Bluestockings

by Jane Robinson

  *

  Not all those registering for training at college were straight from school. Many were governesses, with several years’ experience behind them, but not much expertise: a little like Ellen Weeton. Constance Maynard had governesses from time to time (in fact her family seems to have run the gamut of educational opportunities). Their lessons were dreadful. Constance was expected to read aloud page after page of the dullest of history books (but never to take notes); endlessly to repeat French verbs without necessarily knowing what they meant; learn useless facts such as ‘which of our four British Queens have given the greatest proofs of courage and intrepidity’, or what tapioca was, and why the thunder did not precede the lightning. ‘I do not think I remember a spark of real interest being elicited… Of all the arithmetic I learned, and there was a little every day for several years, I can call to mind only one single rule, and it ran thus: “Turn the fraction upside down, and proceed as before.”’10

  One of Constance’s fellow students at Cambridge in the early 1870s, Mary Paley, had the same experience. All she could remember of her governess’s teaching was the date at which black silk stockings were first worn in England, and (following a theme, here) ‘What to do in a thunderstorm at night’. The pragmatic answer was to ‘draw your bed into the middle of the room, commend your soul to Almighty God and go to sleep’.11 There is no doubt both Constance and Mary were taught by their governesses to draw, sing, probably dance, and to make polite conversation. There was even a lugubrious textbook available for the latter, with common examples of mistakes – one should not, for example, say ‘I have lost my doll’s pretty bonnet that I took so much trouble to make, and I am quite miserable about it. I told the nurse she must find it for me,’ but ‘I have met with a heavy loss. The doll’s bonnet you saw me making the other day: mama said it was pretty; and I am grieved lest she should be angry with me for not taking better care of my things. I have intreated [sic] nurse to assist me in seeking it.’12 This was the tinselly stuff of a governess’s education. Expectations were so low.

  But it is unfair to blame the governess generically for this, nor for the pervasive frivolity of female education and its emphasis on accomplishment over understanding. After all, attempts to reform her meagre career were responsible, ultimately, for the foundation of sound secondary schooling for girls, which eventually led to university access.

  These attempts first got off the ground with the foundation of the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution (GBI) in 1843, two years after Whitelands College opened. There had been a Mutual Assurance Society for governesses for some time, but the GBI offered more to the estimated 25,000 of them working in England during the mid-nineteenth century. It gave annuities, operated a savings bank, and ran an employment registry, as well as providing accommodation for those temporarily ‘disengaged’, and a longer-term home, or asylum, for those described in popular literature as ‘distressed’ or, worse still, ‘decayed’. The high profile of the GBI (Charles Dickens was an early supporter) ensured plenty of attention for the plight of the over-worked, under-trained, and poorly paid governess. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847, with its eponymous heroine, as did Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, two of English fiction’s most memorable governesses, and sketches emerged in comfortable periodicals of wan-looking damsels gazing over their charges’ heads into a middle-distance of frustration, regret, and scarcely quelled emotion.

  Behind the scenes, meanwhile, a dedicated group of agitators was working hard to make the governess extinct. The Secretary of the GBI’s Committee of Education was among them. Frederick Denison Maurice, himself the brother of a governess, was Professor of English History and Literature at King’s College in London, and it was his radical idea in 1847 to institute a series of evening lectures for governesses to improve their teaching repertoire. They were to be called ‘Lectures to Ladies’, delivered by the professor himself, and were to include ‘all branches of female knowledge’.

  There had been open lectures before, to which women could go if so moved. The Mechanics’ Institute in London, later Birkbeck College, was opened in 1823 to provide outof-hours education to working men; in 1830, it admitted women (rather by default, when it was discovered that they weren’t not allowed to go), and having got over the delicate matter of whether those females who did choose to attend should be allowed through the front door (it was decided that they were), it offered them an eclectic choice of electricity, optics, geology, chemistry, phrenology, political economy, and various arts courses. Not many went.

  There is a record of two women attending lectures at University College in London in 1832. They were a Mrs Potter and a Miss Rogers, and they share the distinction of being the first women in England to be entered on to the student roll of a university. It is rather disappointing to find that their brief studies comprised attending the ‘Juvenile Course in Natural Philosophy’, along with Mrs Potter’s fourteen-year-old son. Still, it was a precedent, and precedent is a great thing in progress.

  The popularity of Professor Maurice’s Lectures to Ladies tempted him to put into practice an idea he and his sympathizers had been pondering for some time. In the spring of 1848, he announced the opening of what he proudly called a ‘College for the Education of Young Ladies’ – Queen’s College – in London. Its purpose was to produce a new generation of students: girls who enjoyed high academic achievement and who appreciated the value of high expectation, in themselves and of others in them. Many would inevitably go on to become teachers themselves, which was all part of Maurice’s grand plan. He was one of the first academics to acknowledge school-teaching as a responsible and admirable vocation for women. Its practitioners should be properly prepared and worthy of intellectual respect.

