The emancipation of woman and her usurpation of the province of man has been a favourite theme for satire or caricature in modern times. To the ancients, and to all peoples among whom woman is only a superior kind of servant, such satire would not occur; the occasion for it would be inconceivable. That a great and silent revolution has taken place among us as regards the life of women no one can deny; and among the many social changes of the Victorian era this is by no means the least important. Women, especially young women, lead a much less restricted life than they did fifty or sixty years ago.
Middle-aged people can remember the time when young ladies scarcely moved outside the paternal door without a chaperon; when the pieces de resistance of their education were "deportment" and the use "of the globes"; when physical exercise, unless they were in a position to keep riding horses, was confined to decorous walks in the company of their elders; and when to ride in a hansom or mount to the top of an omnibus - a feat, it is true, which then required severe and ungraceful exertion - was considered distinctly "fast." Hunting, the resource necessarily of a very few, was almost the only active sport that women shared with men; and , though literature and authorship were recognised as suitable occupations for ladies of sufficient intellect, the number of such "divinely-gifted" women, always few, was not likely to be increased artificially under the then prevailing standard of women's education.
It is not too much to say that at the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign higher education for women hardly existed; while the supply of governesses in private families was more conspicuous for quantity than quality, so long as poverty and the need to earn a living were regarded as sufficient qualifications for a teacher. But now all this has been changed. In most large towns high schools, organised and equipped for the best education models, are supplying an education for which, in the multiplication of careers for women, there has been an ever-increasing demand. At Oxford and Cambridge residential halls for women have a recognised status, and are constantly sending out a supply of educated women who have been allowed to measure their strength, sometimes most successfully, with men in the University, thus disproving Aristotle's generalisation that the female intellect is essentially inferior in kind. University examinations supply a standard of intellectual attainment for women teachers.
Opinions may still differ as to the value for girls of an education which aims more at imparting knowledge than at cultivating accomplishments. But there can be no doubt that to educate as well as possible those who will be the earliest teachers of another generation, and by whom, in many cases, the mental attitude of its sons towards intellectual improvement will be permanently moulded, is a national benefit.
It is the opening of new careers for women that has stimulated the demand for their higher education which aims more at imparting knowledge than at cultivating accomplishments. But there can be no doubt that to educate as well as possible those who will be the earliest teachers of another generation, and by whom, in many cases, the mental attitude of its sons towards intellectual improvement will be permanently moulded, is a national benefit.
It is the opening of new careers for women that has stimulated the demand for their higher education. Even on the old theory that marriage was the only vocation in life to which a girl could look forward, it might have been remembered that she needed a good education to be a competent teacher of her children; much more is this need evident now that the complexity of modern life gives her so many other opportunities of maintaining herself. In large families of daughters where there is no superabundance of means it is no longer assumed that on the breadwinner's death they must all drag on a struggling existence as poor gentlewomen. Some of them look out for employment that will earn their bread and make them independent of the protecting care of father or husband. Numbers of women are journalists - even war correspondents - clerks in commercial houses and public offices, doctors as well as nurses. They are undergraduates at the Universities, alternating a little work with a good deal of play, like the male variety of that species. They travel unprotected all over Europe; they shoot and fish, play golf and cricket and hockey and lawn tennis, as well as the milder croquet; and they even, it is whispered, dispense with a chaperon at balls. But perhaps the greatest factor in the growing independence of young women is the universal bicycle. The skilful wheel-woman - and women are as skilful riders as men - can go when and where she pleases, free as the air, rejoicing in her swiftness. The bicycle is a veritable emancipation for girls, especially in the country; and, though it may have some disadvantages to their health and their conduct, most people will hold that its advantages largely preponderate. So, too, we believe, do the advantages of that general emancipation of women, to which on its intellectual side the vast improvement that our age has seen in the machinery for their education bears striking witness.
