Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  The Essay closes cannily with an advertisement for Mrs Makin’s own school in Tottenham High Cross, London. It costs £20 a year (more for advanced students) and goes well beyond anything offered to girls before. The basics are attended to: the principles of religion, needlework, a little dancing and musical appreciation, learning how to write clearly, and enough arithmetic to keep accounts; these take up half the school week. The other half is spent more imaginatively in studying not only Latin and French, but Italian, Spanish, Greek, and even Hebrew. A ‘repository for visibles’, a superior sort of primary-school nature table, teaches them the names, properties, and uses of flowers and herbs, shrubs, trees, minerals, metals, and stones. As well as such culinary skills as pastry-making and preserving, girls can take astronomy, geography, and philosophy.

  Here is a worthy forerunner of the great headmistresses of the Victorian era – Miss Buss and Miss Beale and their ilk (see Chapter 2) – who believed passionately in a girl’s right to learn important things, to be useful to herself and others; who knew the allure (to parents) of choice and a mixture of tradition and innovation, and who inspired by example. When King James I was given a copy of the virtuosic Latin and Greek verses Bathsua Makin published in 1616, he was mildly impressed. ‘But can she spin?’ he inquired. No doubt she could.

  A contemporary of Bathsua Makin’s, Hannah Woolley (c. 1623–c. 1678), was another pioneer of educational equality. In her innocently titled conduct-book The Gentlewomen’s Companion (1675), she was just as damning as Makin about the custom of ‘breeding women low’, or keeping them ignorant, and filling the vacuum with vanity and silliness:

  I cannot but… condemn the great negligence of Parents, in letting the fertile ground of their Daughters lie fallow, yet send the barren Noddles of their sons to the University, where they stay for no other purpose than to fill their empty Sconces and make a noise… Vain man is apt to think we were merely intended for the World’s propagation, and to keep its humane inhabitants sweet and clean; but… had we the same Literature [or learning], they would find our brains as fruitful as our bodies.12

  This last comment was recalled in a poem, ‘Elegy’, for Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, published the following year. The duchess had herself been an advocate of female ‘ingenuity’, or intellectualism, but a little too eccentric in behaviour and unguarded in expression to convince anyone. On the contrary: she was dubbed ‘Mad Madge’, and considered an embarrassment by her aristocratic peers. This poem, full of rhetorical frills and furbelows, reminds its readers that Madge was not like most wives. She had no children. Instead she left a prodigious collection of writings – ‘the best Remains’. But she might have been better admired (the poet implies) had she conformed to the rest of her sex, who complacently enjoyed their allotment of ‘Fruitful Wombs but Barren Brains’.13

  The mention of university in The Gentlewoman’s Companion is significant. It reveals the common perception during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that many young men at Oxford and Cambridge wasted both time and money by going there. Mrs Woolley cannot seriously have imagined that women would benefit from going themselves. But the idea may have sewn a rogue seed in the fertile mind of another contemporary agitator, Mary Astell.

  Miss Astell (1666–1731) was the first writer to blame her sex for their own ignorance. No wonder the world thinks women weak, she complains in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694/7), when they settle so easily for silliness. ‘How can you be content to be in the World like Tulips in a Garden, to make a fine shew and be good for nothing; have all your Glories set in the Grave, or perhaps much sooner?’ she demands. ‘The Soul is rich and would, if well cultivated, produce a noble Harvest.’14 All that is needed is application, and a little peace and quiet.

  Astell proposes a safe, isolated place where women can gather together and be taught to understand, criticize, and perhaps even change the world in which they live. Not like the Bluestockings’ ‘Colledge’, which was too preoccupied with wittiness and fashion, and too public; more like a convent for lay sisters, where the mind is as important as the soul.

