Education: How Old The New

Curiously enough, it was during the thirteenth century when the development of feminine education in the early university period was at its height, that certain changes in the domestic economy of the Bolognese are worthy of notice. Two kinds of prepared food became popular, if they were not, indeed, both invented at this time. One of them, bearing the classic name Bologna, is still with us, has spread throughout the world, and is likely to continue to be an important article of food for many centuries more. Another form of prepared food was a sort of dessert called Bologna pudding, prepared from cereals, and which can still be purchased in Bologna, though foreigners, as a rule, do not care much for it. These two articles of food modified materially the preparation of food for meals at this time. It was possible to buy both of these, as now, ready made, and so the housewife was spared the bother and trouble and expenditure of time required for this work. We have here one phase of the origin of the delicatessen stores. This sort of change in domestic economy has always been noted whenever women have gone out of the home for other occupations and have become something less–or more–than the housewives and mothers they were before. Such changes in the dietary, however, in the direction of ready-made food are never popular with men. One German historical writer has been unkind enough to say that this is one of the reasons why the higher education gradually became much less popular, or at least attracted less attention than before. "Women want things for themselves, and if they are opposed insist on getting them," is the way this cynic Teuton puts it. "If, after a time, however, having got what they want, they find that the men do not like them to have it, they gradually abandon it." According to him Bologna and Bologna pudding saved the stooping over the kitchen range, or whatever took its place in those days, and gave all classes of women more opportunity for intellectual development or at least for occupation with things different from household duties, but after a time the more or less resentful attitude of the men brought about a change. However that may be is hard to say.

Another interesting feature of the history of these times connected in some way with feminine education or, at least, with feminine occupation with other things besides their households, was a great devotion to a particular breed of pet dogs of which one hears much in the accounts of the life at Bologna at this time. Here, once more, the German cynic has had his say. He has suggested that, whenever women became occupied with things outside their home, with a consequent diminution in the number of children, they are almost sure to find an outlet for their affections in devotion to dogs and other pets. Apparently he would suggest that they literally go to the dogs. It is very curious that just during this thirteenth century, when feminine education at Bologna is at its height, one hears so much of these pets. At other times in the world's history, when women have taken to intellectual interests and especially when there has been a fall in the birth-rate, this same attention to pet animals is worthy of study.

After the thirteenth century there seems to have been a reaction against these pets. It is to be hoped that there is no connection between this and the prepared foods spoken of, but the decline in the popularity of pets and of woman's occupation with intellectual interests went hand in hand. For all of this I am indebted to German authorities whose attitude towards feminine education may somewhat prejudice them and, indeed, probably does so, but these things are only mentioned as showing certain views that are held. The interesting thing for us is that after a period of somewhat more than a century of rather intense interest on the part of the women in nearly every phase of the intellectual life, there is then a diminution of interest, so that by the end of the fourteenth century women, even where feminine intellectual life was vigorous, are occupied almost without exception as they were before the university period, mainly with domestic concerns.

While feminine education was so common in the ecclesiastically ruled universities of Italy, the custom did not spread in Western Europe. The reason is not far to seek. All of the western universities owe their origins to Paris. Oxford was due to a withdrawal of English students from Paris, Cambridge to a similar withdrawal from Oxford. Many of the Scotch universities are grandchildren of Paris. All of the French universities are direct descendants, except Montpellier. The Spanish universities have a similar relation. The experience with feminine education at Paris had been unfortunate. The Héloïse and Abélard incident came in a formative stage of the university. It settled unfavorably the whole question of feminine attendance at universities for the west. It seems a small thing to have such a wide and far-reaching influence, but it is very often on little things that the success or failure of great social movements of any kind depends. We have practically no record of any relaxation of university regulations in this matter in the west. Perhaps the Teutonic character was opposed to it, perhaps the Teutonic women were less anxious for it, being more occupied with Church and children and their home, but there was none, and its absence is responsible for the feeling so common among us, that now for the first time in the world women are enjoying the opportunity for the higher education.