  While a good education was essential to an effective teacher, Maurice insisted, rather radically, that teaching should not be considered the only end of such an education. This was a crucial statement, sounding the death-knell of the traditional governess. Maurice suggested that it was the right of every intelligent thirteen-year-old (if her family could afford it) to be offered access to a professionally taught, wide-ranging curriculum. Queen’s College was essentially the first serious secondary school for girls.

  It duly opened its doors on Harley Street, London, with Maurice as its Principal. During the day it ran classes for ‘ladies above the age of twelve’, for which fees were payable; free evening lectures, subsidized by the GBI, were offered to working governesses in search of better things.13 After all, as one supporter bitterly remarked, ‘The wretchedness of an empty brain is perhaps as hard to bear as that of an empty purse.’14 Women like Ellen Weeton, for whom Queen’s was designed, suffered both.

  The organization of the classes and curriculum at Queen’s was ambitious. There was no social segregation: tradesmen’s daughters were as welcome as gentlemen’s, so long as they could pay. The timetable covered much the same subjects as Bathsua Makin’s had, back in the 1670s, but explored them all to greater depth, and included specific sessions on pedagogy.

  Two of Queen’s College’s earliest pupils were to become England’s most famous headmistresses, Frances Mary Buss and Dorothea Beale. Miss Buss (1827–94) went along to the evening classes, six nights a week, after a day’s work teaching in her mother’s school. She had left school herself at fourteen, one of ten children in an artist’s family; her upbringing was warm, good-humoured, chaotic, and usually impecunious. The course at Queen’s was a business enterprise as much as anything: armed with the increasingly well-respected qualifications it offered, she would be an asset to her mother’s school. The more certificates she had, the higher the fees they could demand for her teaching. But ideology was important too. Mrs Buss’s establishment in Camden, north London, was progressive, teaching mixed infants using the gentle, intuitive methods pioneered in Switzerland by Johann Pestalozzi, and attracting girls over the age of twelve with an advanced curriculum and the respect for learning per se that Queen’s had fostered in Frances. ‘I want gi
rls educated to match their brothers,’ she declared, and the school developed into what remains one of the highest-calibre girls’ schools in the country, the North London Collegiate, with Frances as headmistress.

  Dorothea Beale (1831–1906) came from a similarly large household, but less disorganized than Frances’s, and rather more earnest. There was both money and influence in the Beale family, but neither was invested in Dorothea’s education. Like Constance Maynard, she endured a succession of governesses before briefly attending school, which she abandoned at thirteen. Then she was left to educate herself, with the help of hand-me-downs from her brothers’ lessons, and copious reading. At the age of sixteen, in 1847, she was sent to a finishing school in Paris, which she considered ‘of a nature to induce atrophy of the thinking powers’; luckily, when revolution broke out in France in 1848, she was dispatched home. Immediately Queen’s opened that same year, she enrolled on courses for a wide variety of subjects and so excelled that she was invited, at eighteen, to become the first female member of its teaching staff. She stayed at Queen’s until resigning in 1856. A short, unhappy spell at Casterton School followed; she resigned again, and for broadly the same reasons: that her authority as a senior member of staff was being undermined and her constructive suggestions for reform ignored, due to her gender.

  In 1858, Dorothea was appointed Headmistress of the Cheltenham Ladies’ College (founded in 1854), and there she stayed. She developed the school into an intellectual beacon, shining still. The school was her husband, she said, and she the alma mater to generations of academic young women. She educated them, equipped them for training colleges after school, sent them eventually to Oxford, Cambridge, and beyond, and then installed them as the wardens and principals of other influential schools and university colleges around the country, to pass the message on. Those pupils who chose not to practise a profession (and few of them from the Ladies’ College would need to) were taught to do their duty to their husbands and children as intelligent, well-informed, God-fearing women.

  The North London Collegiate School was less elite than the Ladies’ College. Frances Buss was anxious, if possible, to take any girl she felt could learn to her own and society’s advantage. Nor did pupils need to be of the Anglican faith. Both establishments shared firm discipline, a sense of intellectual aspiration, and a forceful, charismatic personality at the helm.

  Miss Buss and Miss Beale became famous, and were caricatured as admirable, slightly alarming but well-meaning bluestockings, whose femininity was inevitably flawed by strong-mindedness, as exemplified by this popular rhyme of the day:

  Miss Buss and Miss Beale

  Cupid’s Darts do not feel,

  They leave that to us,

  Poor Beale and poor Buss.

  Nevertheless, their schools became patterns for the best in modern education for girls and crucibles for progress, resulting in a system of public examinations that finally made university accessible for women.

  That progress was astonishingly rapid between the founding of Queen’s College in 1848 and the establishment of Girton a couple of decades later. Bedford College, founded by the abolitionist Elizabeth Jesser Reid in 1849, was a nondenominational equivalent of (Anglican) Queen’s, and still exists, amalgamated with Royal Holloway College as part of the University of London (whose degrees it awarded from 1878 onwards). Barbara Bodichon went there, as, for a short time, did Mary Ann Evans (the novelist George Eliot) and medical pioneer Elizabeth Blackwell (1812–1910).

