THE HIGHER EDUCATION FOR WOMEN.
THE meeting at Leeds for the furtherance of a genuine Uni- versity education for women may, we hope, result in the speedy subscription of the few thousand pounds necessary for the .erection of the requisite buildings in the neighbourhood of Cam- bridge. There is too much dispersion in the excellent educational aims and aspirations of the present day. Good people aro so distracted with the variety of claims ou them and the number of points at which their sympathies are appealed to, and effectu- ally appealed to, for moral and material aid, that they are scarcely able to apprehend the proportionate importance of the objects so placed before them, and thus there is a real danger of the very best aims failing for want of coherent and sus- tained support. Hence we wish to put this clearly to our readers,—that the primary condition of all ultimate success in the movement not only for a better and more complete system of edu- cation for girls, but also for all such changes in our social system as may be adapted to open to women the opportunity of a larger and higher life, is the thorough intellectual discipline of as many
women as may be willing and able to go through such a training, with a view to forming a highly cultivated class of women, to whom we may subsequently look as competent to furnish both scientific teachers for the highest girls' schools, and even, when not engaged in the profession of education, authorities of weight on all those social difficulties to which we have referred. Fur two points we take to be quite clear,—that the movement for the edu- cation of women must more or less owe its success to the steadily- applied influence of women, or, at least, will succeed vastly less rapidly and less completely if women of influence are not found to guide and urge it on, than it will if they are ; and next, that such influence will never be what it ought to be unless those who lead in these matters are really of a calibre to win the full respect and confidence of the public to whom they will have to appeal. If these two points are indisputable,—and we hope to show that they are,—then the first and most essential of all conditions for im- proving the position of women in the social scale is the immediate and earnest attempt to open the very highest opportunities of edu- cation to all women so placed as to be able and anxious to avail themselves of the same.
Now is either of these poiuts really in any degree doubtful ? Can there be a question that while the thoroughly educated woman is, so to speak, the unknown—not to say the imaginary—quan- tity of the social problem, there never will or can be a proper attention paid even to the elementary education of girls, much less to the more difficult questions on which the opinions of the day are so crude and so much divided ? In the first place, girls' schools, though they may be partly,—and only partly,—taught by men, must always be superintended by women ; and the teaching will
never be good unless the superintendence is keen and instructed. Then the tutorial element in the education of girls,—that more fami- liar intellectual discipline which is not given in the class-room, but
in the discussion which takes place with respect to the lee bure,— can hardly ever be properly provided except by women. There could be no possibility of giving that minute and vigilant and per- sonal care to the intellectual progress of girls which is needed to bring them up to the studies of their class, to keep their interests freshly awake upon them, if men were to be their only teachers. Then, again, unless the mothers are thoroughly educated, we may be quite sure that the daughters' education will
never be tested as it ought to be. Let the fathers be what they may, they will never be quite free from the impression that a woman will best understand what is most needful for her girls. Those who hold most strongly that there is a natural division between the intellectual and moral needs of the races, ought also to hold most strongly that the women should be highly cultivated ; for if there be, as we too hold, any such broad natural division, the best educated members of the one sex can never appreciate perfectly the deficiencies of the other, and the sufferings to which those deficiencies give rise. Nothing can be more illogical than to assert, as some men do, the immutable distinctions of intellectual and moral sex, and yet grudge to women the advan- tage of a highly educated class of their own sex. The very position taken by such persons is in itself a confession that the most refined men cannot adequately judge for women in the matter ; and if so, then what is more obvious than that you should get as speedily as possible a class of women sufficiently educated on every side of their minds to supply the deficiency.
