Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

A

FEMALE EDUCATION IN FRANCE.

REMARKABLE discussion has been going on of late in France on the subject of female education, which throws a curious light on the Catholic view of ideal womanhood and its fruits, and is particularly interesting to us in England, where the same questions (though under a strangely different aspect) are in fact being battled over, i.e. what is the result we ought to aim at in our education of women, and how is it to be obtained.

The object for which woman was put into the world, which may for shortness be symbolised as that weekly enounced by the Saturday Review, is pretty nearly equivalent to the opinion of M. de Maistre, a great Catholic authority quoted by the Bishop of Orleans in his interesting little volume on Les Femmes studieuses. To be able to understand what men are doing and talking of so far as to know that Pekin is not in Europe, and that Alexander the Great did not request in marriage a niece of Louis XIV.,' 'is to be their greatest chef-d'œuvre;' they may love and admire the beautiful, but must not be allowed to seek to express it;' 'art, or study of any kind must only be carried on by way of amusement;' 'woman is only ridiculous and unhappy if she attempts anything serious in any department of knowledge;' 'she becomes a monkey;' in short, though she may be receptive of the thoughts of others, the power of original thought cannot and ought not to be hers.

6

To this the Bishop, Dupanloup, replies by giving a long list of women whose gifts have been uncontested. He goes on to say that 'not only have they a right to intellectual cultivation, but that it is

6

also a duty. God never makes useless gifts, and woman has received from her Creator the gift of intelligence, that it may be used. A strict account will be required of every talent it is said in the Bible, and I know of no Father of the Church who has thought that this parable does not concern women as much as men.' St. Augustine says that no creature to whom God has granted the lamp of intelligence ought to act like the foolish virgins and let her lamp go out for want of trimming, not only for her own sake, but for that of others.' 'Woman,' the Bishop goes on, has not been considered as an intelligent free being, created in the image of God and responsible to Him for her actions, but as the property of man, made only for him who is her end and aim' (the italics are his), ‘a fascinating creature to be adored, but still an inferior being for the use and pleasure of man, who is alone her master, legislator, judge -as though she had herself neither soul, conscience, nor moral liberty, and as if God had not given her also faculties, aspirations, rights as well as duties.'

Monseigneur Dupanloup does not mince matters. He goes on to say that 'coquetterie is the natural result of this education which makes man the only end of the destiny of woman; that if the one man to whom she has been given is vicious, cross, or unworthy of affection, when temptation comes in the form of that superior being for whom she has been taught to think herself created, having been always told that she is an incomplete being, incapable of a separate existence, unless she be very strongly fortified by Christian principle she

Les Femmes studieuses, by the Bishop of Orleans. Sur les genoux de l'Église, Sauvestre. Seconde lettre de Monseigneur Dupanloup.

is enchained by the fatal attraction.'

He proceeds to show that the repressed capabilities, and unsatisfied desires which are not allowed to feed on what is good and true, fix on all sorts of false and unwise objects, and hence the lowness of mental and moral tone, the feeblemindedness of many women evidently fit for better things, but whose education has been stopped when they were really children.' 'A clever woman,' he says, 'will not remain confined to such arid duties as M. de Maistre desires. The knowledge that "Pekin is not in Europe," and the like, will not satisfy her, and unless she has intellectual pleasures as a rest from material duties, she will resort to frivolity to escape from their ennui.' He might have moreover added that a really superior woman will always do whatsoever she has to do better than the mere drudge. Serious and earnest mental application, real exertion of thought, are necessary. Even music and drawing are not enough unless they are of the higher order.' 'We must not deceive ourselves. Rigid principles with nothing but futile occupation, devotion with a merely material or worldly life, produce women. without resources in themselves, and often insupportable to their husbands and children.' Earnest intellectual occupation calms exaggerated feelings of anxiety, restores the balance of her mind, and satisfies any just and noble desires she possesses; it gives peace sometimes more than any prayer, and brings back the spirit of order and good sense.'

6

Mutilating the tree into a stunted shrub is not the way to improve it, and the woman who feels that she has missed her aim in life, exhausts herself in vague aspirations. "Vocation" is a word as applicable to women as to men. There is a divine plan for each soul, the real

VOL. LXXX.-NO. CCCCLXXVII.

isation of which is helped on by our efforts, or checked by our want of energy. We cannot foresee always to what end God intends his gifts, but he certainly has given them for some object. After all, the desire to keep women ignorant is chiefly caused by the idleness of men, who desire to keep their superiority without trouble. It is a vicious circle: idle men wish their wives to be ignorant and frivolous, and as long as women continue so, they wish men to be idle. They scem to think that they have gained a victory when they have succeeded in making their husbands neglect their business. How many magistrates, lawyers, and notaries are worried by their wives into failure and want of exactness in their attention to their work.'