  Daniel Defoe took up the idea, after reading the Serious Proposal. His contribution to the debate on women’s education has rather slipped through the net, hidden as it is in an early, obscure work, An Essay Upon Projects (1697), but it is well worth notice. Defoe’s Essay is a little like Mrs Makin’s, in that it bewails contemporary attitudes to women’s moral and mental capacity. He, too, thinks it pitiful that women are denied the advantages of learning, yet blamed for their ignorance. What does it say about a nation’s leaders, he asks, that they deny God’s grace of education to the mothers of their sons? And what right has the clergy to encourage brutishness in the souls of half their congregation? Besides, he continues (somewhat lubriciously), a well-educated woman is ‘all Softness and Sweetness, Peace, Love, Wit, and Delight’.

  On the other hand, Suppose her to be the very same Woman, and rob her of the Benefit of Education, and it follows thus…

  Her Wit, for want of Teaching, makes her Impertinent and Talkative.

  Her Knowledge, for want of Judgement and Experience, makes her Fanciful and Whimsical… And from these she degenerates to be Turbulent, Clamorous, Noisy, Nasty, and the Devil.15

  To avoid such domestic disaster, which has been recurring each generation since Eve, Defoe proposes the establishment of an ‘Academy for Women’. Like Astell’s, it would be isolated, carefully structured both architecturally and educationally, with a wide curriculum, and its own rules and regulations. But there would be nothing of the nunnery about it: no vows of celibacy would be required, and no guards at the doors; no spies. The students would be free to come and go, free to learn. An Act of Parliament would be passed, that whenever they chose to attend, no man would be allowed to enter – not even their husbands – so they could study in privacy and undisturbed (shades of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own).

  After implying that Eve was not evil after all, just uneducated, Defoe closes the work with the following paragraph:

  I need not enlarge on the Loss the Defect of Education is to the Sex, nor argue the Benefit of the contrary Practice; ’tis a thing will be more easily granted than remedied: this Chapter is but an Essay at the thing, and I refer the Practice to those Happy Days, if ever they shall be, when men shall be wise enough to mend it.16

  Surprisingly, those Happy Days were not so far ahead.

  2. Working in Hope

  I want girls educated to match their brothers. We work in hope.1

  In 1872, two generations before Trixie Pearson went to Oxford, a young woman from a very different background prepared to make history. Constance Louisa Maynard was a pioneer of Girton College, and the first woman to read philosophy (or ‘moral science’) at Cambridge. No women actually graduated from Cambridge until 1948; they just passed through the university as more or less welcome guests, sitting the requisite exams (if they chose to) without the right to formal recognition. At this stage, that hardly mattered. To Constance and her peers, unable to imagine being awarded a degree, it was the work that counted; the means rather than the end.

  Despite her independent spirit, and the fact that she was twenty-three when she planned to go to college, Constance still needed her parents’ permission. The omens were not good: she was considered whimsical and rhapsodic, and was rarely taken seriously by her family. She had little formal schooling behind her and no need to make a living; why (argued Mr and Mrs Maynard) should she suddenly resolve to join some dubious establishment purporting to offer a university education to ladies? Reputation was more valuable an asset in life than learning.

  At worst, the college was described as an ‘infidel place’;2 at best it sounded more like something out of Tennyson’s Princess, with a comic cast of ‘sweet girl graduates’, ‘prudes for proctors’ and ‘dowagers for deans’,3 clamouring uselessly after learning like dainty little moths at a lamp. It was hardly the sort of place a respectable man would commit his daughter.


  Constance, however, was determined. Her father was the easier parent to manage, so choosing her time carefully, and wearing her prettiest smile, she asked him – ‘because learning is a beautiful thing’ – if she might go to Girton. His initial response was not promising. He laughed. ‘I say, Conse, this is something new… But what’s the use? What’s it for?’ Constance then embarked on a treatise about the soul-enhancing properties of Greek, philosophy, and science. Papa murmured something about staying at home and being like her sisters, before pulling out a trump card by offering to buy her a new pony if she would abandon altogether the idea of Cambridge.

