Woman in Modern Society Part 2

And before the quickening influence of the new life had time to become commonplace, the struggle with England began. The Revolutionary period was a time of intense political education for every one. War and sacrifice glorified the new ideas; and even the children and women could not escape their influence. Why then did not the American Revolution pa.s.s on to full freedom and opportunity for women? For the same reason that it did not forever abolish slavery in America. The vested interests involved were so many, and the changes so momentous and difficult, that only the most imperative needs could receive attention.

But this does not mean that the interest in a larger life for women was not active or that women were making no advance in self-direction. There is evidence that women like Abigail Adams realized the abstract injustice of their position, and the fact that as early as 1794, Mary Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" was republished in Philadelphia shows that her ideas must have had some currency in America.

After the Revolution, the intimate, stimulating influence of Europe, which the earlier colonists had enjoyed, was for a time almost entirely lost. The new States became extremely provincial; and minds untouched by the larger world always tend to conservatism. Noah Webster, in "A Letter to Young Ladies," published in Boston, in 1790, declared that they "must be content to be women; to be mild, social and sentimental."

Three years later the "Letters to a Young Lady," by the Reverend John Bennett, were republished in Philadelphia, after going through several London editions. He placed the qualities to be cultivated in this order: "A genteel person, a simple nature, sensibility, cheerfulness, delicacy, softness, affability, good manners, regular habits, skill in fancy work, and a fund of hidden genteel learning." Through the first half of the nineteenth century these ideals struggled along parallel with the new ideas that were everywhere springing up from the colonial forest experiences of the last two generations.

As conservers of morals and as leaders in higher ideals of life, the advanced women of America came early face to face with two outgrown abuses. One of these was human slavery and the other was intemperance.

In attacking these abuses, women had to break with all the traditions that defined their position.

The wealthy and intelligent Englishwoman, Frances Wright, who came to this country in 1818 to attack slavery, found herself doubly opposed because she was a woman speaking in public. Had not St. Paul declared: "It is a shame for women to speak in the church"? Lucretia Mott, born in the Society of Friends in Nantucket, had escaped the full force of this injunction, but even she found, when she attacked slavery in public, that she had invaded a world sacred to men, and she was sternly warned back. Miss Susan B. Anthony also began her public life as a teacher and a temperance reformer. It was only when she found herself helpless, in presence of the prejudices against her s.e.x, that she turned her attention to freeing women from all purely s.e.x limitation in public life.

When the Civil War broke out, the women were ready to do their part. It is quite possible that the names of Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix may be remembered when Grant and Sherman are forgotten. With the establis.h.i.+ng of new human values the historian of the future may consider the saving of life and the preventing of misery as more worthy of lasting record than even military genius. These women and their millions of helpers had not the resources of organized government at their disposal; but, instead, they had oftentimes to work against the jealousy of those in authority. At the close of the war, the Sanitary Commission comprised seven thousand aid societies scattered over the country, and it had raised over fifteen millions of dollars. Those women who remained at home, in the absence of fathers and sons for four years, faced all the problems of practical life. Who can estimate the value of training in cooperative work and organization which the Civil War gave to the American women?

In the Civil War, women directly served men; but in the great industrial reorganization which came afterward they served mainly women and children. Here the victories have been won in the press, in the legislative halls, and in courts of law. Working with men, or alone, they have perfected organization, agitated, raised money, printed appeals, and carried cases through the courts, until factories and stores have been made safer, excessive working hours have been cut down, young children have been exempted from labor, many sweat-shops have been closed, and women workers have begun to be organized to care for their own needs. Much has been done; more remains to be done; but the training of the women has gone steadily forward.

These, then, are the forces which have pushed women forward in America: European political and religious persecution, the forest necessities of colonial life, the American Revolution, the struggle with slavery and intemperance, the Civil War, the industrial struggle and the need to protect women and children from capitalistic exploitation. Possibly women have now reached a point in their development where they can turn to public service and to a full realization of their powers and responsibilities without the goading necessity of a great wrong. If not, there are sufficient wrongs still calling to lead them for many years.

