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CHAPTER V.
EDUCATION OF WOMEN

Among the subjects concerning which my husband advanced with a quicker and firmer step than that of the society around him in general, stands that of the higher education of women. It may be difficult for the present generation to realise what an amount of dogged opposition and prejudice the pioneers of this movement had to encounter only some twenty-five years ago. We have made such rapid strides in the direction of women’s education, that we almost forget that our ladies’ colleges, higher examinations, and the various honours for which women compete so gallantly with men, are but of yesterday. Miss Clough called at our house in Liverpool one day in 1867, to ascertain the state of mind of the Principal of the Liverpool College in regard to the beautiful schemes, which were even then taking shape in her fruitful brain for the benefit of her fellow-women. I think she was heartily glad to find herself in a house where not a shadow of prejudice or doubt existed, to be argued down or patiently borne with until better days. My husband even went a little further, I believe, than she did at that time, in his hopes concerning the equality to be granted in future in the matter of educational advantages for boys and girls, men and women. An active propagandist work was started soon after by James Stuart, of Trinity College, Cambridge, who made Liverpool his head-quarters during his first experiment in establishing lectures for ladies, which developed into the University Extension Scheme. It was arranged that the first course should embrace four of the most important towns of the North of England, constituting a sort of circuit. It seemed desirable that a man of experience and weight in the educational world should inaugurate this experiment by a preliminary address or lecture, given to mixed audiences, in each of these four towns. My husband undertook this task. His first address was given at Sheffield, where he was the guest of Canon Sale, who approved heartily of the movement. Without unnecessarily conjuring up spectres of opposition in order to dismiss them, he carefully framed his discourse so as to meet the prejudices of which the air, at that time, was full. It was generally imagined that a severer intellectual training than women had hitherto received would make them unwomanly, hard, unlovely, pedantic, and disinclined for domestic duties, while the dangers to physical health were dolorously prophesied by medical men and others. In concluding his inaugural address, my husband said: “A community of women, established purposely to educate girls and to train teachers, was not known in Christendom till the institution of the Ursulines by Angela dà Brescia, in 1537. So unheard of at this time was any attempt of women to organise a systematic education for their own sex, that when Françoise de Saintange undertook to found such a school at Dijon she was hooted in the streets, and her father called together four doctors learned in the laws, ‘pour s’assurer qu’instruire des femmes n’était pas un œuvre du démon.’ Even after he had given his consent, he was afraid to countenance his daughter, and Françoise, unprotected and unaided, began her first school in a garret. Twelve years afterwards she was carried in triumph through the streets, with bells ringing and flowers strewed in her path, because she had succeeded. Her work lived and grew because it was right. So take courage, ladies, struggling now at this day for the right to cultivate to their full extent the faculties and gifts which God has bestowed upon you. You must fight your own battles still. At all times reforms in the social position of women have been brought about by efforts of their own, for their own sex, supplemented by men, but always coming in the first instance from themselves.”

The visit of Miss Clough to the Butlers, already referred to, led to the formation at the end of 1867 of the North of England Council for promoting the Higher Education for Women, a body representing associations of school-mistresses in several large northern towns. Josephine Butler was President of this council from 1867 to 1873, and Miss Clough was Secretary for the three first strenuous years of its existence. The first work of the Council was to organise lectures for women, which had already been begun by Mr. Stuart, to whose genius the inception of the University Extension Movement was due. Mr. Stuart’s first course on astronomy was given, in the autumn of 1867, in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield, and was attended altogether by five hundred and fifty women. These lectures were followed by other similar courses organised by the Council, and the idea rapidly spread. In 1868 Mr. Stuart gave his first lectures to working-men at Crewe. These two independent tributaries, lectures to women and lectures to working-men, combined into one stream, which grew into the University Extension system first adopted by the University of Cambridge in 1873. The North of England Council was one of the bodies which memorialised the University, at the end of 1871, in favour of the lecture system being taken up and put on a permanent basis by the University. Their memorial urged the proposal not only on behalf of women, but also on behalf of working-men, who had alike shown their desire for higher education by attending in large numbers the lectures already given.

