LESSONS IN FEMININITY
Lessons at mother's side were supplemented and reinforced by the teachings of formal education. As they grew older, privileged girls were either kept at home and educated by a governess or sent to a convent or private boarding school which offered ‘a special indoctrination into the complexities of domestic life'.41 The Catholic convent excelled in its task of instilling young women with a measure of superficial knowledge alongside the essential skills of the bourgeois woman: needlework, drawing, music, a smattering of foreign languages, as well as the more intangible lessons in posture, grace, virtue, purity and self-control.
In Britain, amongst the wealthier classes, girls recall years of boredom and frustration at the hands of poorly educated governesses who equipped them for little more than ladylike behaviour and marriage. ‘My mother's idea of the equipment required for her two daughters', recalled Molly Bell, the daughter of a millionaire industrialist, ‘was that we should be turned out as good wives and mothers and be able to take our part in the social life of our kind.'42 Adolescent girls were kept in state of limbo, what one mother termed a ‘chrysalis state' which left them with little or no formal academic training, merely a few accomplishments for ‘coming out'.Mothers, it seems, were often responsible for repressing their daughters' desire for intellectual stimulation and knowledge. Amongst the Russian nobility during the upheaval of the 1860s, mothers tried to prevent their daughters reading radical literature which they believed would lead to them rejecting all they had been taught. ‘Where did you get desires and thoughts so unlike mine', exclaimed one despairing mother. ‘How can you express ideas without my permission?'43 In Germany, Fanny Lewald was told by her mother, ‘there is nothing more objectionable and useless than an educated and practical woman.'44 Fanny recalled that, after leaving school at the age of 13, she spent her days ‘pointlessly' so that by the evening she ‘had the terrible feeling that I had done nothing worthwhile all day'.
Fanny's daily schedule demonstrates why this intelligent child felt so frustrated. Piano practice filled her time between 8am and 9am, followed by three hours of knitting and sewing and an hour of reading over her old schoolbooks which bored her intensely. After lunch there was more handicrafts and piano practice and finally an hour of writing practice. Only once, and exceptionally twice, a week was Fanny permitted to go visiting.45 Fanny Lewald's unfulfilling education was paralleled in England where the daughters of the new industrial bourgeoisie similarly lacked stimulation. ‘For more than ten years I was bored to death all the time', recalled Molly Bell. Molly and her sister Elsa learned to speak French and German, and were taught to dance and play the piano by a governess, but ‘the more serious side of education did not take any part in the plans my mother made for us. No girl that we knew was trained for any career or profession, nor did girls of our class go to school.'46At the beginning of the nineteenth century these deficiencies in girls' education were widely recognised by conservatives and liberals alike. When the radical writer Mary Wollstonecraft adversely commented on women's ‘natural cunning', their tendency to become ‘coquettish slaves', she was criticising the kind of superficial learning and stress on amusing and ornamental accomplishments experienced by many young women of the middle classes. ‘The woman who has only been taught to please will soon find that her charms are oblique sunbeams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband's heart when they are seen every day, when the summer is passed and gone. Will she then have sufficient native energy to look into herself for comfort, and cultivate her dormant faculties?'47 For Wollstonecraft, along with many who advocated improvements in girls' education, such superficial learning was not even appropriate for girls who were to become wives and mothers.
Rather, she said that they should be educated to become ‘better citizens': rounded, rational, independent beings who might then become ‘more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers'. In short, education would provide women with a means of gaining some degree of independence of men and their self- respect.48 At the same time, Wollstonecraft was alert to the importance of the maternal role, a concern echoed by conservative writers, for whom the upbringing of children was central to the maintenance of domestic ideology and separate spheres. As Louis Aime-Martin (1786—1847), a French history professor, commented in his 1834 publication The Education of Mothers: ‘On the maternal bosom the mind of nations reposes; their manners, prejudices and virtues — in a word, the civilisation of the human race all depend upon maternal influence.'49 Education for motherhood was the common thread running through the majority of writings on girls' education — conservative, liberal, clerical, evangelical and republican — from Rousseau onwards. The concept of the mother-educator expounded by Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macaulay-Graham and many others, appealed to woman's natural role as bearer and nurturer of children. It assumed marriage and maternity were central to women's lives and offered women a moral role. Women, if educated properly, might extend their civilising influence into the wider world, primarily through their children. For educationalists such as the Scots essayist and novelist Elizabeth Hamilton (1758—1816), domesticity was a sphere in which women could exhibit their moral worth. ‘If women were so educated as to qualify them for the proper performance of this momentous duty [the education of children], it would do more towards the progressive improvement of the species, than all the discoveries of science and the researches of philosophy', wrote Hamilton in 1803.50But it was to be around a century before the progressive ideas of Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries were to infiltrate the European classroom.