Intemperance is not yet banished; the negro is not yet freed from the effects of his slavery; working women and children are not yet fairly protected; disease reaps needlessly large harvests; Lazarus still begs at the table of Dives; our public education leaves much to be desired; criminals are badly handled; millions of European refugees come marching into our land needing guidance. Meantime, millions of women are content, because themselves comfortable, and there are some even willing to aid the powers of obstruction.

In these later years, marvelous changes have taken place all over the world. Even in China, official attempts are now being made to leave women free to walk by abolis.h.i.+ng the bandaging of infants' feet. In Turkey, women are going out from the harem to partic.i.p.ate in public life. In Germany, they are escaping from the exclusive service of the home. In England, they are repeating the cries of the men of 1776 and of 1789: "All men and women are born free and equal." "No taxation without representation." "One person, one vote." In Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Norway and Sweden, women have all the essential civic and political rights of men.

But, as in all human progress, first the ideas of a few leaders change; they shape legislation; and the new organization slowly makes over the practices and then the deep-seated mental and moral habits, which const.i.tute popular prejudices. These old unreasoning feelings still largely dominate us, blinding us to the facts of life and blocking each new advance by which women might pa.s.s into the world of free choice and adjustment of their lives as co-workers with men. In the next chapters we must study these present-day conditions in detail.

III

Women in Education

In discussing woman's relation to formal education we are really examining her ability to master and teach certain intellectual exercises, for in our modern industrial democracies our efforts are confined almost exclusively to training the mind and to stocking it with information. Each year we talk more and more about physical, moral, political, social and industrial education; but requirements for entrance into schools, promotions in them, and graduation from their courses, still rest almost entirely on information acquired; and in a less degree, on intellectual ability displayed.

Even in selecting and certifying teachers, the emphasis is all laid on intellectual equipment. On the physical, moral, or social sides we at most demand that the candidates shall not be too bad; on the political side we do not demand even this, since nearly 80 per cent. of our whole teaching force is declared legally unfit to vote or hold office, and is yet employed to train our future citizens. But on the intellectual side we demand positive proof of fitness. Thus it is fair to say that our modern education deals almost exclusively with knowledge.

Knowledge, in the past, has nearly always been considered much as we consider dynamite to-day. It was a dangerous force, useful to a ruling cla.s.s, and hence preserved in the hands of a cult, generally a priesthood; but it was thought capable of working endless mischief in the hands of ignorant people. Through all the pages of history we find individuals, and weaker groups, driven away from the acc.u.mulated treasure; and if detected in their desire to know, especially if they sought knowledge through original investigation, they were branded with such t.i.tles of disgrace as "wizard" or "heretic;" and, as a warning to others, they were often burned in the public square or buried alive.

Women, as an inferior cla.s.s, were especially restrained from learning.

Knowledge would breed discontent in them; it would make them question the binding power of the conventions and beliefs which held them in their place; and it would show them how to achieve their freedom, and might even encourage them to a.s.sume leaders.h.i.+p. Here and there, individual women gained the training necessary for leaders.h.i.+p, as in the cases of Sappho, Aspasia or Hypatia; but the great ma.s.s of women was sternly repressed. Eve leads a long line of women martyrs who, across the ages, have paid a great price for their desire to eat of the tree of knowledge. For herself, she might have paid the price but, with subtle understanding of women, the penalty was made to involve all whom they loved; the terrors of that price have held the s.e.x in restraint ever since. Eurydice, Pandora, Eve, Lot's wife and Bluebeard's wife have in turn served as awful warnings. After a time it came to be understood by women that they should fix their eyes on their husbands and never look forward or backward, lest they lose their Eden and drag those whom they loved after them to destruction.

Of course, if women could not learn they could not teach; at least, they could not teach where it was necessary to impart knowledge; and so their share in formal education has been slight, until our own time. Young children have been considered their special charge, and the care and culture of infancy and young childhood have always rested in the hands of mothers, grandmothers, aunts and female servants. Beyond these early years, however, woman's part has been restricted to emphasizing, mainly with girls, the dogmas and practices of caste, kitchen and church.

