The schoolgirl of a century ago was nothing like her predecessor of a half century earlier, according to this editorial. – JOE JOYCE
IT HAS been insisted of late that the secret of Ireland is inertia, but it is reassuring to find that one domain of activity at least has escaped its baleful influence – the Alexandra College, whose first Guild Conference is reported in our columns to-day.
Nothing could be more sharply defined than the contrast between the Early Victorian “Miss” and the twentieth century College girl. The former left school “finished,” in the amazing vocabulary of the day, prepared to divide her time between routs, beaux and the vapours. If you had told her she had duties as a citizen she would have stared; if you had suggested that she had ties, duties, and obligations, to a class other than her own, she would have professed herself “vastly tickled,” or “vastly insulted,” according to her temperament.
The modern girl carries from her class-room, in a head at least as pretty as her predecessors, an aroused and undying sense of duty and human fellowship. But it must be remembered that the lack of this sense in the girls of the past was not wholly their fault – they were the natural outcome of their day and generation.
That was the time when, a legislative measure of great importance to the welfare of the working classes being before the Lords, the Archbishop of Canterbury walked out of the House, regarding the matter as one in which he could not conceivably be supposed to take an interest. He would be both a rare and a bold ecclesiastic who could so act to-day, when a great social revolution has been gradually effected in the attitude of all classes of the community towards each other. Sympathy has been widened, the ethical sense immensely developed, and the consciousness of social obligation and citizenship steadily gains ground. A slightly jarring note was struck by one lady in an otherwise brilliant and admirable address when she spoke of the habitual jealousy of women towards each other.
It is about time that this fiction should be given a decent burial. For one of the great advantages of a Collegiate education for girls is that it lays the foundation of those warm and often life-long friendships between women which are one of the characteristic features of modern life.
We have observed that the doctrine of the jealousy of women lives chiefly on the lips of the elder generation, who have never proved how bon camarade a girl can be, how proud of a friend’s laurels, how generously willing to be eclipsed by her, and in the mouths of the kind of men who hold that a woman qua woman is incapable alike of good work, noble aspiration, or real comradeship. But the woman of to-day does not need to talk about her work with a capital W. She goes and does it, keeping always in her heart an undying loyalty to those at whose feet she learned a high tradition of womanhood.
As in the evolution of humanity those nations which honoured and maintain that tradition hold, and have always held, the highest place, so among individuals, it is not the men of small brain and inferior calibre who have helped the woman’s movement which, as Olive Schreiner has so ably pointed out, is emphatically not a movement on the part of civilized women in search of greater material enjoyment or physical ease.
Rather is it a revolt among the best and noblest part of feminine humanity against remaining in passive idleness, contributing nothing, mentally or physically, to the fund of labour which sustains the State.
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