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769—1821) expressed a common attitude in 1807 on the occasion of the founding of a school for the daughters of officers and civil servants. For the French emperor, the new school should aim to produce not the pleasing coquettes imagined by Rousseau but good wives and household managers:In a public institution for demoiselles religion is a serious matter... it is the surest guarantee for mothers and for husbands. Make believers of them, not reasoners. The weakness of women's brains, the mobility of their ideas, their destination in the social order, the necessity for inspiring them with a constant and perpetual resignation and a mild and indulgent charity, all that cannot be obtained except by means of religion, a charitable and mild religion... I am desirous that they should leave not as pleasing women but as virtuous women, that their pleasing qualities be those of morals and of the heart, not of the mind and of amusement.51
‘I am not raising vendors of style nor housemaids’, he concluded, ‘but wives for modest and poor households.’
The Napoleonic view, that women did not possess the ability to reason, and neither did they need to develop it, was not uncommon. ‘The sphere in which the female sex is destined to work is certainly narrower than that which is assigned to the man,’ wrote the pastor director of a newly opened girls’ school in Gottingen in 1806; ‘and only seldom can that sphere be enlarged beyond its natural limits without the loss of precious femininity.’ Another remarked that he opposed ‘that broad smattering of knowledge so insufferable in the second sex, which destroys delicate femininity’.52 Early attempts to provide middle-class girls with some form of structured education sought to limit the amount of intellectual stimulation provided, since it was believed that over- or mis-education would invariably compromise girls’ femininity. On the other hand, it was believed an appropriate education would be beneficial to counter the dangerous consequences of women’s ‘mania for reading’, especially romantic novels which could ruin a woman’s sensibility.53 In the early years, knitting and sewing were deemed more important than reading and writing.
Louise Otto-Peters (1819—95), later a feminist and outspoken advocate of an improved education for girls, recalled of the 1820s that ‘knitting and the knitted stocking were already for the four year old girl the first serious work’.54 Some three decades later it was still said that ‘stocking knitting is essentially the steady companion of the young girl’.55 In the Polish Kingdom, where access to and provision of education was expanded during the nineteenth century, usefulness was considered more appropriate than knowledge for noble girls. In Warsaw, the school authorities justified the rather small number of institutes of higher learning for girls on the grounds that a woman’s ‘destiny and duties, and consequently [her] skills and virtues, are to ensure the happiness of the family and its individual members... the education of this sex is domestic rather than public... the parents' home is the best and most useful school for them and their mothers are the proper teachers.'56In middle-class single-sex schools for much of the century, education consisted of lessons for motherhood and domesticity in a tacit acceptance that women required preparation for their ‘natural calling'. The daughters of the bourgeoisie were taught that their duty was to devote themselves to their children since, in the words of a character in a popular didactic text Mathilde et Gabrielle, ‘the duties of a mother are sweet to fulfil'.57 When the character in one French schoolbook asked her tutor why there were no female inventors, the reply was ‘Women don't study science. They are important as mothers of future inventors.'58 Even progressives, such as the Bremen schoolteacher and writer Betty Gleim (1781—1827), believed it was the purpose of girls' schools to develop the ‘special qualities of women's nature' in order that they might fulfil the highest calling, that of wife and mother.59 Hence, reading and schooling in intellectual subjects was subordinated to practical instruction in those tasks essential to girls' eventual duties in the home.
For Caroline Rudolphi (1754—1811), teacher and writer on girls' education, schooling should help develop in girls not only practical skills in child nurture, but also the qualities they needed to survive in a male-dominated world: selfsacrifice and obedience.60 In Bavaria, an 1804 decree barred the study of the sciences by women, but more common was the tailoring of the curriculum to suit the supposed nature of girls: conversational French for example, was preferred in Germany over the Latin taught to boys; history was boiled down to the stories of great men and women.61 Girls of the English middle classes could expect a year or two of formal schooling. Some, it is true, received a liberal and broad education, often at the behest of their fathers, but even then it was likely their education would be interrupted by family obligations or business distractions. There were few boarding schools for girls until mid-century, and alternative educational institutes such as literary societies and the reading rooms of mechanics institutes usually excluded girls and women.62 Such restrictions served to reinforce the messages received from didactic literature and learned at mother's side: that the home was the appropriate site for women's activities, enhanced by religion and separated from the world of business.At elementary level the opportunities for instilling ‘feminine' values and behaviour into young girls were multiplied with the expansion of compulsory and free schooling in much of western Europe. Primary schooling was made
compulsory in Prussia (1812), Denmark (1814), Norway (1827), Sweden (1842), Switzerland (1848), Scotland (1873), England and Wales (1880) and France (1882). Alongside the mission to teach the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, primary schooling was used for the dissemination of civic and moral values including dominant notions of femininity. This was made all the easier when boys and girls were educated separately, as was the case in France. Whilst few explicit distinctions were made for girls and boys in the official curriculum at elementary level, teachers were expected to emphasise the ‘special duties', obligations and qualities of girls who were taught to be modest, patient and even-tempered, orderly and clean. One French teachertraining manual in 1832 advised its readers to ‘make sure that [the girls] do not make with their hands, their feet or their heads any movement which could distract the others, or which would be improper... let all of them be arranged and directed in such a way so that the idea of order, of silence and of respect be joined to the class's spirit.'63 ‘Woman is the guardian of the foyer. Her place is at home... it is for the foyer that she must reserve all her grace and good humor... A woman who does not love her home, who has no taste for household duties... cannot remain a virtuous woman for long', instructed one widely used French textbook for the moral education of girls.64