The Council also interested itself in the question of examinations for women, and in 1868 presented the following memorial to the University of Cambridge, signed by five hundred and fifty teachers, and three hundred other ladies:

“We, the undersigned, being either connected with or engaged in the education of girls, desire to bring under your consideration the great want which is felt by women of the upper and middle classes, particularly by those engaged in teaching, of higher examinations, suitable to their own needs. The Local Examinations, to which by a Grace of the Senate, passed April, 1865, girls under eighteen have now for three years been admitted, have proved of the greatest advantage in stimulating and steadying the work in Girls’ Schools. Students above eighteen are not, however, admissible to these examinations, nor are they of a sufficiently advanced character to meet the wants of such students, especially of those who have adopted, or wish to adopt, teaching as a profession. We therefore beg that, taking into consideration the grave necessities of the case, you will be pleased, either by extending the powers of the Syndicate for conducting the Local Examinations, or in some other way to make provisions for such examinations as shall adequately test and attest the higher education of women.”

Josephine Butler by her personal efforts obtained many of the signatures to this memorial, and herself went to Cambridge in support of it. Miss Clough wrote of this expedition that “the charm Mrs. Butler put into all the details she gave, showing the desire of women for help in educating themselves, made the subject, which might have been considered tedious, both interesting and attractive, and thus drew to the cause many friends.”²

To friends in the North.

June, 1868.

One of our friends at Cambridge amused himself with counting up the number of gentlemen who talked privately and kindly to me about it – there were forty-eight. So you see there is a great deal of sympathy there. It is not so easy for me to tell you what I felt, as what actually happened. I felt the reality of the good that must come from this movement. It would have pleased you, I feel sure, as it pleased me, to see the grave and kindly tone of these dons. I was talking to one elderly Professor with grey hair and a somewhat stiff expression, and I happened to speak of the struggle which the lives of many women of the middle classes is, and of the gratitude we felt when men of weight and real goodness came forward to help us, and this elderly don was deeply moved. The tears came into his eyes, and he could scarcely answer me. He said: “I fear we get selfish here, and forget how much there is of work and sorrow in the world outside of us.” Professor Maurice came to my room one day and talked a long time to me. He said at leaving: “If there is anything else which you and your friends think Cambridge could do to be of use, I trust you will suggest it; it does us more good than it does to anyone else.” I trust that a time is coming when barriers between men and women and one class and another may give way before the influence of true Christian charity, and a desire to help and be helped.

The memorial met with a ready response from the University by the establishment in the following year of the Examinations for Women, which a few years later were called the Higher Local Examinations, and were open to men as well as women.

“These two things – the organisation in the northern towns of lectures given, by University men, which led to University Extension, and the establishment of an examination for women which led to the Cambridge lectures, and so to Newnham College – were the Council’s most striking achievements; but it had a hand in various other important educational enterprises.”³

For instance the Council worked hard, and with some success, in endeavouring to induce the Endowed Schools Commissioners to secure that some part of the endowments of Public Schools should be devoted to the education of girls. “Mrs. Butler made an able as well as a zealous President of the Council, and while she herself took an active part in almost everything that was undertaken, she also did good service in kindling the enthusiasm of others by her eloquence and enthusiasm.”⁴ Although she retired from the Presidency in 1873 on the ground of ill-health, she attended its last meetings at York in 1874, when she read a paper on Economic Science as a part of the Education of Girls. In that year the Council was dissolved, having finished its pioneer work, and feeling that the movement could henceforth be carried on by other organisations, which had by that time come into existence.

