SCHOOLGIRLS TWO CENTURIES AGO

Evening Star, Issue 22451, 23 September 1936, Page 5

SCHOOLGIRLS TWO CENTURIES AGO

Two hundred years ago the education of girls was a strange and fearful thing (says a writer in the ‘ Daily Mail’). At the tender age of six or seven the child of well-to-do parents was packed off to boarding school, at a cost to her father of some 12 to 14 guineas a year. She took with her, in a diminutive tin trunk, two sheets and one silver spoon, which, on her arrival, became the perquisites of her headmistress. The fee paid by her parents was, of course, subject to that bugbear of pre-sent-day fathers of families, the “ extras.”

In those days these comprised two guineas a year laundry (young John could get a reduction of his laundry bill if he wore dark trousers, but Miss Lettice must pay the full two guineas), two guineas a year French, two guineas a year geography “ with use of the globes,” two guineas a year singing, and, as it was not considered “ genteel ” for young ladies to sing in any tongue other than Italian, a further two guineas a year Italian. The instruction covered by the everyday curriculum taught a young lady to “ enter a room gracefully,” to “ cross a room genteelly,” and to “ accept a present elegantly.” In addition, the most exquisite needlework was taught.

The samplers surviving to-day, fine as some of them are, show little of the careful and beautiful embroidery such as was worked into the household linen of great-great-great-grandmother, in whose days tots sat on their little stools learning to sew years before they learned their letters or were old enough to he sent.away to boarding school. Dancing, another extra, was taught by exquisite dancing masters, who not infrequently fluttered the hearts of their susceptible pupils. In fact, so romantic were .the .schoolgirls of those days that their highest flight of fancy was an elopement with the dancing master! Painting was one of the subjects on which a gently brought up young woman must be able to discourse, in addition to being herself something of an artist.

As Daniel Defoe wrote on the ‘ Education of Women 1 : “ Their youth is spent to teach them to stitch or sew or make baubles. They are taught to read, indeed, and perhaps to write their names, or so; and that is the height of a woman’s education.”

The daughters of less wealthy parents were not so fortunate. If they attended school at all, it was the village Dame’s School, where, at the most, they were taught to read and write, and repeat certain prayers. The schoolgirl of 200 years ago was not encouraged to think for herself, the answers to the Dame’s questions being learned by rote after this fashion: — Teacher: Was not Oliver Cromwell called Lord Protector?

Pupil: He was. Teacher: Did not Queen Elizabeth cause to be beheaded Mary Queen of Scots ?

Pupil: She did. No doubt girls of those days were inhibited and had masses of complexes; but I like to visualise them “ entering a room gracefully ” and “ crossing it genteelly,” and then I think of my own daughters bounding through the lounge like young tigers.