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    12 THE PROFESSION OF THE TEACHER.

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  • Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.

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    The Annual Reports Of The Governesses' B...

    earning , inside one ' s own door , and snugly locked up by one ' s own key , teaching the widow's son to read , and the motherless bairn to

    sew , or holding comfortable converse with Dickens and Thackeray , Tennyson and Mrs . Browning , or some of those elder spirits among

    " the just made perfect" who have left us records of earnest lives and holdeathsas a compensation for living people whom we

    y , have not met because they would not meet us , —because we kept a shop !

    Into the general stream of business , then , whose tributary rivulets are of different complexion in different localitieswe desire to turn

    , the intelligent female labour of the Anglo-Saxon race . The second question we proposed was , —how are we to effect the change ? It

    can _onLy be effected on the required scale by every young 'woman who must " go out" from the domestic hearth asking herself , " Is

    there nothing else which I can , for better pay than that of a governess , undertake at the cost of a little courage ? Can I not

    enter somebody else ' s shop , or set up one of my own with some friend ? Or is there not some situation as clerk or accountant , or

    superintendent , for which I can fit myself if I look out sharply ?" Such an onecasting her gentility on the waters , would assuredly find

    it return to , her again after not many days . And with married women in their own comfortable and well-considered homes lies the

    great onus in this matter , of sheltering with their motherly and sisterly sympathies the more exposed career of those who must at

    all events for some years seek their own bread . [ Let it once be clearlrecognised that the young business-woman is shielded by the

    social y intercourse of those who are technically called " ladies , " and many of those graver objections which deter parents and guardians

    from allowing their charges to meet the world in shops and Warehouses would be obviated . It is because these scattered young

    women are not so shielded , because when they disappear there is no large and reputable circle to hound the destroyer with

    indignation , that mischief sometimes occurs . Before concluding we would fain make some allusion to a long

    and careful paper in ' Blackwood' for the current month ( February ) . It iswe think , written by a man of strongly conservative tendency ,

    | but w , ith much sense and kindliness . The writer believes that the cry about unemployed women nowadays is marked by much morbid

    exaggeration , and that young men struggle with equal difficulties as tutors , as clerks , as emigrants ; and that it would be an excellent

    thing if all single women would get married as fast as they can , and the rest hold their tongues in a dignified manner . And he thinks

    that the numbers of solitary women are greatly exaggerated in the popular mind just at the present time . He instances the Bronte family

    as a case where the tutor brother failed , and the governess sisters succeeded , in working out a great career . All this is said with a

    certain pleasant paternal kindness , much as Sir Peter Laurie might

    12 The Profession Of The Teacher.

    12 THE PROFESSION OF THE TEACHER .

• Citation
  • English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), March 1, 1858, page 12, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01031858/page/12/