Even the university epoch, however, is not the first phase of opportunities for the education of woman in modern history. Far from it, indeed, we can find much more than traces of a feminist movement in other centuries before this, and, indeed, in many of them. When Charlemagne established schools for his people and invited Alcuin, the English monk, to develop educational institutions for his people, the first and most important school was that of the imperial palace where Alcuin himself taught. In this the women of Paris were given opportunities quite as well as the men; indeed, they seem to have taken a more vivid interest and their example seems to have been the highest incentive for many of the men to take up a work so foreign to their natures, for as yet they had all the barbarous instincts of their Gothic ancestors, only slightly tamed and modified by two or three centuries of gradual uplift and religious training of character. There are letters from the women of the palace, and especially Charlemagne's daughter, to Alcuin, discussing phases of his teaching and suggesting problems and questions with regard to the matters which he had been making the subject of his instruction.

It would be easy to think that this incident of the Palace School did not mean very much and that its passing influence did not make itself felt widely nor for long. The state of education at this time must not be forgotten. Only the clergy, as a rule, had leisure for it. All the rest of the world were engaged either in the frequent wars or in a tireless struggle for subsistence as farmers, merchants and craftsmen. The nobility neglected education just as much as the upper classes always do, though there were certain fashions which gained a foothold and that seem to show that they had some interest. Many a nobleman of the mediaeval centuries, however, boasted that he could not sign his own name. He was rather proud of the fact that he had not lowered himself to mere book knowledge. There were large numbers of the clergy and the monks, however, and these were the scholars of the period.

There were also at this time large numbers of religious women, and these in their leisure hours spent much time at educational matters and some of them accomplished lasting results. The mother of the family, the court dame, the wife of the nobleman, whose castle was much more the home of work than it has ever been at any time since, had but little leisure for the intellectual life. The nuns devoted themselves to beautiful handiwork, to the composition as well as the transcription of books and to the cultural interests generally.

It has always been true, as a rule, that the woman who accomplished anything in the intellectual life must be either a celibate, or at most, the mother of but a child or two. The mother of a large family, unless she is extremely exceptional, cannot be expected to be productive in the intellectual life. She has not the time for original work, and still less for the filing process necessary for appropriate expression. There are rare exceptions, but they only prove the rule. One of the two forms of production apparently women must give up to devote themselves to the other. The nuns in the Middle Ages, in the retirement of their convents, gave themselves much more than we are likely to think possible, to literary and scientific production. Within the past year I have published sketches of two distinguished women of the tenth and twelfth centuries whose books show us the intellectual interests of the women of this time. Only that women were having opportunities for mental development these would not have been written, and as they were written for women, it is evident that those interests were quite widely diffused. One of these two authors comes in what is sometimes called the darkest of the Dark Ages, the tenth century; the other was born in the eleventh. They serve to show how much more intense than we are likely to think was the interest of the time in things intellectual. Without printing and without any proper means of publication, somehow these women succeeded in making literary monuments that have outlasted the wreck and ruin of time, and that have been of sufficient interest to mankind to be preserved among vicissitudes which seemed surely destined to destroy them.

One of the two ladies was Roswitha, or Hrotswitha, a nun of Gandersheim, in what is now Hanover, who in the tenth century wrote a series of comedies in imitation of Terence, probably not meant to be played but to be read. She says in the preface that the reason for writing them was that so many religious were reading the indecent literature of classical Rome, with the excuse that it was necessary for the cultivation of style or for the completion of their education, that she wanted and had striven to write something moral and Christian to replace the older writings. That preface of itself ought to be enough to show us that in the nunneries along the Rhine, of which we know that there were many, there must have been a much more widespread and ardent interest in literature, and, above all, in classic literature, than we have had any idea of until recently. Hrotswitha, to give her her Saxon name, was only a young woman of twenty-five when she wrote the series of stories and plays thus prefaced, and while her style, of course, does not compare with the classics, worse Latin has often been written by people who were sure that they knew more about Latinity than any nun of the obscure tenth century could possibly have known.

