involved more scandals than segregation; or—what was then regarded as almost equally scandalous—more marriages; when co-educated girls could not easily be distinguished from graduates of the separate colleges by any stigmata; yet again a feeble old Spook came back to whisper tormentingly, that schools and colleges were being "feminized," and young men deprived of their birthright, unhampered masculinity, by the presence of so many females. The century which began with a complete "masculinization" of education ended in shrill and ineffectual protests on the part of a small class of left-over males, because their monopoly of opportunity and opinion had been broken.

During all this period every pioneer woman who attempted to enlarge her intellectual horizon or to prepare herself for a profession was met with ridicule and hostility. When reluctantly admitted to partake of the crumbs which fell from scholarly tables, she knew herself unwelcome, and was constantly reminded that her sex must forever prevent her from full participation in the feast. It should not surprise any one that her attitude was, more often than not, antagonistic to men. Like other self-made beings she often understood, but would not acknowledge, the crudity of her half-trained powers; and inevitably she bore about her the marks of the hardships through which she had come. Where one pioneer survives with scars, a hundred fall by the way, and the hardier survivor, however strengthened by the experience, is likely to be an exceptional, if not an eccentric, person.

Among these early women graduates, a few came out arrogant and aggressive, with a chip on the shoulder and a conviction that sex ranged against sex was the only way for women to win an equal chance. Some who had not the fighting temper carried, nevertheless, a deep sense of injury toward men who thought themselves entitled to the best, and would not admit women willingly to share it. Others starved their womanly natures in the devotion to learning, vowing themselves to a sort of conventualism in the Cause of Woman and narrowing their outlook to purely feminine experiences. Those who married sometimes dropped back into the accepted and limited conventions of femininity, and wore an apologetic air for their collegiate temerities; or, finding no solution for their anomalous position between the old and the new, agreed with the alumna who said:

"To be intellectual is all right—to be domestic is all right—but to try to be both is hell!"

But by far the larger number came out wholesome and unperverted by opposition, and took their place as leaders of succeeding generations. Though not less womanly than their ancestors of the domestic régime, they walked with a more serious air, feeling themselves consecrated by their own exceptional privilege to the help of their sex. As the number of alumnæ increased and opposition declined, their sense of responsibility broadened to include the young, the weak, the limited, and every class who, like themselves, needed the equal chance. That feminization, whose impalpable shade still hovers near, has come to mean, in its large aspect, the brooding of the maternal instinct over all mankind.

It will be remembered that Emma Willard, in her petition to the New York Legislature in behalf of state endowments for girls' schools, urged that, among the sciences proper to the sex, "domestic instructions" should be considered important; and suggested that housewifery might be reduced to a system as well as other arts. Though many girls' seminaries, and even some of the women's colleges, at their foundation required a certain amount of domestic labor from their students, it was rather to economize, and to disarm prejudice, than for its educational value. It gives a humorous aspect to the con troversy between the segregate and the co-educational factions for the strictly feminine party to be obliged to grant that the co-educational institutions, which were opposed because they might defeminize young women, provided the first and best equipment for training in the subjects related to housekeeping and the family. The tardiness of the women's colleges to offer courses having a direct application to the domestic occupations is to be explained partly by the prevalence of the tradition that only the classical training was real education. Only very recently, for instance, have the sciences been accepted as equal in disciplinary and cultural value to Greek and Latin. The difficulty with which the applied sciences of Agriculture and Engineering were introduced into the curriculum alongside of the classical courses, warned women not to try to climb up by any such disputed way.

What women had come to want was The Best, and The Best was symbolized by the classics as taught at Harvard and Yale. To this standard, therefore, every woman's college must come before its degree would be accepted. With its students prepared in inferior schools, with limited resources, and hampered by the timidity of its patrons, it was all that such a college could do to teach the traditional requirements. It could not afford to jeopardize its reputation by any experiments in coordinating its work with the future lives of its students.

