Female
Education
It is the height of
selfishness for men, who fully appreciate in their own case the great
advantages of a good education to den these advantages to women. There is no
valid argument by which the exclusion of the female sex from the privilege of
education can be defended. It is argued that women have their domestic duties
to perform, and that, if they were educated, they would bury themselves in
their books and have little time for attending to the management of
their
households. Of course it is possible for women, as it is for men, to neglect
necessary work in order to spare more time for reading sensational novels. But
women are no more liable to this temptation than men, and most women would be
able to do their household work the entire better for being able to refresh
their minds in the intervals of leisure with a little reading. Nay, education
would even help them in the performance of narrowest sphere of womanly duty.
For education involves
knowledge of the means by which health may be preserved and improved, and
enables a mother to consult such modern books as will tell her how to rear up
her children into healthy men and women, and skillfully nurse them and her
husband when disease attacks for her household. Without education she will be
not unlikely to listen with fatal results to the advice of superstitions
quacks, which pretend to work wonders by charms and magic.
But according to a
higher conception of woman’s sphere, woman ought to be something more than a
household drudge. She ought to be able not merely to nurse her husband in
sickness, but also to be his companion in health. For this part of her wifely
duty education is necessary, for there cannot well congenial companionship
between an educated man and an uneducated wife who can converse with her
husband on higher subjects than cookery and servants wages. Also one of a
mother’s highest duties is the education of her children at the time when their
mind is most amenable to instruction. A child’s whole future life, to a large
extent, depends on the teaching it receives in early childhood, and is needless
to say that this first foundation of education cannot be well laid by an
ignorant mother. On all these grounds female education is a vital necessity.
nyc
ReplyDelete