The other woman writer of about this time was Hildegarde, the abbess of a monastery along the Rhine, born at the end of the eleventh century, who wrote a text-book of medicine, which was the most important document in the history of medicine in this century. The nuns were the nurses and the hospital attendants and in the country places, to a great extent, the physicians of this time. In the cities there were regular practitioners of medicine, but the infirmarian of a monastery cared for the ailing monks and the people on the monastery estates when ill, and often they were many in number, and the infirmarian of a convent did the same thing for the sisters and for at least the women folk among the people of the neighborhood. It was in order to gather together and preserve the medical traditions of the monasteries and convents that Hildegarde, who afterwards came to be known as St. Hildegarde, wrote her volume on medicine. It has been recently issued in the collection of old writings called "Migne's Patrologia," and has drawn many praises from historical critics for the amount of information which it contains. These two, Hroswitha and Hildegarde, furnish abundant evidence of the intellectual life of the convents of this old time and more than hint at how much has been lost that might have helped us to a larger knowledge of them.

With this in mind it will be easier to understand a preceding phase of the history of feminine education in Europe. The first nation that was converted to Christianity in a body, so that Christian ideas and ideals had a chance for assertion and application in the life of the people, was Ireland. Christianity when introduced into Rome met with the determined opposition of old paganism. After the migration of nations and the coming down of the barbarians upon the Roman Empire, there was little opportunity for Christianity to assert itself until after these Teutonic peoples had been lifted out of their barbarism to a higher plane of civilization. In Ireland, however, not only did conversion to Christianity convert the whole people, but it came to a people who possessed already a high degree of civilization and culture, a literature that we have been learning to think more and more of in recent years, many arts, and the development of science, in the form of medicine at least, to a high degree. The law and music, the language and the literature of the early Irish all show us a highly cultivated people. When Christianity came to them, then, education became its watchword. Schools were opened everywhere on the island. Ireland became The Island of Saints and of Scholars, and literally thousands of students flocked from England and the mainland to these Irish schools. The first and the greatest of these was that founded by St. Patrick himself at Armagh. During the century after his death there were probably at one time as many as 5,000 students at Armagh. Only next in importance to this great school of the Irish apostle was that of his great feminine co-worker, St. Brigid, who did for the women of Ireland what St. Patrick had been doing for the men. It is probable that there were 8,000 students at Kildare, Brigid's great school, at one time. It is curious to think that there should have been something like co-education 1,500 years ago, and, above all, in Ireland, but Kildare seems to have had a system not unlike that in vogue at many of our universities in the modern time. The male and female students were thoroughly segregated,–may I say this is not the last time in the world's history that segregation was the distinguishing trait of co-education,–but the teachers of the men at Kildare seem also to have lectured to the women. The men occupied an entirely subsidiary position, however; even the bishops of Kildare in Brigid's time were appointed on her recommendation. For centuries afterwards the Abbess of Kildare, Brigid's successor, had the privilege of a commanding voice in the selection of the bishop. The school at Kildare was conducted mainly by and for women, though there were men in the neighboring monastery who taught both classes of pupils.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the education of Kildare is that it was not concerned exclusively, nor even for the major part apparently, with book-learning. The book-learning of the Irish schools was celebrated. Down at Kildare, however, certain of the arts and crafts were cultivated with special success. Lace-making and the illumination of books were two of the favorite occupations of these students at Kildare in which marvellous success was achieved. The tradition of Irish lace-making which has maintained itself during all the centuries began, or at least, secured its first great prestige, in Brigid's time. Gerald the Welshman, sometimes spoken of as Giraldus Cambrensis, told of having seen during a journey in Ireland centuries after Brigid's time, but nearly a thousand years ago, a copy of the Scriptures that was wonderfully illuminated. He thought it the most beautiful book in the world. His description tallies very closely with that of the Book of Kells. Some have even ventured to suggest that he actually saw the Book of Kells at Kildare. This is extremely improbable, however, and the Book of Kells almost surely originated elsewhere. There seems, however, to have been at Kildare some book nearly as beautiful as the Book of Kells, made there, and establishing peradventure the thoroughness of the artistic education given at Kildare at this time.

