16
she might pass to a subsistence, closed in her face with expressions of deference. Signs have not been wanting which have justified the saying "that a selfish disregard of the interests of women, and indifference to their sufferings, is the great national sin of England,—and all national sins, if unrepented, meet with their punishment sooner or later."
(3.) The defective training of the women themselves is the most serious of all the hindrances which I have been considering. Here it is that the vicious circle returns upon itself. These women cannot teach, because they are so ill educated, and again, they are so ill educated that they can do nothing but teach.[1] Many a woman rejected from the shop—till or housekeepers room for ignorance and inefficiency, is compelled, to offer herself among the lowest class of nursery governesses, or, failing all, to embrace the career, the avenues to which stand ever wide open, yawning like the gates of hell, when all other doors are closed.
The fault of this defective training lies mainly with the middle-class parents who, as the Endowed Schools Commissioners say plainly enough, educate their daughters to get husbands, and for nothing else.
Education was what the slave-owners most dreaded for their slaves, for they knew it to be the sure road to emancipation. It is to education that we must first look for the emancipation of women from the industrial restrictions of a bye gone age. In the meantime I may surely say that no lover of his country, of justice or of God, can see this misery unmoved. "He looked for judgment, but behold oppression, for righteousness, but behold a cry."
- ↑ "In one of Jerrold's sketches, Mr. Issac Cheek is asked. 'What can you do?' Now, as Issac had not dined for three days, he thought himself justified in saying—'Anything'. Hunger thus conferred the cheap diploma of omnipotence: why not of omniscience too? In a bitter moment I have been tempted to say that a governess is too often a poor lady who knows nothing, and teaches everything for nothing."—Dr. Hodgson.
