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    FEMALE EDUCATION IN THE MIDDLE CLASSES, ...

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    -=Ss5 »-- Nearly Half A Century Lias Ela...

    years of age , have no place In non-doniestic industry , and remain secondary at home as lace " wive in s industry and " daug as hters " farmers ; " that ' wives one million " " shop occupy keepers a

    wives , " etc p . ; and that the remaining , two millions are , engaged in nondomestic occupations on their own account , or are possessed of

    independent Now , means in the . " face of facts like these , It is no longer a question

    whether woman ought or ought not to leave the sphere of home duties , and take her part In industrial and other occupations . What ,

    in this respect , was speculation and theory fifty years ago , has become actice and necessity now . In the middle classes of life there is

    often pr no alternative between labor of some kind , manual or Intellectual , dependence upon others , or vice , which , followed by "woman

    as a trade , Is a festering canker in the heart of civilisation . _~ No man of the middle classesbe he engaged in

    professionalmercantile , or other pursuits , be , he prosperous as he may , can , assure to Ms daughters pecuniary Independence . Brought up in luxury ,

    _expensively and fashionably trained , elegant and accomplished girls are , to the daily knowledge of us all , suddenly thrown upon their

    own resources by the death or pecuniary failure of their parents . Unfitted btheir education and their habits to stand alone , with

    their matrimonial y chances lessened , if not lost in the change of ¦ circumstanceswhat more melancholymore hopeless , and helpless

    condition can , be imagined than that , to which custom has in some degree rendered us callous , and the recurrence of which the whole

    system of middle-class female education renders inevitable . The beautiful dependence of woman upon manupon which novelists

    , and sentimentalists love to dwell ad nauseam ,, and the burden of which some of the more sensible of either sex thoughtlessly take

    up , is in reality a condition of servitude and dependence from which every reflecting and honorable mind must inevitably shrink . Out

    of it has grown that servility of mind and body , which ., disguise it as we is at the root of all the relations between the sexes ,

    _smd which may , aims the deadliest blow at domestic peace and happiness , at human worth and dignity .

    Till women of the middle classes are educated as responsible human beings , trained to take their part in active life , they will

    never truly be man ' s mate and companion . The author of " The Industrial and Social Position of Women , " a work which cannot be

    too widely known both to men and women , goes to the very root of the question .

    " If , " says he , " we compare the position held by woman In the middle ranks on the one hand , with the position held by her , on the

    other hand , in the higher and lower ranks , we cannot but be struck with the contrast . In the higher and in the lower ranks she

    emphatically shares the lot of man : —leading with him in the one a life of affluent leisure , and bearing with him in the other a share

    of the labor characteristic of their common station . But in the

    Female Education In The Middle Classes, ...

    FEMALE EDUCATION IN THE MIDDLE CLASSES , 223

• Citation
  • English Woman’s Journal (1858-1864), June 1, 1858, page 223, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/ewj/issues/ewj_01061858/page/7/