So much for feminine influence and education under Christianity. Most people are likely to know much more of the place of women in Greece and Rome than during Christian times. We are prone, however, to exaggerate the dependence of woman among both Latins and Greeks and to think that she had very few opportunities for intellectual development and almost none for expression of her personality and the exertion of her influence. Here, once more, as in many other phases of this subject we are, through ignorance, assuming conditions in the past that are quite unlike those which actually existed. Recently in the Atlantic Monthly, Mrs. Emily James Putnam, sometime the Dean of Barnard, in an article on "The Roman Lady,"17 has completely undermined usual notions with regard to the position of the Roman woman. The Roman matrons had rights all their own, and succeeded in asserting themselves in many ways. There was never any seclusion of the women in Rome and the Roman matrona at all times enjoyed personal freedom, entertained her husband's guests, had a voice in his affairs, managed his house and came and went as she pleased. Mrs. Putnam suggests that "in early days she shared the labors and the dangers of the insecure life of a weak people among hostile neighbors. It may not be fanciful to say that the liberty of the Roman woman of classical times was the inherited reward of the prowess of a pioneer ancestress, in the same way as the social freedom of the American woman to-day comes to her from the brave Colonial housemother, able to work and, when need was, to fight."

Indeed the more one studies social life in Rome the more clear does it become that conditions were very similar for women to what they are in this latest of the republics here in America. This will not be surprising if we but learn to realize that the circumstances of the development of Rome itself, the environment in which the women were placed resembled ours of the later time much more closely than we have had any idea of until recent years. The Italian historian, Ferrero, has read new lessons into Roman history for us by showing us the past in terms of the present.

The conditions that developed at Rome, as I have said, were very similar to those which developed in the modern American republic. Riches came, luxury arose. Eastern slaves came to do all the work in the household that could formerly be accomplished by the women, Greek hand-maidens particularly took every solicitude out of her hands, and then the Roman matron looked around for something to occupy herself with, and it was not long before we have expressions from the men that would remind us of many things that have been said in the last generation or so. There is a well-known speech of Cato delivered in opposition to the repeal of the Oppian Law which forbade women to hold property, that is reported by Livy and sounds strangely modern. Mrs. Putnam talks of it very aptly, "as an expression of the ever recurrent uneasiness of the male in the presence of the insurgent female."

"'If, Romans,' said he, 'every individual among us had made it a rule to maintain the prerogative and authority of a husband with respect to his own wife, we should have less trouble with the whole sex. It was not without painful emotions of shame that I just now made my way into the forum through a crowd of women. Had I not been restrained by respect for the modesty and dignity of some individuals among them, I should have said to them, "What sort of practice is this, of running out into public, besetting the streets, and addressing other women's husbands? Could not each have made the same request to her husband at home? Are your blandishments more seductive in public than in private, and with other women's husbands than your own?"

"'Our ancestors thought it not proper that women should transact any, even private business, without a director. We, it seems, suffer them now to interfere in the management of state affairs. Will you give the reins to their untractable nature and their uncontrolled passions? This is the smallest of the injunctions laid on them by usage or the laws, all of which women bear with impatience; they long for liberty, or rather for license. What will they not attempt if they win this victory? The moment they have arrived at an equality with men, they will become your superiors.'"

