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Eve's Daughters at School Eve's Daughters at School by Marion Norman and the commonly assumed disabilities No picture or exemplar is affected under which they laboured in conse• to be drawn, nothing but the sin• quence of their virtual exclusion from cere life of a daughter of Eve, the general educational system. Be• beginning her course amidst the tween the time of Milton, for whom the vanities of the world, advancing in excellence under the impulse of very possibility of Eve's "sweet at• extraordinary faculties. tractive grace" (Paradise Lost IV, (Wm. Roberts, Life of Hannah More, 298) achieving fulfillment apart from 4 vols., London, 1834, p. 4) her husband was inconceivable, and that of Blake, whose Enitharmon's groans (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I XXV) heralded the birth of modern woman, almost a century of educational The original idea for this study of the evolution seemed to invite exploration education of seventeenth-century Eng• and reassessment. lishwomen came from contrasting the self-image revealed in their numerous This paper addresses itself to three autobiographies, diaries, journals and simple but basic questions: Who (i.e., letters with the scant attention they what proportion of the female popula- received in pedagogical treatises(1) The Head of Fame from Vermeer' "An Artist in His Studio." tion) were being educated? Where and through whatever educational resources what types of education were, in fact, happened to be available. Despite ob• available to them? What were the vious inequalities of opportunity, their measurable results? Although the ranks contained a surprising proportion focus is primarily aesthetic, other of persons of exceptional talent who factors—economic, social, political— have left ample evidence, published and profoundly affecting the situation, unpublished, supporting their claims to have been taken into consideration. distinction in life and in the arts, especially literature. Investigation suggests that the in• creasingly intelligent and discrimina• Disregarding the stereotypes embalmed ting female audience appealed to by in courtesy books and pedagogical trea• writers like Addison and Steele pre• tises, reflections of deep-rooted pre• supposed well-instructed mothers in judices or current fashions, I have the previous century determined to pursued, instead, a more pragmatic develop their daughters' full intel• approach. The initial impetus for lectual potential, despite the alleged what proved to be both a fascinating risk of so jeopardizing their future and rewarding journey was provided by a happiness within or outside marriage; book, now relatively rare, left un• that long before universal education finished at death by George Ballard: or female suffrage, even working women The Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great could and did learn to read and write Britain Who Have Been Celebrated for —usually mainly for easier access to Their Writings or Skill in the Learned the Bible and devotional works (which Languages, Arts and Sciences (London, still constituted more than forty per 1752). To ensure greater comprehensive• cent of publications),(2)rather than ness, I have supplemented this tribute for business or recreation; finally, by one of women's staunchest admirers that behind Mrs. Thrale (1744-1821), with considerable non-literary evi• Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762), dence, as well as additional investi• Fanny Burney (1752-1840), Jane Austen gation of levels of literacy among (1775-1807) and Hannah More (1745-1833), women of the middle and lower classes were numerous seventeenth-century fore• and some comparison of educational runners whose creativity and self- standards and techniques in non• determination ensured wider horizons conformist and Roman Catholic schools for their sex as a whole. Without at• with those of the establishment. tempting to challenge the system, seventeenth-century Englishwomen did II manage to fulfill their intellectual What proportion of women in the seven• identities, at least in some measure, teenth century were educated, where and by whom? There is considerable evidence orthography, music (the virginals, proving that some rudimentary instruc• viol, organ as well as singing), public tion was available in this period for speaking, history, physical education girls as well as boys of all social and, of course, religion. Girls, in ranks, as R.D. Altick's The English addition, learned needlework, house• Common Reader(3)amply shows. (For the keeping and bookbinding. In this "Lit• present I intend to postpone, for the tle Academy," the community's first most part, closer examination of the secular venture, novels, plays and educational opportunities of the other profane literature were rejected lower classes, in favour of those of in favour of historical moral exempla children of the gentry and professions and books of travel which the older whose greater social prominence usu• children read aloud at meal times. ally made them more vocal and the evi• "This," we are told "made them men be• dence more plentiful.) The girls se• times and even acquainted women with lected for special study here are histories, ancient and modern."