In 1868 Josephine Butler published her first pamphlet, The Education and Employment of Women. Starting with the census figures of 1861, she meets the old argument that woman’s sphere is the home, and only the home, by pointing out that the proportion of wives to widows and spinsters over twenty was only about three to two (in 1901 the proportion was even less), and that over three million women were earning or partly earning their living. This number had risen in 1901 to over four millions. She refers to the miserable wages received by women workers, from the teaching profession downwards, due in part to the comparatively low state of education among girls, and in part to the restrictions upon their employment in various directions, both causes being ultimately traceable to the fact that “they are unrepresented, and the interests of the unrepresented always tend to be overlooked.” Hence she pleads for the higher education of women and the removal of all legal and other restrictions upon their employment. She incidentally urges the mixed education of boys and girls. As against the argument that the more extended employment of women would injure men, she prophesies, in the words of F. D. Maurice, “Whenever in trade or in any department of human activity restrictions tending to the advantage of one class and the injury of others have been removed, there a divine power has been at work counteracting not only the selfish calculations, but often the apparently sagacious reasonings of their defenders.” Surely this prophecy has been fulfilled, as it appears from the Report of the Poor Law Commission recently issued, that, taking a wide outlook of the whole industrial situation, there has been no tendency in the past twenty years for women workers to displace men. (Pp. 322-5.)

In 1869 Josephine Butler edited and wrote an introduction to a volume of essays on Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture. The essays were by Frances Power Cobbe, Jessie Boucherett, George Butler, Sophia Jex-Blake, James Stuart, Charles H. Pearson, Herbert N. Mozley, Julia Wedgwood, Elizabeth C. Wolstenholme, and John Boyd-Kinnear. In her introductory essay she lays stress on the fact that any disabilities, from which women suffer, cause injury and loss to men, no less than to women themselves. She admits that woman’s sphere is home, but she wishes the home idea to be realised in wider spheres than within the four walls of a single household. She pleads that to grant the demands of women for higher education, and for unrestricted liberty to engage in any employment, will tend to the restoration of true home ideals; first through the restored dignity of women, and secondly through the opening out and diffusion of the home influence and character into the solution of social problems, by the relegation to women of some of the more important work of dealing with our vast populations. This she illustrates in the following passage.

In the present pretty general realisation of the futility, if not the positive harm, of many forms of private philanthropy, and the often-repeated deprecation of meddling individuals, who pauperise the community by their old-fashioned, lady-bountiful way of dispensing alms and patronage, we do not perhaps quite foresee the reaction which is setting in, with a tendency so strong in the opposite direction that it brings us into the danger of once more missing the philosophy of the whole matter. The tendency at present is to centralisation of rule, to vast combinations, large institutions, and uniformity of system. I have a doubt about any wholesale manipulation of the poor, the criminal, scholars in schools, etc. I believe it to be so far from being founded on a philosophical view of human nature and of society, that if carried to extremes the last state of our poor will be worse than the first. For the correction of the extreme tendencies of this reaction, I believe that nothing whatever will avail but the large infusion of home elements into workhouses, hospitals, schools, orphanages, lunatic asylums, reformatories, and even prisons; and in order to attain this there must be a setting free of feminine powers and influence from the constraint of bad education, and narrow aims, and listless homes where they are at present too often a superfluity. We have had experience of what we may call the feminine form of philanthropy, the independent individual ministering, of too mediæval a type to suit the present day. It has failed. We are now about to try the masculine form of philanthropy – large and comprehensive measures, organisations and systems, planned by men and sanctioned by Parliament. This also will fail if it so far prevail as to extinguish the truth to which the other method witnessed in spite of its excesses. Why should we not try at last a union of principles which are equally true? “It is not good for man to be alone” was a very early announcement in the history of the world. Neither is it good for man to work alone in any matter whatsoever which concerns the welfare of the great human family; and the larger the work be which he undertakes, unassisted by her whom God gave to him for a helpmate, the more signal will be the failure in the end.

We quote another passage from this essay to show how here, as always, she founded herself on the appeal to Christ as the highest authority in matters of principle and of action.