  The campaign for high-quality secondary and tertiary education for girls gradually emerged into the public eye; articles were published discussing its advisability, and debates conducted in print to argue the pros and cons. Some of the sharpest opposition came from women. The novelist Charlotte Yonge was cynical when asked to contribute to the founding of Girton. She abhorred the prospect of ‘bringing large numbers of girls together’, and thought a home education, under the supervision of ‘sensible’ fathers, was invariably best.15 The concept of paying for a young lady’s education was something she found distasteful, and faintly vulgar.

  Elizabeth Sewell, a teacher herself, and author of several popular books for children, agreed. She was a pragmatist (or defeatist?) rather than a reformer. Since the aim of education, she said, is to fit children for adult life, it seems foolish to encourage intellectual curiosity and thinking skills in girls. They should not need them. ‘Girls are to dwell in quiet homes, among a few friends [just what Florence Nightingale detested]; to exercise a noiseless influence, to be submissive and retiring.’ And no one likes ‘strong-minded’ or over-educated females. ‘They might be useful in their generation; but we may well desire to be spared them as a race.’16

  Queen Victoria granted a royal charter to Queen’s College in 1853. She approved of a sound Christian education for girls, certainly, but the thought of that leading to any unladylike demands for political attention (as some said it might) was outrageous:

  The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s rights’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety… It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious she cannot contain herself.17

  Despite such illustrious disapproval, individual role models for the campaign began to grow in confidence and prominence. The most vociferous of these tended to be members of a new, more business-like ‘petticoterie’ of bluestockings known as the Ladies of Langham Place. Intellectual, outspoken feminists, who argued in public for political and social reform, they ran a sort of clubhouse in Langham Place, London, a ‘Ladies’ Institute’, which provided a reading room, an employment registry, a committee room available to philanthropic associations, and the office of their house publication, the English Woman’s Journal.18 A glance at the first few numbers of the Journal gives a reasonable idea of the editors’ wide-ranging concerns. There is an article on the profession of teaching, naturally enough; the annual reports of the GBI are printed; a digest of current affairs; thoughtful book reviews; an article on Elizabeth Blackwell’s triumph in qualifying as a medical doctor in New York; statistics from the 1851 census about women’s occupations; a notice on the opening of a public swimming bath for ladies in Marylebone; and a long piece, ‘Women’s Dress in Relation to Health’, reporting that the average weight of an eighteen-year-old’s clothes – ‘a lynsey [coarse linen] dress, a thick cloth cloak, a scarlet flannel upper petticoat, a steel skeleton skirt, a flannel under-petticoat, and all the rest…’ – was, staggeringly, just over fourteen pounds (about six and a half kilos) in weight. There is also a discussion on women’s intellectual capacity: ‘Aristotle has remarked that the female brain is absolutely smaller than the male, it is nevertheless not relatively smaller, compared with the body…’

  Barbara Bodichon was one of the Langham Place circle, editing the Journal and campaigning for higher education and legal privilege; so were the philanthropist Bessie Rayner Parkes; Adelaide Procter, who founded the Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women; and Emily Faithfull, a lobbyist for working women. What set these people apart from any of their feminist predecessors (except, perhaps, Bathsua Makin) was that they got things done. Bodichon petitioned vigorously for the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act in 1858. Emily Faithfull was appointed Royal Printer to Queen Victoria. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson broke down the barriers to women training as doctors in England. Emily Davies introduced public examinations for schoolgirls, and then founded Girton College, Cambridge.

  Meanwhile, away from the capital, a new, slightly gentler phenomenon was developing. In towns and cities across England, more Lectures to Ladies were being advertised, and from Exeter to Nottingham, Guernsey to Liverpool, little flocks of gentlewomen were emerging from the parlour, and scuttling their way to talks in public rooms by gentlemen academics. The cartoonists of the day adored them: ladies in search of learning were intrinsically rathe
r ridiculous. But despite their apparent sciolism, there were some extremely strong-minded men and women behind this movement, and like the Langham Place circle, they achieved real results. Ladies’ Educational Associations were formed, with local committees, to arrange and publicize courses; lists of prospective students were signed up, and if there were enough to subsidize a visiting lecturer, peripatetic professors were engaged from London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Durham, under the auspices of the University Extension Movement.19

  One particularly enthusiastic young tutor from Cambridge, James Stuart, spent his vacation in 1867 touring Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Rotherham, and Crewe for the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education of Women, established by Josephine Butler and Anne Jemima Clough. He delivered an eight-week course on physical astronomy, was paid the handsome sum of £200, and attracted some 550 students. Such was the popularity of his lectures that the local circulating libraries had to ditch some of their novels in favour of scientific books, and the number of ladies hoping to attend further lectures threatened to reach unmanageable proportions.