(4) drawn from widely different backgrounds: Religion classes for family and neigh• the children educated in the Arminian bours, adults and non-adults, modelled community at Little Gidding; Mary on the highly successful Sunday Schools Astell (1668-1731), future Cambridge pioneered at Milan by St. Charles Bor- Platonist and educational reformer; romeo (1538-1584)(5)included instruc• Lady Lettice Legh (1663-1753), author tion in reading and writing. As might of The Lyme Letters 1660-1700, Anne be expected Ferrar's pupils profited Whitehead (fl. 1686), a talented greatly from this unique but short• Quaker; Lucy Hutchinson (1620-1675?), lived experiment combining both tra• devoted wife and biographer of a ditional and modern educational Parliamentarian colonel; and Mary Ward methods.(6) (1585-1645), Yorkshire foundress of the first non-cloistered order for teaching Catholic girls. Boys and girls of the Legh family(7) were also educated together, first at home by their mother, then at the Wen- In the converted pigeoncote of the wick school on their estate, founded farm at Little Gidding, the sixteen and endowed by an ancestor. It had Collect children and several from always had distinguished teachers such neighbouring households were taught by as the famous Richard Mather (1596- Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637), a Cam• 1669) first a pupil, then master, later bridge graduate specializing in one of the Pilgrim Fathers; another won classics, logic, mathematics as well fame both as a classical scholar and as divinity, and by his mother and teacher before intemperance forced his sisters. Lessons, for both girls and dismissal; a third became so absorbed boys, included Latin, arithmetic, in divinity that he abandoned teaching ones will not let me live like a Lady, in favour of his own studies. Genera• I must turn She farmer."(12) Surviv• tions of Legh children learned the ing a second marriage and widowhood, rudiments at Wenwick and received fur• she lived to be ninety, mourned especi• ther training in foreign languages, ally by the poor whom she had never music and dancing; only for boys, how• turned away. ever, was Latin conversation compul• sory, in preparation for eventual at• In the Shardeloes family(13)the tendance at university. Older members children were educated separately and of the family also took a personal in• not at home; the four boys went to terest in this education as may be seen Westminster, the two girls to a school from the letter written by one of the run by the Misses Luck and Terry. Un• girls to her grandfather about the like their brothers' texts, which were time of the Rye House Plot(8)in 1683: entirely in Latin, the girls' included "Yr sister is labouring every day at several in English: Salmon's Geography, her Music and Dancing and takes as Robinson Crusoe and a translation of much paines as you used to do."(9) On Aesop's Fables; also a few French ones another occasion Lady Legh reprimanded like Les Magasins des Enfants by Marie her daughter for her "scribbling."(10) de Beaumont Leprince (d. 1780).(14) The girls especially turned out well. Lessons in writing, geography, music Fanny and Lettice, like other women of and dancing were provided for addi• their time, were renowned for their tional fees; but by far the greatest needlework as well as their conversa• emphasis was given to needlework and tion. Peter married into the Fleetwood "other polite accomplishments" judged family and his mother-in-law, an to be necessary preparations for the exacting old lady, kept a salon in the girls' future entry into the matrimon• young people's Soho house.(11) Peter's ial market. It was such an educational children, wild and unmanageable, were program which proved fair game for first educated at home. While the two dramatists like Sheridan (1751-1816), boys were sent away to school, at near• in his School for Scandal (1777). by Tattenhill, then at Warrington where lax discipline encouraged truancy and neglect of learning, the daughter, Theophilus Dorrington (d. 1715), who who was educated at home by her father was schoolmaster-chaplain to the and, after her mother's death, by a Duchess of Bedford in a household very French governess, afterwards displayed different from that of the worldly remarkable fortitude. Upon early loss Shardeloes, vigorously insisted on the of her child, her husband and her primarily religious purpose of educa• father, she moved to Worcestershire, tion and on parental responsibility courageously determined: "If the great for providing it, either by families banding together in groups or by en• English which she had learnt from her listing the aid of schools established mother, an ingenious gentlewoman." by the town corporations. Only in Quaker influence is suggested by her this way could Anglican boys and girls parting gift to Thoresby of "an auto• be protected against the two-fold threat graph copy of the noted George Fox." of Sectarian "profaneness and irre- (17) Still more he admired "the in• ligion" and Popery's proselytizing genious Elizabeth.
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