THE GIRL GRADUATES' NEW GRIEVANCES.
WE have received during the last three weeks a shower of letters upon a subject started by the Bishop of Manchester,—the occupation of educated girls, who, as he recently said, complain bitterly of the household discipline under which their time, as they think, is frittered away. We have published only a selection of the letters, partly from want of space, partly because we have thought many of them unwise ; but we have read them all, and they all indicate the existence of a new and somewhat curious social difficulty. Great numbers of English girls, particularly in the well-to-do middle-class, are getting them- selves, in one way or another, fairly educated. They cannot all go to Girton or Nuneham, and so get an education which puts them on a level with men ; but they do go to college, and learn from competent masters, and read hard, and select governesses with knowledge, and acquire, in one way or another, a very good, though often a rather broken and irregular, training. Of course, getting the education, they get with it the activity of mind and desire for interesting occupation, which education, when the soil is at all rich, or even ordinarily fertile, almost invariably produces. They want, therefore, when they leave the class-room, to turn their knowledge to account, "like the boys," to "be something" or do something definite, some- thing in which they may seem to themselves to advance towards an end. The something need not be a money-making occupa- tion—though the desire to make money is not always absent— but it must be something definite, in which progress, and the measurement of progress, is possible ; in which the mind is really tasked, and consequently, in which it can absorb itself. They demand, in fact, to be seriously interested in their pursuits. To their annoyance, and sometimes their amazement, the girls find that the discovery of such occupations is exceedingly difficult. They are not, many of them, asked to govern homes. They cannot in any numbers devote themselves to professions, the only pro- fession really open to them—teaching--being to a large proportion of them unattractive. They cannot "go about " as the boys do, when boys happen to be idle, being prohibited by a strict, not to say an irresistible etiquette ; and they cannot fill up their time with amusement, amusement in the day-time being for the middle- class nearly unprocurable. There are few daylight amusements, except concerts, which they are expected to attend ; and those few very often strike them, as they struck Sir Cornewall Lewis, as distinct deductions from the very small sum of human happiness. Even in London, amusements soon weary, and the girls in search of occupation find themselves either driven back upon their" own resources," or forced to enter upon some course of study taken up for occupation, and therefore pursued with intermittent zeal, and without that strong desire to advance at a fixed pace which compulsory study usually developes. Those among them who possess "resources of their own,"—that is, those who have any creative power, who can paint, or model, or carve, or write, are of course fairly happy, for they can by persistence raise their work into regular occupation ; can advance, and can measure their advance by obtainable foot-rules. The painter or modeller can sell her work, or can exhibit it, or can strive on until the Academy at last opens its doors, the Academicians at all events being singularly fair to women. The novelist or the biographer can publish, and test her work by the reception given it by critics or the public, or if she fails to find a publisher, has at least the distraction of thinking of her own creations. Even the musician can advance, can master new and more difficult tasks, and can achieve, if not a public, at all events a defined drawing-room success. There is scope in all these things for ambition and energy, and it may be, for the desire of usefulness in the house ; or at the very least, there is absorbing occu- pation. The student is less fortunately situated ; she com- mences a labour which there is no one to share, or watch, or commend, and for which her materials are very often imperfect. The difficulty which middle-class girls have in pro- curing books at will is much greater than many men, who have never thought of the subject, would readily believe. The girls can very rarely find them in the house, Englishmen buying few books for themselves ; the fathers will not buy books for them in any quantity ; and they are often quite unreasonable about sub- scriptions to more libraries than one. If an English girl has one subscription to Mudie, she is thought to be fairly sup- plied. An expenditure of £9 a year for books, which will secure entry to the London Library, the best accessible large collection of grave books, to Rolandi's, one of the best for foreign books, and to Mudie's, the best for new English litera- tare, seems monstrous, to a father who would, nevertheless, give his daughter the £9 for an extra dress, or for a trip to the country, without either wincing or demur. The mothers, too, worry about the books more than is consistent with their obvious ignorance of their subjects ; while anything very new or very in- structive is apt to be snapped up by the men, who appreciate nothing so much as good household book-tasters. Then both painters and students complain of the household want of respect for their time. They say they are perpetually interrupted by absurd requests, which they cannotoppose ; that papa wants letters written, and mamma wishes them to drive out, and visitors will call and talk twaddle, to which they must listen sympathetically, and they are expected to go through a round of frivolity which makes study impossible, and wearies them into irritation and headache. This was the original complaint of the young lady who wrote to Dr. Fraser, and special as her complaint was, it un- doubtedly must have found an echo in thousands of minds, for in all the letters we have seen on the subject allusion is made to this grievance, occasionally in terms of savage energy, the writers declaring that they are slaves because mamma will not prevent their being constantly interrupted. Indeed, one correspondent speaks of herself as called away from her reading to dust some china, in a way which is quite a revelation to us of the failure of education to develope in some minds a sense of the proportion of things. With all, however, "inter- ruption " is a grievance, and sometimes a grievance so great, that if the ordinary correspondence sent to the Spectator had not accustomed us to the language of the aggrieved, we should see in this one complaint a real menace for ordinary house- hold happiness. The girls write as if the oppression would justify any revolt, and curiously enough, when their mothers agree with them, they do it with the thoroughness of our corre- spondent of last week, who goes the whole length of the American Judges about slavery, and declares, almost in so many words, that parents have no rights which children need respect, and are entitled neither to obedience nor affection. Fortunately, this exaggeration is only a feminine mode of swearing a little, and need not be regarded except as a maladroit method of ex- pression ; but the resort to such doctrines shows how very deeply the complaint is felt.
