Ungovernable

by Therese Oneill

  And whatever you do, never let a man suspect you’re as smart as he is. Well, you aren’t as smart as he is, obviously: your brainpan is too small and likely engorged with fantasies of new frocks and fuzzy ducklings. But don’t let him suspect you’re smart even for a woman. “If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret,” says Gregory, “especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated understanding.” In conclusion, strive to emulate an especially quiet yet engaging toddler. Otherwise, warns Gregory, “It will be thought you assume superiority over the rest of the company.”

  “‘Rectum?’ says the doctor. ‘Forget that, it damn near KILLED ’im!’” Maren’s skilled verbal wordplay often went unappreciated in mixed company.

  Q: That’s intolerable, ridiculous advice.

  A: Now it is, maybe. Gregory no doubt honestly intended this advice for his daughters’ own good. The things his daughters would need to do, need to be, in order to have a contented life were very different from what we imagine for our children today. The question is, should his advice be dismissed out of hand, or are we brave enough to take a closer look at the potential process and dangers of female education?

  Q: Oh, by all means! So how much education can my daughter take before the pressure of knowledge shrivels her womb?

  A: Ah, now we’re on the same page! How you educated your daughter in the 1800s depended, not surprisingly, on your wealth and social station. People of the middle or merchant class often relied on “dame schools,” a system so agreeable that it is still in use today, though it’s intended for younger children and we call it preschool or daycare. A (preferably literate) woman of reputable character would take five to ten small children into her home during the day and provide them with some instruction while she went about her housework. Dame schools were an inexpensive and reasonable option at a time when public schools were not available (schooling would not become compulsory in Britain until the late 1800s and would not become law in all the American states until the twentieth century), and parents were not able to teach. Here the children learned to read, write, and do basic arithmetic.

  Both genders received healthy doses of shame along with basic education while attending local “dame schools.”

  Q: Girls are allowed to learn math? Well, goose my bustle!

  A: No. Arithmetic, not math. Adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, the equations you’ll actually use in your lifetime. Mathematics was and is an entirely different study, involving intangible geometric proofs, algebraic formulae, and the slow death of a young person’s self-confidence. Only the most advanced (male) scholars officially studied mathematics at this time. That custom has changed. For some exorable reason. Well, perhaps I’m too prejudicial against mathematics. You have no doubt used the advanced trigonometry you studied in high school many times while employing parallax methods to calculate the distance between planets. Or maybe that time you were adjusting radiological emissions to eliminate cancer cells? Oh, those aren’t among your hobbies? Yet you gave up two years of your precious youth and shed unnumbered tears of rage to learn them? Then forgot them immediately because they had no practical application in your life? And so it will be for your own children, if you abide by modern educational mores.

  All it takes for evil to conquer is for generations of good people to not stand up and say, “I never once used any math beyond long division.”

  But back to a simpler time. A girl would leave a dame school whenever it was no longer worth her parents’ money or time to keep her there, usually around age ten. There were no set lessons or graduation requirements, which, as we will see later, was a pivotal problem in female education.

  Q: Did they go to high school, or some equivalent at least?

  A: Not in the earlier part of the century. In the 1700s and before, if a man of means took a notion to have his daughter educated, she would first have a governess, usually a learned young woman whose family had fallen on hard times, requiring her to work. Or, for more esoteric knowledge, she might have sat private lessons with a male tutor, as the famous Eloise did with her teacher and lover, Abelard. Possibly this wasn’t the best system, at least in their case. It ended with Eloise acquiring both a strong grasp of the classics and a bastard child, after which she lived her life out in a convent. And Abelard… well, he had testicles before Eloise’s family found out what she was really learning in those tutoring sessions… not so much after.

  But that was rare. After a governess had taught all she had to offer, there was the question of what was next for your daughter. Marriage before the age of eighteen was considered gauche even in the nineteenth century. So the question was, where might we stick a teenage girl to preserve her virtue, improve her marriageability, and not have to put up with her moping and pouting? If only there were some sort of… live-in daycare for moody teenagers.

  Abelard to Eloise: “Honey, no dad ever really means it when he threatens to chop off your boyfriend’s jewels and send you to a nunnery! Relax!”

  Q: Was there some sort of live-in daycare for moody teenagers?

  A: Indeed there was! At least for rich girls. Most girls were not rich—those girls could consider their education complete by the age of twelve or fourteen. By that time, no matter what educational route she took—learning from her parents, dame school, governess, or one of the few publicly funded coed schools starting to crop up over the Western world—she would be able to read and do household sums, and have a thorough religious indoctrination, enough learning for girls of any class to get by well enough in the nineteenth century. So, in their early teens, girls would find work on farms and factories, be placed as servants, take jobs as village teachers or governesses, or stay home and learn housekeeping from their mothers.

  But for many parents, status-conscious ones especially, that wasn’t enough.