These were the conditions which prevailed through early Oriental and Cla.s.sical times. Christianity brought women some degree of intellectual freedom, but it also imposed new forms of restraint. Its fundamental teachings, based as they were on a belief in individual values, were favorable to the extension of knowledge and to the opening of opportunity for all. The Church, however, shaped under the half-civilized conditions of the Middle Ages, quickly took knowledge into her own keeping, forbade its extension, and increasingly held before woman, as her highest ideal, the negative virtues of the cloister.

The humanistic and theological changes which came with the awakening of the European mind at the close of the Middle Ages, did much to set free the acc.u.mulated treasures of knowledge. Protestantism, by exalting individual judgment and insisting on the necessity of each one reading and judging the sacred records for himself, made it possible for even women to enter into the heritage of the ages. At least, the key to learning, reading, was given into her hands. Later Protestant sects broke down the limits of sacerdotalism, until women found that they could look forward a little way without losing their Edens, or could even glance backward without being turned into pillars of reproach.

The political revolutions of the eighteenth century also affirmed in their point of view the same intellectual freedom for women as for men.

It has taken a long time to make the practical adjustments, but they are now well under way. Since 1870, women have had very great freedom in their approach to knowledge; and having knowledge, they have been allowed to impart it to others.

In America, freedom for women to study has moved more rapidly than in Europe. Even in the colonial period, there were emanc.i.p.ated women, as we have seen; and in the last half of the eighteenth century several schools were opened for girls, which were more than polite finis.h.i.+ng schools. Notable among these inst.i.tutions were the seminary at Bethlehem, Pa., opened in 1753 by the Moravians, and the school established by the Society of Friends, in Providence, R.I., in 1784. But nearly all girl's schools before 1800 were limited to terms of a few months, where girls attended to learn needle-work, music and dancing, and to cultivate their morals and manners.

At the close of the Revolutionary War, the leaders of public opinion universally recognized that their new experiment in government would succeed only if the voters were intelligent. This statement of belief became the major premise on which all arguments for free and compulsory education were based; and while we have practically accepted a much wider justification for education, in connection with the care of defectives, industrial training, and other recent movements, we have not yet changed our formulated philosophy concerning the relation of the state to its children. Free and compulsory education is still mainly justified on the ground that it produced good citizens.

But the women had not full citizens.h.i.+p and hence the argument for general education did not apply to them. Had they been enfranchised after the Revolution, all educational opportunities would have been open to them at once as a matter of course; and an immense amount of struggle, futile effort, and unnecessary friction would have been saved.

But this larger view of woman's rights and powers would have required an adjustment in deep-seated ideas and prejudices, concerning her proper position, too great to be undertaken by men facing a new form of government and the material problems of a new world.

But even without this change in ideas, economic conditions steadily forced the women into educational activity. There were not enough men available to teach the scattered country schools, and citizens had to be trained for the needs of the new democracy. John Adams recognized this when he wrote to Mr. Warren that their wives must "teach their sons the divine science of politics;" though he would have been one of the last to favor admitting women to full partic.i.p.ation in public life. He did not realize that if women were to train men for citizens.h.i.+p, the rudiments of knowledge which they had learned in scattered schools and in their poor little academies must be greatly supplemented. Life, however, is never logical, and at this advance men balked. Necessity was forcing women into schools as teachers, and hence into larger preparation for their own lives; but public opinion, here as elsewhere, failed to recognize the forces that were compelling its action.