And again, apart from the question of education in the narrower sense, on what do we want more light than on the capacities or incapacities of women for various branches of social and pro- fessional work? On what points are we more clearly in need of new and finer judgments, than on the various painful and difficult social questions into which some women have lately rushed with such ill-advised and ostentatiously precipitate zeal ? Can it be doubted that these women have gravely prejudiced the true interests of their sex by the impression which they have created of wild pre- judice and fanatical intolerance? If they have taken up, as probably they often have, by mere instinct, the right cause, they have done it infinitely more injury than they would by their advocacy of the opposite cause,—and solely, purely, for want of a trained judicial intellect, for inability to suspend their judgment till they have heard all, for conspicuous,—and what would have been in men of the same calibre—disgraceful, want of fairness. Yet this has not been their fault. It is the mere inevitable result of defective education, of the absence of that faculty for duly weighing all that can be said, which is never acquired without the discipline of a thorough education, and is rarely if ever inherited. There can be no manner of doubt that on many of the most delicate and difficult questions involved in our modern civilization, we greatly need the fine judgment of really educated women, bat are very far in-
deed from needing those impetuous prejudices of half-educated women which at present we too often get in its place. People sometimes pretend to fear that with a highly educated class of women, wo shall have a dangerous and revolutionary social influence. Now we ourselves are not entirely without fear that women as they are, with vehement philanthropic impulses and little educated judg- ment, may sometimes exercise a dangerous and revolutionary in- fluence on pending questions. But who ever heard of high culture making any class more rash and revolutionary ? Is it not the common-place of political observation that the highest masculine culture of the country is far too cautious and conservative ? Do the Universities,—even the London University, youngest and most radical of the University constituencies,--elect revolutionary agitators ? Do not one and all incline far too conspicuously to reactionary notabilities? What folly, then, for Conservatives as such to deprecate the higher education of women ! If, as is often said, women are in all things more conservative than men, and if the most conservative of mon are the men whose intellectual culture has been pushed the highest, all analogy should teach us that in pro- ducing a highly-cultivated class of women, we are producing not a revolutionary agency of dangerous destructiveness, but a con- servative agency dangerous, if dangerous at all, for the strength of its probable attachment to the past. The argument should certainly lie in the mouth of Radicals rather than in that of Conservatives, that high education for women is to be distrusted. Luckily, how- ever, such an argument would so ill become such a party that that is not really formidable. Still, it can never reasonably be advanced by those who profess a panic fear of innovation.
If, then, what we need, both for the sake of the adequate educa- tion of girls, and for the sake of a higher judgment on our most difficult social problems, is a really highly cultivated class of women,—the energies of all who desire that result should, we maintain, be given to aid and advance the one institution which alone at present really provides a true University edu- cation for them. The Ladies' Colleges in the great towns are admirable secondary schools. The classes at Edinburgh and in London,—we call attention with the greatest pleasure to the new prospectui of the Ladies' Classes in University College, London,— are capital educational influences of their kind ; but as they are not shaped into any curriculum of study, as their value is not tented by any body of external examiners, and as they are not accompanied by any system of tutorial aid and inspection, they cannot claim to do in any degree the kind of work which the Ladies' College now at Hitchin, and soon, we hope, to be removed to the more immediate.neighbourhood of Cambridge, accomplishes. Therefore we say that those who take a profound interest in the various questions affecting women's place in society should now concentrate their efforts on this one object,—to raise a real Univer- sity for women, where opportunities in all respects such as are open at the Universities to young men are granted to women,— where they have the invaluable intellectual freedom of sepa- rate sitting-rooms, the constant aid and superintendence of tutors, the stimulus of good professorial lectures, and the advantage, scarcely to be overrated, of having their knowledge and their progress periodically tested by the most thorough scru- tiny from outside. Let us get this one point Bottled before we disperse our efforts again over a wide surface. Let us raise the few thousand pounds adequate for the establishment of one good Women's University, and we shall have set on foot a movement that will soon propagate itself in a hundred different directions for the helping and healing of Englishwomen and, through Englishwomen, of Englishmen. The Women's University is the first groat step to be accomplished by all who wish to see the rapid progress of Women's Education, and to avail themselves of the highest calibre of women's judgment in deciding on those various great social issues of the day in which women are most directly and powerfully interested.
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