  These parents didn’t want their teen daughters to go to universities or anything like that. But they might have a better shot at landing “the right sort” of gentleman if they mastered skills that only women of the leisure classes could turn their attention to: music, dancing, decorative needlepoint (“fancywork,” as opposed to utilitarian “plain work”), and, of course, religious indoctrination.

  The Augusta Female Seminary advertises unsurpassed instruction in music and French. It is assumed some arithmetic and dishwashing courses are available to the less comely students.

  Q: How did you know if you were sending your girl to a quality boarding school?

  A: That question vexed parents, even then. These ladies’ seminaries/academies/finishing schools were, at least for the first part of the nineteenth century, nothing more than dame schools for big girls. Once again, a lady, usually a spinster, hopefully of sterling reputation and refinement, would hang out her shingle, and take thirty or so girls between the ages of twelve and eighteen into her home. There she would keep them, and teach them… whatever. There was no standardized curriculum for girls. In an attempt to attract more pupils and more money, many schools tended to focus fervently on the skills that a girl’s parents could show off to their neighbors.

  Q: Why didn’t they take the opportunity to actually teach those girls instead of babysitting them?

  A: And what should they be taught in a world where your main education centered on the career you would have? In a world where your career was to be a woman.

  “Another letter from my Prudie just arrived! I’d invite you to read it but it’s in French so—” “Cram it, Helen.”

  It was in the interest of these schools to teach skills that could be shown off. They wanted mothers of their students to pressure others into attendance through good old-fashioned bragging. “Have you seen the woven picot needle-lace handkerchief my little Prudie made for me? Miss Pueper’s Academy insists their girls master even the most complex fancywork. You can always tell a true lady by her throw pillows, don’t you agree? How is your little Fideline faring with her sti
tching? She has such thick, sturdy fingers! Has she mastered that tricky ‘threading the needle’ part yet? Well, don’t fret! Really, delicacy can be quite a curse in a daughter. You’re so fortunate that your Fideline is such a solid little trout of a girl!” Of course, Fideline would be enrolled for the next term at Pueper’s Girls’ Academy.

  Q: It sounds like a big con.

  A: Precisely. Chaotic, too. There was no governing institution for female education, no graduation requirements, no requirements at all, really. Until 1819, when a woman named Emma Willard, who ran a school like the ones mentioned above, began to believe that the pitiful excuse of an education being offered the girls of America could be considered dangerous to society.

  Women were half the population. A mother was (ostensibly) a child’s first teacher. Perhaps it was unseemly for women to show the extent of their intelligence in public, but they at least had to be smart enough so that, if asked, they’d have more to offer in a conversation than a handful of slack-jawed Ralph Wiggum–isms.

  Q: Go, Emma! Smash the patriarchy!

  A: I said “1819,” my adorable lil’ radical third-wave feminist. Emma made no attempt to smash anything, because Emma knew that would not work in her world. Instead, she pointed out how unsound, how unwholesome, the system was, and how it might be improved.

  Willard wrote a concise essay, “A Plan for Improving Female Education,” to be presented before the New York Legislature. (Not by her personally, of course; women had no business roaming the halls of government.) In it, she detailed what she saw as the barriers to young women’s mental development and, by extension, society’s development. It was a much-lauded work and one of the first to argue that a woman’s mind was a strong and useful contributor to society. If treated with proper respect and gentility.

  “My cat’s breath smells like cat food.”

  One problem with girls’ schools, she said, was that women usually opened them out of financial need rather than passion for education. They were not endowed by patrons the way boys’ schools were. Preceptresses (lady principals) were at the mercy of their charges and their charges’ parents and were encouraged to “teach to the test.” “The test” in this case was becoming a pious, dainty-footed ballroom dancer who knew what all the forks at a fancy table setting were for and could speak a bit of French. While sketching fruit.

  And, since girls’ schools had to save money whenever possible to turn any profit, most of them were cramped houses full of noise and chaos, lacking libraries, ventilation, or many of the other conditions considered necessary to healthy living.

  It went without saying that sexually mature girls (over twelve years old) were to be taught only by ladies (see “How Abelard Lost His Scrotum,” above). But many of these ladies had never had a thorough education themselves. Besides that, since “teachers” in “schools” for girls had no one overseeing them, no one to report to, you really had no idea what your child might be learning and from whom.

  Says Willard: “Instances have lately occurred, in which women of bad reputation, at a distance from scenes of their former life, have been entrusted by our unsuspecting citizens with the instruction of their daughters.”

  Demoiselle would love to educate your daughter in “the French arts.”

  All too easily parents assumed that women who could speak French and recite John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” couldn’t possibly be of low character! (Unless, as we’ve established, they were French. In which case you could almost guarantee them to be sensuous deviants.)

  Willard wanted better for women. She wanted to create institutions that “might possess the respectability, permanency, and uniformity” of boys’ schools, “and yet differ from them, so as to be adapted to that difference of character and duties, to which the softer sex should be formed.”