Thus the work of furnis.h.i.+ng more advanced intellectual training for American women had to be started by the women themselves. This is possibly the first time in human history that a great group of people feeling itself irresistibly moving toward a social, industrial and political readjustment, little less than revolutionary in its nature, has gone deliberately to work to prepare for the change through education. The working cla.s.ses of the world are doing the same thing now; but women showed them the way. In some vague degree, American women recognized the truth which Dr. Gore recently brought before a ma.s.s of working men in England. "All this pa.s.sion for justice will accomplish nothing," he declared, "unless you get knowledge. You may become strong and clamorous, you may win a victory, you may affect a revolution, but you will be trodden down again under the feet of knowledge if you leave knowledge in the hands of privilege, because knowledge will always win over ignorance."[21]

[21] _The Highway_, London, Nov., 1911.

American women were fortunate, too, in having for their leaders such women as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon and Catherine Beecher. Emma Willard was a woman of the world; she had traveled abroad and she brought to her work a cultivated nature, wide experience of life and natural leaders.h.i.+p. Her personality went far toward lifting the movement to a plane of respect. After trying a little academy in Vermont, she appealed to the State of New York in 1814 for help. In this appeal, she wisely adopted the prevailing view of the relation of the state to education.

The state must have good citizens, she repeats, and then goes on, "The character of children will be formed by their mothers; and it is through the mothers that the government can control the character of its future citizens." The State of New York granted her articles of incorporation for her academy at Waterford, N.Y., but refused her the modest sum of five thousand dollars for which she had asked. In 1821, she established the Troy Female Seminary, where for years she trained and led the intellectual life of American women.

Miss Mary Lyon begged the money from the common people with which she opened Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837. Those who feared the education of women were disarmed by the fact that in the new inst.i.tution domestic service was emphasized to the extent of having the girls do all their own work. Another group of possible critics was won over by the fact that religious instruction received constant care. But notwithstanding the conserving influence of housework and religion, there went steadily out from Mount Holyoke during the following years a strong line of teachers demanding ever larger opportunity for themselves and for those they taught.

Miss Catherine Beecher added to her work in schools for girls a general propaganda for woman's education, and she devised large plans for its development. In 1852, she organized the American Woman's Educational a.s.sociation "to aid in securing to American women a liberal education, honorable position, and remunerative employment." She helped to start girls' schools in half a dozen cities, and by writing and talking she sowed in the hearts of women, especially in the Middle West, a discontent with existing conditions and a deep desire to know.

From the time of this awakening in the thirties and forties, two lines of educational activity for the advancement of woman's education steadily developed. One was the effort of women to educate themselves in distinctly women's schools; and the other was the movement by which existing inst.i.tutions for boys and men were gradually opened to girls and women. These two lines of activity still remain distinct, and not always sympathetic with each other's aims.

The effort to establish distinctly women's schools was continued after the Civil War by Matthew Va.s.sar, who founded in 1861, and opened in 1865, the first adequately endowed and organized college for women in America. Ten years later, Miss Sophie Smith founded and endowed Smith College to furnish women "with means and facilities for education equal to those that are offered in colleges for young men." The inst.i.tution was opened in 1875; and in the same year Henry Durant established Wellesley College.

The last Report of the United States Commissioner of Education shows that there are now 108 inst.i.tutions of higher learning to which men are not admitted; but most of them have modeled themselves so closely upon men's colleges that they have not been able to work out lines of distinctive instruction specially fitted to women. One cannot help feeling that since they do not open their doors to men they should do something more toward working out an ideal education for women than they have so far undertaken. When the a.s.sociation of Intercollegiate Alumnae met in New York, in the autumn of 1911, its discussions gathered around the possibility of adding to college courses subjects of special value to women. Hygiene, biology and sociology were the subjects most favored; but the matter needs attention from women and men who stand outside the group dominated by our older college traditions. This movement to provide distinctive schools for women had brought together, in 1910, 35,714 girl students in private secondary schools and 9,082 women students in higher inst.i.tutions of learning.

The second line of development, which sought to open up all existing schools to girls and women, began when Boston opened a high school for girls in 1825. New York opened a high school for girls three years later.

It was in the West, however, that this movement took strongest root and made most steady advance. The West has always led the East in opening equal opportunity to women, even equal suffrage. The forest and the frontier compel such action even in such commonwealths as Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where there has been no political revolution to hasten it. Labor is scarce; the invading people are intelligent and ambitious for their children and desire them educated. The women must teach them to read and write; the girls learn with their brothers; and so the women master the mysteries of formal education.