The classics were, in truth, as well adapted to the average girl as to the ordinary boy, so far as training and culture were concerned, and were scarcely less related to the practical needs of life. It was not until the exclusive domination of the curriculum for gentlemen was supplanted by an elective system broad enough to meet the cultural and vocational needs of all classes, that the idea of a modified curriculum for women could be safely entertained.

Although this is essentially a man's world—since women have not yet had time to contribute the full fruits of their freedom and belated opportunity—yet every woman who reads the history of their slow emancipation must acknowledge that the slowness was due as much to the apathy of women themselves as to the reluctance of men to endanger their traditional ideal of female purity and competence by bringing it in contact with their own strength and coarseness. Nor should the modern woman fail to pay her debt of appreciation to the few truly liberalminded men who primarily made that progress possible. But for the vision of Joseph Emerson of Byfield, Massachusetts, Mary Lyon would perhaps not have set out on her mission of found ing a school where girls could be adequately prepared to save the world. When Sophia Smith—who had herself been refused admission to the public schools of her native town-inherited a fortune, her timid desire to do something for the education of girls might not have ended in the foundation of Smith College but for the encouragement of her pastor, Dr. John M. Green. Coeducation-a method offensive to Old and New England alike-owed its prevalence in the West to the democratic spirit of the Methodists, and to the personal sacrifice and foresight of individual men.

All along the road, women have been led and encouraged by the exceptional man. That they have not even yet attained a truly equal opportunity for self-development is as much due to outworn traditions of their own cultivation as to the fact that men who wish to be just are still in the minority. It is, indeed, a curious world where mankind dreams always of perfection, yet is afraid of the processes necessary to attain it; and it is still haunted by many phantoms like that of the Learned Lady who was to defeminize herself by the human exercise of systematic thinking. A strange world, indeed, where the light from which all such shadows flee is regarded with terror. Women have at last, however, arrived at a stage where they may at any rate grapple directly with the reality of their own conventionalized natures.

The results of women's education were regarded by many, at the end of the century, as disappointing. It was said that the trained woman was imitative rather than original; superficial, as might have been expected, and lacking in concentration of effort—in short, the critics were astonished that women had not succeeded in attaining in three-quarters of a century what only the exceptional man had achieved in all the ages of his own making. Without in the least discrediting the remarkable achievements of individual women, or overlooking the altogether higher level which women in the mass have reached, it must be granted that the depth and breadth of their ideas has been limited by the narrowness of their experience. Professor Thomas very justly points out that women's attainments have been to men's so far, as those of an amateur to a professional, because of their intellectual sequestration.

Yet the scholars who have been most friendly to women's mental advancement have not comprehended, apparently, that the petty traditions of feminine duty have, after all, been the chief hindrance to women's intellectual growth. The male scholar of the past century did not darn, cook, nurse his sister's children through the measles; make his own clothes in scanty vacations; play the church organ, teach a Sundayschool class, or take his mother's place when she fell ill. Nor was the lack of money any serious difficulty to the clever young man. While many a young girl was doing the work of a common servant in order to earn the sixty dollars necessary to pay her way through Mount Holyoke, Harvard College was offering not less than twenty-five thousand dollars a year in cash premiums for study; and, as in the Chinese family, mothers and sisters at home pledged themselves for the support of the brilliant boy, who was to be of the "literati" and reflect honor on the household.

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century it was perfectly apparent that not until women ceased to be the pensioners of men; not until they could command their own money and limit their duties in the household; not until endowments and scholarships for their use were as abundant and as generously provided as for men, could any considerable body of women attain an unquestioned intellectual status. Nor could their attainments be justly appraised until the phantom of the learned woman had vanished. So long as men were reluctant to let their womenkind take their chances in education, as they have to do in matrimony; so long as they wavered between the fear that young men will be inoculated with the bacillus feminus, and the theory that women themselves will become immune to it, women distrusted their own powers, and the legitimacy of their commission. They have yet to learn to be themselves, and to follow the inner vision wherever it may lead.