The Bishop's description of 'polite' life in Paris is very graphic and somewhat terrible; 'a young woman seems to think that she has married in order to be able to run about the world and amuse herself: balls, concerts, visits, the turf, do not leave a moment of rest day or night. Later in the year come the watering places and bains-de-mer. Whether he likes it or not, the husband must share this exuberance of excitement; he is often bored and often remonstrates, but the wife employs all her grace, skill, and seductiveness, which God had given. her for a very different use, to induce him to yield.' 'If she has married a literary man, an orator, or a philosopher, and he takes up a book to escape from this whirl, she pouts (which is thought charming when she is twenty), dances round him, puts on her bonnet, comes back, sits down, gets up, looks repeatedly in the glass, takes up her gloves, and ends by an explosion against all books and reading, which are of no use but to make. a man absent and unbearable. For the sake of peace, the husband throws away his book, loses the

Ꭰ Ꭰ

habit of reading, and in time, failing to raise his companion to his standard, he sinks down to hers.' Certainly, in France, husbands must be more complying than with us, and female influence stronger, for it would be a strange household in England where such fantastic tricks could succeed.

He goes on to show a state of things to which fortunately there is no parallel with us. In the well to do classes,' he declares, as soon as there is any question of marriage, a young man is called upon to give up his profession, for every girl who has enough to live on insists on her husband's doing nothing. A soldier or a sailor must remain single, or marry a dowerless girl. This senseless prejudice is such an accepted fact that even the most rational mothers of a certain class hardly advise their sons to adopt a profession, or only for a few years, for say they, "a married man cannot go on with one." How can men be expected to work under such conditions, or care for a position which may have at any moment to be given up? What zeal or ambition is proof against the knowledge that at five or six and twenty, when a man has just got over the difficulties which beset the beginning of all careers, he is to renounce everything? I have known mothers in despair at seeing their sons, in the very moment of success, forced to forsake it all at the peremptory demand of a young girl and the blindness of her parents, who cannot foresee the dangers of idleness, and the inevitable regrets, the monotony of a tête-a-tête after the emotions of Solferino, the unceasing excitement of our Algerian garrisons, or the adventurous life of a naval officer. It is the part of

a Christian woman to teach her daughters to dread the dangers of brutal stupidity and idleness; the social and intellectual suicide produced by having no employment,

no office, no work; the religious and political necessity of taking up a useful position in life and asserting one's influence in the cause of right.'

He complains that the separation of mind between men and women is becoming more and more dangerous; 'if she has read nothing but frivolous books, and has no idea of what can be said on both sides of a question, now that all subjects are discussed and reasoned upon, how can she give that help, virtue, purity, and faith which are her peculiar province? She must become serious, reflective, firm, courageous, I will even say manly in thought, to be able to do her part. There are no noble works in which woman has not borne part; she is intended as the "socia" of the man-even more, his helpmate, support, councillor, 'adjutorium.'

[ocr errors]

With regard to her children, 'study is necessary to accomplish her most important duties; she must attend to their intellectual as well as their moral education. How many an affectionate mother has lost her influence over her sons from the want of the power to guide or understand them. Sound judg ment and capacity are required as well as love; whereas now the chasm between the sexes becomes daily greater, the contrast between her occupations and the life she should lead, working with and for man, and like him for God.'

At present what does education do for girls, who at eighteen are taught that all is finished with their first pink gown, and who fling themselves headlong into the rapturous delights of going out into society? They have learnt nothing thoroughly, not even that on which they spend so much time. A girl will practise four hours a day at the piano, and possess at the end no knowledge of the great masters, their styles or schools. Music has degenerated into a brilliant noise,

which does not even sooth the nerves.' Drawing as usually taught does not even develop the sense of the beautiful. A girl may be able to draw what is called well, and not know a good picture from a bad one, or whether Perugino was the master or the pupil of Raphael.

As to the charge of pedantry, or of being a 'blue stocking,' these are not the consequences of real knowledge; it is the incomplete development of the mind, the smattering of sciences and accomplishments which make a woman believe that she knows what she is really ignorant of.

Moreover, when there is no proportion between aspirations and the power of realising them, the half educated mind will not be satisfied with common life, but will seek its pleasures in excitement and emotion.

There is one point to which the Bishop incessantly recurs, which certainly does not bear by any means the same proportion to the life of women in England as in France -dress. He describes how it takes up the conversation for several hours at least every day, how it saps the foundation of everything serious even in virtuous and Christian women. He complains of the inordinate time taken up in shopping, the way in which milliners and ladies' maids become the confidantes of girls, that a mother teaches her daughter to think that dress is one of her greatest interests and primary duties, talks and allows her to talk about it for hours, and to judge of everything in the world by its criterion.