Thus it is no accident that Oberlin, in the western forest, was the first college to open its doors to women. Antioch, under Horace Mann's direction, was, however, the first inst.i.tution of higher learning to give men and women equal opportunity. The new States of the Mississippi Valley early established State universities. These inst.i.tutions were little more than seminaries, but the free spirit of the frontier was so strong in them that in 1863 Wisconsin University admitted women to its privileges, and Kansas and Indiana followed shortly after.

It is the year 1870, however, that marks the beginning of a new period in the higher education of women as in so many other lines of advance.

In that year, Michigan University, California University and the University of Evanston, adopted co-education. Michigan was just entering on a great career and her influence was very important. There, for the first time, women could follow a university curriculum under the same conditions as men. Two years later, Andrew D. White introduced the Michigan idea at Cornell.

In the forty years since Michigan opened her doors, the advance of women under conditions of co-education has been steady and rapid. In Harvard and Columbia opportunity takes the form of annexes where women can secure almost any educational opportunities they desire. In other universities, like Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins, women are admitted to graduate study. Most of the inst.i.tutions of higher education that do not yet admit women are theological and technical schools, or small colleges like Haverford, where there are equivalents in Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr, for women who wish to attend a Friend's College. A woman can work in almost any important university in America to-day if she cares to do so.

In 1910 there were conferred in the United States 12,590 A.B. degrees, and women took 44.1 per cent. of them.

Meantime, there have been no important reactions in inst.i.tutions which have once opened their doors to women.[22] In 1902, Chicago University separated men and women students, but only during the first two years of their undergraduate work. Practically this has affected only one-half of the women in the first year and a very much smaller proportion in the second year.[23] When Leland Stanford Junior University was opened in 1891, 25.4% of the students were women. This proportion rose in successive years as follows: 1892, 29.7%; 1893, 30.4%; 1894, 33.8%; 1895, 35.3%; 1896, 36.6%; 1897, 37.4%; 1898, 40.1%. Fearing that the inst.i.tution would be swamped with women, and that able men students would stay away, Mrs. Stanford ruled that there should never be more than five hundred women students in the university at one time. This limit was reached in 1902, and it was then provided that women should not be received as special students, nor in partial standing. Later, men in partial standing were cut out, though they continued to be received as special students. Women are now admitted in order of application, but preference is given to juniors and seniors. This really establishes a higher standard for women than for men, and one would expect that men would be kept away from an inst.i.tution requiring a higher standard for women quite as much as from one where there were many women working on an equality with men. In 1910, Tufts College decided to separate men and women, for local reasons. The statement was made at the time that a philanthropist had promised a gift of $500,000 for a woman's college, if the s.e.xes were separated.[24] The doors of Wesleyan are to be closed to women after 1912, but this is due to local and financial reasons.

[22] HELEN R. OLIN, _The Women of a State University_, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1909.

[23] MARION TALBOT, _The Education of Women_, University of Chicago Press, 1910.

[24] _Report of the United States Commissioner of Education_, p. 132, 1910.

The movement in European universities, while not so uniform as in America, has been in the same direction. Miss Buss, Miss Beal and Miss Emily Sheriff led an early movement for higher secondary education of girls similar to that which gathered around Miss Willard in America. In 1871, Miss Clough started in England the lectures for women which led to the establishment of Newnham and Girton at Cambridge, and opened Oxford to women. Now women can study almost any subject they like at these universities and take the same examinations as the men. They do not receive degrees, but they have most of the other advantages of men, and for forty years they have carried off many honors. In the newer universities of London, Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool and in the Welsh University they have every advantage open to men.

In Germany, the opportunities for higher education of women have changed from year to year; but in 1910, there were 1,856 women in the universities as compared with 1,108 in 1909, and this notwithstanding the Emperor's well known belief that woman's sphere should be limited to domestic activities.