For this particular grievance of interruption, there are just two cures, and no more. The girls can endure it, with irritated repinings and complaints, as most of our correspondents are inclined to do; or they can get rid of it, as the boys are compelled to do, by getting rid of the mental habit of suffering under interruption. Men have to learn and do learn to be interrupted, and not mind ; and the girls, if they want the control of their time, must acquire the same self-restraining habit. There is not a professional man in London or a student who is not constantly interrupted, some- times ten times an hour, or one who does not at last learn to regard interruption as part of the day's work. He is not called off to mend china, but he is called off by five posts a day, and clients' or patients' visits, or clerks asking for advice, or superiors demanding help, or visitors bringing intelligence he cannot put aside. Nobody in active life can hope to write, or think, or count, or anything else entirely without interruption ; and nobody, unless his temper is very bad indeed, or he is nervous to the point of disease, makes of interruption a serious grievance. He learns to endure it, as he endures the weather, treats some interruptions automatically, disposes of others with half his mind, settles others by concentrated attention, and learns by habit, whatever happens, not " to lose his thread." That power can be acquired by all who choose, if their tempers are in any why under control ; and the girls must just acquire it, or suffer under its want, as they would suffer under a want of the power of application, or any other mental deficiency. English life cannot be wholly regulated for them, any more than for any other class ; while the extinction of parental authority, which some of our correspondents recommend, is absurd, as well as unjust. It would come merely to this,—that the parents would be in fetters, instead of the daughters, and that selfishness would be regularly cultivated in the young. Selfishness comes quite soon enough with age, without being pampered in that way. The parents have a well-founded right to household assistance from their daughters, if only because they Niemand more care than sons, and add less to the family wealth ; and if that assistance is asked for in the shape of help to pass time pleasantly, there is nothing unreasonable in the demand. There must be interruptions, and the interruptions must seem trivial, and the girls must provide for them as men do, by culti- vating a tolerance which, in three months, they will find easier than they could have believed. At the same time, they ought to be allowed a certain proportion of time to themselves, more especially if they are asked or wished to acquire any useful or money-bringing accomplishment ; much more access to books than they now have, and within limits which it is very difficult to define, a little more of the American independence of action. They are already far more free than their sisters on the Continent, where restriction is pushed till it becomes a moral im- prisonment, but they need still a little more. Parents are too much influenced by the example of the highest class—which is driven by the conspicuousness of its women to a sort of conventual disci- pline—and forget too much that strong intellectual interests and plenty of work are in themselves the best protections against dissipation. We are not fighting for an enfranchisement which we fully recognise to be undesirable for young women under twenty- five, or for any material alteration in the manners of our society, but only for the modicum of liberty to move about, and see friends, and choose occupations, which is conceded without a word said to every respectable governess in the country. There is no sound reason whatever why a girl living in an English city should not move about her business like a man, unattended like a man. If a woman must earn money, the useful restrictions continue and the nonsensical restrictions drop off, and why should they not drop off when the money is not so im- portant? They will drop off, whether the parents like it or not, if education is to go on at its present pace ; and the best course for them is to accept the change kindly, modify it, and surround the new situation with new mental guarantees. Otherwise, they will have ten years of worry to go through, ending in a more decided emancipation than they will like, or we either. Good girls in Boston are as good as they will be found anywhere, but if they want to cross " the Common " without escort, they cross it ; and it will come to that here, even if we have to revolutionise our police system to secure it.
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