  At last, Constance managed to bring him round. He was prepared to allow her to leave home, he wearily agreed, and to pay her fees – but only if Mother concurred. Mother did, but on strict conditions. Constance was to be on her guard at all times at Girton: it was likely to be a ‘worldly’ place, and its inhabitants ‘not at all our sort’. She must not degrade herself by taking university exams, nor stay longer than a single year. When she returned home, she must never entertain the idea of becoming a teacher or entering some other equally wretched employment. She must treat the whole enterprise as a long visit to slightly unsuitable friends, and when it was over, do her best to forget all about it. ‘And I promised anything,’ remembered Constance, ‘everything!’4

  Why should someone like Constance have been so desperate to go to university? Florence Nightingale, like most intelligent young gentlewomen, knew the answer to that. Florence was bred to be passive in all things. She was shown how to read, and more, but never taught to learn independently, nor explore new ideas. She was even discouraged from choosing her own books, ‘and what is it to be “read aloud to”? The most miserable exercise of the human intellect. Or rather, is it any exercise at all? It is like lying on one’s back, with one’s hands tied and having liquid poured down one’s throat.’ She was force-fed received wisdom, and it choked her. ‘Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity – these three – and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?’ Why are they denied the ‘brilliant, sharp radiance of intellect’, suppressed in darkness?5 She knew how desperate a life lived in the shallows could be, and how soul-destroying it was to be condemned to triviality.

  Florence Nightingale found a different way to fulfil her potential, but had a university education been available, she would have been the perfect candidate. She became one of the first reputable Englishwomen to enjoy a career. She was a formidable statistician, a quick and sinewy thinker who deftly exposed the sclerotic blunderings of the British military machine. She was a philosopher, too, of startling insight. A woman’s life is sketchy, she maintained. Someone needs to colour in the picture, give it depth. She had the bravery to do that herself; others, like Constance Maynard, needed help.

  In fact, help was on its way. It dragged its feet, it’s true, for the first half of the nineteenth century, but by the time Nightingale discovered her own vocation in the early 1850s, the political and cultural movement that was to result in university places for women was beginning to gather pace and a sense of purpose. Her argument was just one of many urging on the juggernaut.

  The reason for the initial lack of progress is obvious. For all the practical efforts of reformers like Bathsua Makin and Catherine Macaulay, and the theoretical proposals of Wollstonecraft and Defoe, a vicious circle still swirled round the subject of educating girls. Until there were good schools in place to teach them the basics, there was no hope of girls’ academic development. That called for good teachers, but without good schools in the first place, where were they to come from?

  Home tutoring was available, of course, to those whose fathers could afford it, and happened to approve of spending money informing the mind of a mere wife-to-be. Childhood was a middle-class invention of the Victorian era; before that infant girls were dressed as miniature women, and expected to behave as such – with some allowances – until they could earn money either by manual work or marrying well. It must have seemed to traditionalists an extravagant caprice to consider investing in female intellect. But some middle-class sisters did share their brothers’ tutors, and daughters could learn fast and well from amiable parents.

  Constance Maynard, born in 1849, was one of them. Her early education, like that of so many of the other pioneers, was largely a matter of scavenging. Every Thursday afternoon, her mother would teach the four youngest Maynards an unconventional curriculum of ‘exactly what we liked’, which included printing, willow-plaiting, heraldry, drawing in perspective, and memorizing the Greek alphabet. Constance soon tired of this, and longed for her brother George to come home from boarding school and feed her real (if regurgitated) knowledge. One holiday, he brought her a map of the stars, and every clear night the two of them would steal outside and learn the constellations. ‘Here was a sort of outlet into Eternity… George and I were left to ourselves, and we laboured away at the starry sky till we “got it right”.’6

  Constance’s elder sisters had also been sent to school, and Constance joined them for a couple of years, but it was her parents’ whim that in her case this was a waste of time and money. Father failed to see why he should go on paying for an expensive school, when Constance could quite easily pick up her education at second hand from the older girls. The implication that she was not worth the investment hurt Constance deeply, but she never complained. She had been too well brought up.

  A hand-me-down education might have had its attractions for Mr Maynard, but to Constance it was useless. The Maynards’ money bought their daughters gentility, but very little learning. All those unimpeachable maiden ladies (often clusters of sisters) who ran nice, private schools for upper-middle-class daughters were more concerned with cultivation than education. If indeed they did that: the political activist Barbara Bodichon (Florence Nightingale’s cousin) publicized a worrying rise during the mid-nineteenth century of academies, institutions, collegiate establishments for young ladies – call them what you will – offering nothing but a place to deposit your daughter for a while. Most of them were staffed by incompetent opportunists, charlatans, who had failed in other walks of life and fancied opening a school to make some money. Teaching hardly featured.