Notions of service and self-sacrifice pervaded thinking on girls' education in France at the end of the century. Textbooks portrayed girls dutifully committing themselves to their families, thereby sublimating their own desires to the needs of the greater good. The popular heroine Suzette, who appeared in one French schoolbook, took over the running of a farm and the care of younger siblings when her mother died and her father was plunged into helpless despair. Such self-sacrifice, modesty, satisfaction with one's social status and acquiescence, narrowed girls' horizons to being a good housewife and mother. Irish elementary school textbooks designed for girls' schools both instructed girls in correct behaviour and gave practical advice on household management, cookery and child care. In 1846, the schoolgirl read that ‘knowledge is not to elevate her above her station... It is to correct vanity and repress pretention. It is to teach her to know her place and her functions; to make her content with the one, and willing to fulfil the other. It is to render her more useful, more humble, and more happy.'65
In the English elementary school system, the message to girls was delivered in a more practical way. Schools were encouraged to provide domestic subjects to ‘fit the girls for life'.66 One consequence was the almost ubiquitous presence of needlework on the primary school curriculum, an activity which was admired as much for the desirable qualities it would impart to girls, such as neatness, patience, concentration and thrift, as for the skill itself.67 By the 1870s the Department of Education had made domestic economy (cookery, laundry work and the ‘household arts') a compulsory subject for girls in elementary schools, clearly demonstrating how the ideology of domesticity had come to determine girls' education. Certain class assumptions underpinned these initiatives, one being that a practical education suited to their station would attenuate the poverty and poor living conditions endured by the working classes on account of poor budgeting and improvident household management by women. Hence the remark of one observer that working-class women would benefit more from learning to cook sheep's heads than cakes.68 But whilst girls generally accepted that their fate was to follow in their mothers' footsteps, few enjoyed domestic subjects and many girls and their mothers believed the lessons learned at home to be sufficient. As Elizabeth Roberts discovered in northern England, girls regarded lessons on domestic management at school as no substitute or improvement on the real experience they undoubtedly had at home.69 And, in France, surveys of female students' preferences consistently ranked domestic and practical subjects lower than academic.70
The last few decades of the nineteenth century saw a qualitative change in girls' experience of schooling. In Germany, France, Britain and Ireland, education for girls expanded at the elementary and the secondary levels, and a broader-based curriculum in middle-class schools taught girls that they might have career aspirations outside, or even instead of, the role of wife and mother. When, in 1870, Jules Ferry, a future French prime minister, spoke of ‘equality for both sexes' in education, he was anticipating substantive changes in the provision and delivery of schooling to girls at the secondary level. Just six years later the Belfast resident Isabella Tod opened her Ladies' Institute for middle-class girls, a practical consequence of her campaign to educate girls for a productive life. ‘Parents should remember', she wrote, ‘that they cannot... obtain for their daughters exactly the situation in life which they suppose to be desirable. It is, then, short-sighted to fit them for no other; nay, it is even cruel.'71 In Britain, some liberal headmistresses, whilst continuing to insist on ladylike behaviour, began to implement a broader- based curriculum for girls, consigning what were called aesthetic subjects to lesser importance and rejecting practical training in domestic duties which was assumed to occur at home. German secondary schools, though, made few curriculum changes in response to the concern about increasing numbers of ‘redundant' or ‘surplus' women who required training for employment, and there was constant opposition to academic training of women in
German secondary schools. As late as 1884 the Prussian minister of education commented that girls' minds should not be ‘crammed with facts from all fields of knowledge'.72 Instead, a number of private initiatives were set up for girls leaving school to provide technical training, from cookery and dressmaking to commercial skills and photography.73 Such initiatives were paralleled elsewhere in Europe including France, Sweden, Russia, Poland and the Habsburg Empire.
The debate about the importance of teaching girls domestic subjects never really subsided. Indeed, in England those who campaigned to raise the status and prominence of domestic training tried to have it redesignated as an applied science taught in ‘kitchen laboratories'. Thankfully, female science teachers resisted attempts to ‘dumb-down' chemistry lessons to make them ‘relevant' to girls' interests and needs. An initiative in 1908 by London's King's College to teach a three-year university-level course in Home Science was described by outraged feminists as a ‘despicable prostitution of educational opportunities'.74 Formal education always did more to reinforce dominant attitudes than to resist them and thus it should be no surprise that middle-class ideals of femininity pervaded schooling throughout the nineteenth century. On the other hand, the efforts of some liberal headmistresses, especially in secondary schools, did begin to shift the educational agenda towards a more positive and independent model for women, encompassing exercise and fresh air, fewer constraints on girls' freedoms and an academic as opposed to a practical or domestic training in recognition of the fact that many girls of the middle as well as the working classes would be forced to earn their own living.