  Willard did not consider the sexes indistinguishable in their education needs. She wasn’t advocating equality. She, and this was realistic of her, didn’t see the point of girls becoming masters of ancient languages or trigonometry, or even biology unless it was delicately taught. (We can talk about flowers, they’re nice. Just… not the stamen part. Or pistils. None of that filth.)

  Cross-section of plant reproductive system. Which shows why we must be very careful in teaching our daughters biology: prevalence of plant penises.

  Willard’s lesson plan was practical for her era. Girls would learn subjects falling under four main tenets, pass standardized tests, and graduate. The child would attend a real school, overseen by a trustee board, or even by local government, and held accountable to standards outside those of show-offy parents wishing to impress the neighbors. The tenets were, in order of importance:

  1. Religious and moral.

  2. Literary.

  3. Domestic.

  4. Ornamental.

  “Religious and moral” are self-explanatory. “Literary,” in this context, meant anything that could be learned out of a book, including science.

  Domestic study, the third tenet, would actually prepare a girl for her career. Running a household in the nineteenth century was like running a complicated business. Even if they had servants to do the actual work, girls must learn about that work. Particularly budgeting, the basics of cooking and cleanliness (if these things were not done right, people could get sick and die), how to communicate with tradesmen, how to repair and mend anything in her household, and the basics of infant care to combat an infant mortality rate too depressing to mention. And finally, those Ornamentals. Music, dancing, fancywork, grace in movement, all the things that distinguish a lady from a flap-teated fishwife. It was absolutely revolutionary that Willard thought those of least importance.

  Educators responded well to Willard’s essay. But while society marched forward in the attempt to educate girls, it didn’t quite march in the direction Willard intended. Strangely enough, boys and girls began to be educated together as more and more governments decided to pay for them to do so. The reason being, it was simply cheaper to educate both genders together. They might enter through separate doors, sit segregated, and be discouraged from socializing, but they could all learn decimals at the same time.

  Or could they?

  Q: Yeah. They really can. I’ve seen it done.

  A: As small children, perhaps. And the glum, glazed-eyed gender-rejecting youth of the twenty-first century, maybe. But what about proper girls, who have entered puberty? Even if Victorians could accept that young women’s brains were as capable of learning as men’s, only a madman would fail to consider the part menstruation plays in a young woman’s ability to read books and do math.

  As in this turn-of-the-century Washington, DC, school, it was more cost efficient to educate both genders at once.

  Q: You’ve got to be kidding me.

  A: Argue with my cited bibliography! For instance, when John Thorburn wrote Female Education from a Physiological Point of View in 1884, long after the gender integration of the school systems and the slow burgeoning of coed universities, he gave voice to what everybody was secretly thinking.

  Girls aren’t dumb, but their periods turn them into manic-depressive idiots.

  And for their own sake, they need to get out of the classroom. “Since my attention was specially called to the subject some years ago,” Thorburn wrote, “I have come across a very large number of cases where the growing school girl had been temporarily or permanently injured by scholastic work performed during the menstrual period.”

  “Everyone just hold it together. We can start crying and smashing stuff again as soon as the photographer leaves.”

  Thorburn goes on to describe a typical case. An adolescent daughter is brought to him, suffering from any one of the well-known period-related diseases: anemia, hysteria, being excessively moody or sullen and showing deranged appetite (then as now, the unabashed female craving for pickled vegetables or nutmeg was a sure sign of an overtaxed mind and uterus). Today we are tempted to define this behavior in oversimplified terms, terms like “teen
ager.” Medical men of the nineteenth century knew better: these were clearly symptoms of brain degeneration due to overuse.

  In most schools, said Thorburn, headmistresses and teachers will sensibly allow girls to forgo heavy study during her period. But of course, they can only grant such leniency to girls who complain, as most well-bred girls will not do, especially about this shameful aspect of their lives.

  So, the inevitable happens. Said Thorburn, “It was only towards the end of the [school] session that they broke down, but they were often in the end the greatest sufferers from nerve prostration. Two cases of this kind have ended in sudden death from hematocele [bleeding so severe it overflows the uterus and drowns the abdominal cavity], soon after their return home, and several have had local diseases of a troublesome and chronic nature which have taken years to remedy or have never been remedied at all.”

  Q: Girls bled to death because the strain of education conflicted with the strain of having a uterus?

  A: Yes! Maybe! It was written in a book, so probably! Even if a young woman was fortunate enough to survive education without a deadly hemorrhage, the resulting race of females would be wizened, sickly, and prone to madness. If menstruating women continued to be educated, one Dr. Edward Clarke warned, “it requires no prophet to foretell that the wives who are to be mothers in our republic must be drawn from transatlantic homes.”

  Q: What did doctors who were women say?

  A: Mostly they said, “Would you like to see the pillow I embroidered? I’m not a doctor because women aren’t allowed in most medical schools and even if they were only jaded hags with no prospects would attend.”