The author of Ecce Homo has set the example to those to whom it did not occur to do so for themselves, of venturing straight into the presence of Christ for an answer to every question, and of silencing the voice of all theologians from St. Paul to this day, until we have heard what the Master says. It may be that God will give grace to some woman in the time to come to discern more clearly, and to reveal to others, some truth which theologians have hitherto failed to see in its fulness; for from the intimacy into which our Divine Master admitted women with Himself it would seem that His communications of the deepest nature were not confined to male recipients; and what took place during His life on earth may, through His Holy Spirit, be continued now. It is instructive to recall the fact that the most stupendous announcement ever made to the world, the announcement of an event concerning which the whole world is divided to this day, and which more than all others is bound up with our hopes of immortality, the resurrection of Christ, was first made to women. Nor can we wonder, looking back over the ages since then, and seeing how any truths asserted by women, not at once palpable to the outward sense or provable by logic, have been accounted as idle tales, that of the first apostles it should have been said, “The words of the women seemed unto them as idle tales,” when they declared that Christ was risen. Among the great typical acts of Christ, which were evidently and intentionally for the announcement of a principle for the guidance of society, none were more markedly so than His acts towards women; and I appeal to the open Book, and to the intelligence of every candid student of Gospel history, for the justification of my assertion that in all important instances of His dealings with women His dismissal of each case was accompanied by a distinct act of Liberation. In one case He emancipated a woman from legal thraldom. His act no doubt appeared to those who witnessed it as that of a dangerous leveller, for while He granted to the woman a completeness of freedom from the tyranny of law which must have electrified the bystanders, He imposed upon the men present, and upon all men by implication, the higher obligation which they had made a miserable attempt to enforce upon one half of society only, and the breach of which their cruel laws visited with terrible severity on women alone. They all went out convicted by conscience, while the woman alone remained free; but, be it observed, free in a double sense – free alike from the inward moral slavery, and from the harsh, humanly-imposed judgment. The emancipation granted to another in the matter of hereditary disabilities was signal. In a moment He struck off chains which had been riveted by the traditions of centuries, and raised her from the position, accepted even by herself, of a “Gentile dog” to one higher than the highest of the commonwealth of Israel. In another case His “Go in peace,” and words of tender and respectful commendation to one who had been exiled from society, contrasted solemnly with His rebuke to His self-satisfied host, who, while firmly holding his place among the honoured of this world, marvelled that Christ should not seem to be aware what manner of woman it was who touched Him. To another, before ever she had spoken a word, He cried, “Woman, thou art loosed!” and to objectors He replied, “Ought not this woman, being a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan hath bound lo these eighteen years, be loosed from this bond on the Sabbath day?” The tyrannies and infirmities from which He freed these persons severally were various and manifold, and this does but increase the significance of His whole proceeding towards them. Search throughout the Gospel history, and observe His conduct in regard to women, and it will be found that the word liberation expresses, above all others, the act which changed the whole life and character and position of the women dealt with, and which ought to have changed the character of men’s treatment of women from that time forward.

While in His example of submission to parents, of filial duty and affection, in His inculcation of the sacredness of marriage, and of the duty of obedience to laws which ought to be obeyed, His righteousness far exceeded the righteousness of the Pharisees of His own or of the present day, it seems to me impossible for anyone candidly to study Christ’s whole life and words without seeing that the principle of the perfect equality of all human beings was announced by Him as the basis of social philosophy. To some extent this has been practically acknowledged in the relations of men to men; only in one case has it been consistently ignored, and that is in the case of that half of the human race in regard to which His doctrine of equality was more markedly enforced than in any other. It is no wonder that there should be some women whose love for this Saviour exceeds the love which it is possible for any man to feel for Him, and that, retiring from the encounter with prejudices which are apt to lurk even in the minds of the most just and most generous of men, they should be driven to cast themselves in a great solitude of heart before Him, for He only is just, He only is holy, He only is infinitely tender.

In the same year, 1869, Josephine Butler published the Memoir of John Grey of Dilston, a most interesting biography of a good man, who faithfully served his native county throughout his life, and took a keen interest in all the stirring political events of the first half of the last century. An Italian translation of this Memoir was published in Florence two years later.