'A girl accordingly, at her outset in life, asks only for jewels, lace, and a title; she thinks only of these, of herself in short, even on the very day when she is about to consecrate her life to devotion to the most serious duties' (underlined in the original). "When she finds, as life goes on, that she must give up

instead of being an idol, serve instead of being served, the trial is a hard one.'

He then says that some sort of plan of life is necessary to secure a certain proportion of details to the whole. In architecture a great work is sometimes sacrificed from the want of this harmony. Let the architect of his own life look to it. If there is difficulty in gaining time for reading, let women learn the art of seizing on odd times, of using disengaged moments.

Study makes women like their homes, and instead of being 'crushed and flattened under the enormous weight of nothing' as De Maistre calls it, gives them an occupation and an interest there. For this, however, she must give herself a chance in matter of time: if she stays out every night at late balls and parties, how can she work in the morning?

In short, nothing could be more admirable than the Bishop's tone, or more judicious than his remarks, and probably Monseigneur d'Orleans, a clever, ambitious man, very earnest in what he considers the right, was considerably pleased with the effect he had produced. He had proved his case only too well; his facts do not seem to have been disputed. The Cardinal Archbishop of Bordeaux, member of the Senate, followed suit, and it now only remained to find a proper remedy for such a grievous state of things. A paternal government, of course, felt itself called on for action, and the Minister of Public Instruction appealed to the whole lay body of teachers to organise a better system for the education of women.

To the horror of the Bishop, it was proposed to establish courses of instruction for girls, lectures, lessons by the professors of the university, in short all the 'personel et matériel scientifique' of all the 80 lycees and 260 colleges of France was to be employed in the cause.

Monseigneur Dupanloup was furious. To have himself nursed the pinion which impelled the steel' was too much for his equanimity, and, forgetting all his former philosophic calm, he uttered a loud long shriek of terror, in two pamphlets, declaring that the whole was the result of a conspiracy to take the education of women out of the hands of the Church.'

To which M. Sauvestre, as one of the representatives of the lay and reforming part of the community, replies in a little book called Sur les genoux de l'Eglise. 'If,' said he, 'the Church has already had the whole of the education of girls in her own hands, as by your own confession is the case, upon it must fall the responsibility of the state of things which has called forth the reprobation of the two bishops.' 'For nearly twenty years the priests in France have enjoyed an influence recalling the worst days of the Restoration; for ten years the clergy have had the direction of almost all education, as Monseigneur admits, and what is the result in his own words?-'flimsy, frivolous, superficial. A young woman in general knows nothing, absolutely nothing; she can only talk of dress, steeplechases, and the absurdities of other people. She knows by heart all about the most famous actors and horses, the names of the performers at the Opéra and the Variétés; she is more familiar with the Stud Book than the Imitation. Last year she betted on Tourques, this year on Vermouth, &c.; she will you the best milliners, the most fashionable saddlers, and weigh the respective merits of the stables of the Comte de Lagrange and the Duc de Morny; but, alas, should conversation turn on any subject connected with history or geography she is struck dumb; she is incapable of talking on business, art, politics, or science.'

tell

'These

girls,' says Sauvestre, 'so well up

in horses and theatres, all come out of fashionable convents; could any one, indeed, live in the world who had not been educated in a convent?' He goes on to describe how an attempt has been made to destroy all lay instruction, to support and encourage Jesuit colleges and convents, and the schools of the various brotherhoods and sisterhoods (where the young mind is perverted out of all distinctions of right and wrong, and the casuistry of Liguori is put in the place of morality, where the pupils are taught to distinguish between theft which is permissible and theft which is blamable,' between defamation to be avoided and that which is permissible to defend the holy interests of the Church and morality— of which last permission the outside world will perhaps think that the Bishop has occasionally availed himself liberally in his second pamphlet).

Sauvestre then gives his authorities, beginning with a catechism in very general use, sanctioned by the Church, headed by testimonials from the Bishop of Strasburg and Bishop of Verdun, at much length, third edition, 1866.

'Is it always wrong to steal ?'A. 'No; it may happen that the person from whom you take the property has no right to oppose you, or you are in extreme distress, and only take what is absolutely necessary to deliver yourself from it; or in secret as a sort of compensation, which you cannot otherwise obtain, of things which are due to you in justice' (this last is even a point of doctrine which is called 'secret compensation'). 'Thus servants who do not think themselves paid according to their merits, the shopkeeper who thinks he is selling too cheaply, can right themselves by this convenient doctrine.'

[ocr errors]

The chapter on 'Defamation' shows how calumnies need not be retracted in five different cases; i.e.

« AnteriorContinuar »