The social conditions which developed at Rome are indeed so strangely like those with which we are now familiar as to be quite startling. As a mere man I should hesitate to suggest this, since it refers particularly to feminine affairs and domestic concerns, but since it has been betrayed by one of the sex perhaps I may venture to quote it. Once more I turn to Mrs. Putnam for an apt expression of the conditions. She says:

"The Greeks, who, to be sure, had nothing in their dwellings that was not beautiful, had still supposed the great works of art were for public places. With the Romans began the private collection of chefs-d'oeuvre in its most snobbish aspect. The parts played by the sexes in this enterprise sometimes showed the same division of labor that prevails very largely in a certain great nation of our own day that shall be nameless: the husband paid for the best art that money could buy, and the wife learned to talk about it and to entertain the artist. It is true that the Roman lady began also to improve her mind. She studied Greek, and hired Greek masters to teach her history and philosophy. Ladies flocked to hear lectures on all sorts of subjects, originating the odd connection between scholarship and fashion which still persists."

This subject may be pursued with ever-increasing recognition of similarity between that time and our own. For instance, Mrs. Putnam says: "A woman of fashion, we are told, reckoned it among her ornaments if it were said of her that she was well read and a thinker, and that she wrote lyrics almost worthy of Sappho. She, too, must have her hired escort of teachers, and listen to them now and then, at table or while she was having her hair dressed,–at other times she was too busy. And often while the philosopher was discussing high ethical themes her maid would come in with a love-letter, and the argument must wait till it was answered.

"Nothing very important in the way of production resulted from all the lady's literary activity. The verses, if Sulpicia's they be, are the sole surviving evidence of creative effort among her kind; and, respectable as they are, they need not disturb Sappho's repose. It was indirectly that the Roman lady affected literature, since kinds began to be produced to her special taste; for it is hardly an accident that the vers de société should expand, and the novel originate, in periods when for the first time women were a large element in the reading public."

In our time it has been said, that one of the reasons why the young man does not marry is often that he is fearful of the superiority of the college-bred young woman. He knows that he himself has no more intelligence than is absolutely necessary for the proper conduct of life, and he fears that his "breaks" in grammar, in literature, in taste for art, in social things, may make him the laughing-stock of the educated woman. We would be reasonably sure, most of us, that at least this is the first time in the world's history that anything like this has happened. It is rather interesting, however, to read some of the reflections of the Roman satiric poets on the state of affairs that developed in Rome as a consequence of study and lectures and at least supposed scholarship becoming the fashion. "I hate the woman," says Juvenal, "who is always turning back to the grammatical rules of Palaemon and consulting them; the feminine antiquary who recalls verses unknown to me, and corrects the words of an unpolished friend which even a man would not observe. Let a husband be allowed to make a solecism in peace." I recommend the reading of Juvenal to the college young woman of the modern time, not only for its classic but for its social value.

Among the Greeks the position of women was quite different from what is usually supposed. It is only too often the custom to think that the Greek women, confined to a great degree to their houses, sharing little in the public discussions, coming very slightly into public in any way, were more or less despised by the men and tolerated, but surely not much respected. The place of women in life at any time can be best judged from the position assigned them by the dramatic poets of any period. The larger the mind of the dramatic poet, the more of a genius he is, the more surely does his estimate expressed in literature represent life as he saw it. Ruskin pointed out that Shakespeare has no heroes and many heroines; that, while he has no men that stand in unmarred perfection of character, "there is scarcely a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity." What is thus true of Shakespeare is just as true of the great dramatic poets of the Greeks. In practically all the extant plays of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, women are the heroines. They are represented as nobler, braver, more capable of suffering, with a better appreciation of their ethical surroundings and the realities of life, than the men around them. As much as Antigone is superior to her quarrelsome brothers, as Alcestis rises above her selfish husband, as Tecmessa is superior to and would have saved Ajax if only he had permitted her, so everywhere do we find women occupying not a place of equality but a position of superiority.