  Bodichon herself was lucky: she was sent to a progressive Unitarian school in London which was co-educational (something Mary Wollstonecraft advocated in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and which welcomed a mix of children from different social backgrounds. But then Barbara was from an unconventional and slightly outrageous family. Her father, a Radical MP (in his forties when she was born), never married her mother (a milliner’s apprentice in her teens), and Barbara was brought up to question received wisdom wherever it might rear its lazy head.

  In an illustration from The Workwoman’s Guide, by a Lady (1840), a teacher and her assistant preside over a girls’ schoolroom. Books lie discarded while the pupils sit and sew.

  Alternative schools included those run by the Quakers, or Anglican charities such as the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, the Home and Colonial Infant School Society, or the National Society for the Promotion of Education for the Poor, which sprang up in parishes all over the country. Many of these new charity and government-aided schools were designed for the children of men and women working in the engine-room of the Industrial Revolution, yet even then only a fraction of ‘the poor’ sent their girls. It is estimated that during the 1830s three in ten children between the ages of six and fourteen went solely to Sunday school; two in ten went to a dame or a private school; one went to a National Society or parish school; and the remaining four went nowhere.7 The sexes are not differentiated in these statistics, but it is safe to assume the minority was female.

  In 1823, Casterton School was founded in west Yorkshire by the Church of England, expressly for daughters of the clergy. It was there – when it was Cowan Bridge School, the dismal pattern for Lowood in Jane Eyre – that the Brontë sisters went, and where their frien
ds became pupil-teachers, ploughed back into stony ground before they had a chance to flourish in the world.

  Being a pupil-teacher could be a haphazard, frustrating affair. Ellen Weeton, not so far from the Brontës, over the Yorkshire/Lancashire border, hated the position when forced into it by her indigent widowed mother in Wigan. Mrs Weeton ran her own school, and at first Ellen had been allowed to learn along with the paying pupils, soon outstripping them all. When her mother realized how precocious Ellen was, she panicked. What use to herself or anyone else was a strikingly clever girl? Rather than encouraging Ellen’s fast-developing intellect, Mrs Weeton prohibited her from lessons, except to teach the basics to fellow pupils:

  Oh! how I have burned to learn Latin, French, the Arts, the Sciences, anything rather than the dog-trot way of sewing, teaching, writing copies, and washing dishes every day. Of my Arithmetic I was very fond, and advanced rapidly. Mensuration [or how to measure things] was quite delightful, [and] Fractions, Decimals, & Book keeping. So would Geography and Grammar have been, but… I could not get on as my mother would not help me.8

  Like so many in her position, Ellen was being exploited, and her eager mind trained more to shrink than to stretch.

  There was a formal pupil-teacher system in place in well-regulated schools, which offered the only (vaguely) official training for women teachers in England. Grants were available to cover the apprentice’s costs from the age of fourteen until she graduated at eighteen into teaching full time. But with more schools opening, even though compulsory education was not introduced until 1870, demand for teachers was in danger of exceeding supply. The National Society decided to keep that supply ‘in house’ by opening a London training college, Whitelands, in 1841. Its aim was ‘to produce a superior class of parochial schoolmistresses’; their aim was to teach their girls to be good, ‘and let who will be clever’. Another five teacher-training colleges for women appeared over the next four years, and by 1850, of 1,500 women teachers working in England, 500 were professionally trained.9 To an extent, anyway: the curriculum was neither rigorous nor challenging, but it was a start. Indeed, Whitelands was the first establishment to come anywhere close to Astell’s and Defoe’s visions of the future. The colleges were not residential (at first), nor highfalutin in their academic expectations, but they took women, young and not so young, and educated them for a career, just as Nightingale’s school for nurses did later on. The next step, of course, was to offer women non-vocational higher education.