CHAPERONAGE. T HE Daily Telegraph, after its annual and interesting custom
at the beginning of autumn, is trying to get up a discus- sion on a social topic,—this time the necessity or superfluity of chaperonage. It is not a bad subject to start, for it has not been recently discussed, while in half the families of the Kingdom it is incessantly battled over, the young and the old usually forming themselves into opposite camps. We say usually, because if we have observed with sufficient attention, the brothers are frequently as old-fashioned on this point as Papa and Mamma, and, as they go out when they please, draw down upon themselves a shriller indignation. It is natural, too, that the combat should be severe at this moment, for the new education of girls and the new etiquettes which have followed that education, make the question a very pressing one. The girls of England have won a great deal of liberty for themselves ; they are being educated pretty much as they please ; they share, within certain rather rigid limits, the college life of their brothers they practise athletics, and they naturally argue that the bond of chaperonage is no longer necessary for their protec- tion. We can protect you, they say to fathers and mothers, a great deal better than you can protect us. On points, that is true enough, for they have much clearer brains ; they are free of the old medley of ignorant fears, and as we cordially admit, they wish to go straight more strongly than has ever before been the case in the history of society. The old system was by no means so conducive to universal modesty and decorum as it is the custom to imagine, partly because Miss Austen, in her pictures, never travelled out of a certain beaten route.
Moreover, if girls are to work, some of the etiquettes must go, whatever the consequences ; for neither art, nor literature, nor teaching, nor the professions, can be studied, far less practised, in drawing-rooms alone. The young girl- artist must have a studio, and the girl-doctor must have what are practically the equivalent of chambers of her own. The demand which is now being made, however, and which is conceded by the Daily Telegraph, is for the complete abolition of chaperonage, for liberty to go about alone and at discretion, just as the boys do, and with almost as little attention, in many cases, to either companions or hours. We are convinced that if this claim is won, society will, sooner or later, be startled by some of its consequences. In the first place, girls are not nearly so physically safe as boys. They think they are, and in some districts of England go wan- dering about into the very depths of the hills and woods as if they were protected by their improved intellects, but they are not ; and if a single tragedy happened in a good family, such as constantly happens among the poor (vide the Daily News of Thursday, under its news from Hunstanton), the old requirement of escort in lonely places would once more be imperatively enforced. Imagine the occurrence there reported happening to a Lady Clara, and its instant social effect. Nor in the cities is the safety perfect. Manners, as the Telegraph says, have wonderfully softened, and abduction, which was so common in the last century, is now an unknown crime; but fathers and mothers wish to pro- tect their daughters from insult, and there is not a great city in the Kingdom where a number of men do not pass their lives in making insulting propositions to unprotected young women. No girl is safe in walking home alone from a theatre. It is nonsense to say that American girls in similar circumstances find themselves quite safe, and wander about unprotected with- out any harm happening to them. Harm does happen some- times, and American society is differently organised from ours. As a correlative of the deep respect felt for women in America—a respect which has made many American girls delightfully frank and free, and many others not delightfully childish, restrictions acting as bonds to one class and bat- tresses of character to another—Americans grow savage at any breach of it, and an American girl who reported an insult at home—we do not mean an outrage, but an insult— would be avenged within twenty-four. hours in a manner she might herself recall with regret. We are writing of England, and hold that in a great many places, the liberty of dispensing with escort which, is practically conceded to the new genera- tion of girls, has been pushed to a dangerous extreme.
As against the claim to dispense with chaperonage indoors, the case we would make is a different one. In the first place, the social laws, like all other laws, are not meant for the good, but the bad. There are frisky young girls in society, as well as frisky young matrons, and it is by no means expedient that the former should be left absolutely to themselves, to pre- ceed from one audacity to another, and at last form groups with laws and manners which, at all events, are not those of English civilisation. Those who argue that there is no danger of the kind, either do not know what passes around them, or do not recognise the fact that like tends to like, and likeness tends always to deepen. Abolish the con- orship to-morrow, and though few theatres would suffer, there would always be one which was socially intolerable. There is no danger of our society descending to the Compiegne level, as described by Prosper Miiimee, but nobody wants to go within measurable distance of that level; and the only way to avoid it yet discovered, is to infuse into every meeting at which both sexes are present, a certain proportion of the ex- perienced, which is the meaning of chaperonage. After all, the ultimate object of all these assemblages is that girls and boys should have a chance of falling in love with one another; and to reject chaperonage is, in fact, to declare that under the most trying and risky circumstances of life, experience is of no use. How is a girl, even if she is from Girton, to know that the pleasant man who is so assiduous is, recognised by all men in the room as "a bad lot," or a man whose habit it is to amuse himself by exciting the affection which he does not intend to claim? The girl, however emanci- pated, cannot ask the questions the chaperone can ; nor does she receive in a moment the volley of information—sometimes, it may be, malignant information—which reaches the chaperone at once. The world is not too kind, but it usually refrains, from telling a girl what her lover is like until she either cannot believe the information or, believing it gets a bitter heartache. Why should she have less help in these strenuous circumstances of life than in any others, or why not from the same people ? We see no sense in a liberty which is simply a liberty not to know things all-important to be known. Besides, surely mothers have some rights, though there is a little danger of their being whittled away into nothingness, and the mothers may care to see by whom their daughters are sought, where their fancy strays, and even —though that, we admit, is a detail at which the young lady of the age secretly smiles—whether they behave in strict accord with the conventions, some of which are rubbish, but others are the result of centuries of painful experience. The turning-out of the mothers, which is the first result of the theory advocated in the Daily Telegraph, seems to us a most harsh proceeding, entirely fatal to the mothers' efforts to do their duty, and nearly fatal to the family confidence, which is worth at least as much as liberty. After all, there is liberty enough for girls in all but a few circles. Parents for some time past have been very properly brought up by their children, and hardly deserve to be placed under a new vigime imported from America, which their experience tells them is not precisely adapted to our social climate. If they are too much oppressed, they may rebel, the doctrines of Radicalism not being exclu- sively for the benefit of the young ; and then, what would become of the progress of the age, the emancipation of women, and all the other social Utopias in which this generation, fastidious as it is and enjoyment-seeking, loves to find new sources of intellectual titillation.
The Daily Telegraph, in discussing chaperonage, makes the remark that "hysterics are practically a lost art," and evidently believes that this inconvenient method of displaying emotion was in reality a form of affectation taught by one generation of women to another. Is not that a little unjust to our great-grandmothers? As a matter of fact, hysterics have not died at all, but have only descended to a lower class, which lives, like our grandmothers, under insanitary Con- ditions. Factory-girls go into hysterics just as easily as the ladies of 1790 did, and sometimes as affectedly, allowing the want of self-control, generated by ignorance, bad air, and want of proper food, to get the better of them, till they scream, cry, and beat their heels, just as Fanny &peeve did. It is improved health which has rid the educated classes of this nuisance, and we are not sure that improved health is not at the bottom of a great many of the new claims for liberty to be accorded to girls. They want so desperately to be active, they feel so vigorous, and they fear so little, that they resent the fetters involved in waiting for a companion, and are ready for a ten miles' hill-walk alone. They are not wise in taking it, nevertheless, least of all wise when they live in the neighbourhood of a great city, or must move along the great silent highways in the country, where tramps andgipsies often in extraordinary numbers make their home.
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