THE BELGRAITIAN YOUNG LADY.
THE number and variety of the articles, papers, reviews, and even books which are now written about women's work, seem to strike some people with amazement, and incline them to exclaim, with Carlyle, speech is silver, but silence is golden. A little less talk, a little less agitation among men, and the sort of flutter now visible among women, they say, would die away of itself, to the great relief of all not acutely interested in the wrongs and the rights of Girls. That might be the result of silence, no doubt, and we are conscious, like the rest of mankind, of a slight weariness of the topic ; but there is a side to the matter which these observers scarcely sufficiently perceive. After all said and done, these women are half the human race ; in Britain a great deal more than half ; in the class which discusses them, say everybody not working with his hands, immensely more than half. Exact statistics are impossible, but the probability is immense that of the 700,000 surplus marriageable women in England, women who ought to marry, and by no human possibility ever can marry, more than half belong to the educated and semi-educated classes, among whom marriage is late, who emigrate, who enter professions in which marriage is inconvenient, who, for different reasons, some bad and some good, seek no wives. There is no doubt whatever that among these three-fifths of the middle and upper classes there does exist a sense of grievance, real or unreal, a readiness to cry aloud, a passionate desire for some as yet undefined great change, which crops up momently, now in a movement that is, or seems, more or less ridiculous, now in one which good men feel anxious to foster, and very often, we may add, by fostering, spoil. These plans for education, these struggles for entrance into the professions, these claims to separate property, these efforts to secure votes, are all signs, some of them healthy, some of them morbid, of a real unrest, which, in countries less controlled by historic tradition or caste feeling, are producing the most striking and very often the most untoward
results. Much of the American movement, for example, rightly shocks lm "advanced" minds ; but the shock does not blind them, if they are sensible, to the fact that all these wild "resolutions," with their fierce condemnation of marriage, of inequality between the sexes, of legal restrictions on work, mean a revolt as serious as a revolt against any creed. There is not an editor in England who cannot confirm from his personal experience the existence of this unrest, who does not know that the faintest expression of a wish to receive evidence deluges him with letters of complaint, entreaty, ! and scorn for existing systems. We wish the managers of the Times,—al ways on this point the most conservative of journals,— would announce that for two days to be specified they would pub lish every woman's letter received on Woman's Claims not containing a libel. They would publish nothing else on those days, and the revelation of the unrest existing would, we believe, astonish those who complain that so much is now made of "such trifles."
The paper in Macmillan said to be, we dare say quite truly, by a " Belgravian " young lady, on "A Girl of the Period," suggests naturally a speculation as to the causes of the unrest which she describes and endeavours to account for, as, we think, most unsatisfactorily. She says the cause is mainly idleness, and sighs for thework-a-day careers she fancies open to her sisters of the middle • class. We wish they were, the fact being that of all classes the daughters of the professionals have the least to do in the way of actual work, and perhaps the most desire to do it, but that is not our point for the moment. The Belgravian young lady says the girls of her class, fairly though imperfectly educated, and in good "condition," as girls a century ago were not,—though, by the way, they lived longer than this generation—find no field for their energies in their father's houses, may not take to the poor for reasons of hygiene, or to reading lest they should be "blue," and are driven to choose between a Protestant nunnery and the ball-room, which latter form of pleasure soon palls, till the power of enjoyment is reawakened by "flirtation,"—flirtation marked just now,—why, she does not explain,—by a "low tone of morality which allagree to be gaining ground." "We ask any intelligent man to put himself for a moment into the place of any unmarried woman of his acquaintance. Treated up to the very confines of middle life as if still a child, with no more liberty or independence than at sixteen, obliged to conform to the habits and practices of her father's house, whether congenial or not to her own temper and principles, with no definite object in view, and no prospect of being able to form larger interests till the breaking-up of her home (often late in life) leaves her even more desolate than before, can we wonder that with many fear overcomes delicacy in their struggle to escape ?" Well, all that may be true, and some of it • is, though we question if the really fast girl is the one that marries, believing that the main distinction among girls, apart from exceptional beauty or fortune, is a power of sympathizing with men, which is often found among the quiet daughters of country parsonages, and has no necessary relation whatever to "fastness ;" but the question is, how much of it is not only true, but also new. Was there not just as much dissipation a hundred years ago, and were there more outlets for female energy ? The first question may be answered out of any collection of memoirs, and the answer will be that dissipation has on the whole decreased, that society is less absorbed in the pursuit of pleasure, or rather excitement, and that its pleasures and excitements are rather less injurious than they were. People make a grand fuss about the indelicacy of modern female dress, much of which is in their own imaginations,—the purest women in the world, for example, the Irish peasant girls, being bare to the knee, and some of the irnpurest shrouded from head to foot in black—but after all, Miss Chudleigh is impossible to-day, and as Miss Chudleigh is to a fastish girl of to-day so are the manners of the Georges to our own. The gossip of society is worse than the reality, and the gossip is pure compared with the written memoirs of a century ago. Dissipation is very much what dissipation was, only a little cleaner, and with this bad difference,—that there is a greater disproportion between the sexes, partly real, partly resulting from the habit among men of delaying marriage, and then seeking only the young. Men of all ages marry girls under twenty-five, and of course women who pass the fatal age are left out in the race, and will sacrifice a good deal to regain their places. On the other hand, is there less scope for energy indoors? No doubt there is less in mere domesticity, the habits of our day scarcely permitting the daughters of the wealthy to take part in the control of the household. Real equality has not come, and real distinction has disappeared, and the girl who tried to control footmen and keep the housemaids in order would in a month find that she was messing a task almost too hard for her mother. But the loss of this occupation has been most amply supplied by a thousand other and higher if not more pressing interests. Those excellent girls who knew housekeeping so well, knew very little else, seldom opened a book, never saw a newspaper, and thought as little of any world outside a circle limited by endless difficulties of locomotion as any nuns are supposed to do, as, in fact, unmarried girls on the Continent usually do. "Now," writes "A Belgravian Young Lady" with perfect truth, "a desultory education has shown her glimpses of much that is interesting in the world around her, and probably the poetry of three or four modern languages has left the traces of many a noble thought and aspiration in her mind. The newspapers lying on her father's table show her
each morning the great world, with all its sorrow and all its needs. The religious revival, too, affects her powerfully, as in sermon after sermon she bears the preacher extol the merits of self-denial and the glories of self-sacrifice." There is even an increase of actual work. The whole field of literature is open to women and the whole range of art, and the daughter of the Duke of Norfolk may exhibit a statue, or present a painting, or sell a book without offence to the most rigorous censor. Princesses do all those things, and who cavils? Travel for girls is an absolutely new habit not yet twenty years old, and the opportunities of study are at least as great for one sex as the other, perhaps greater, for the weaker has time and can have seclusion. That something is still wanting,—a something best described as a possibility, of a career other than marriage,—we have been among the first to urge, and we should gladly see every profession thrown open ; but we do not believe that girls' lives are stupider, or less full, or more colourless than they were, or that they are more necessarily driven to dissipation than their grandmothers were who endured it all, and did not complain, or complaining were disregarded. What has increased, and will increase, is self-consciousness, the sense that a minute life is a poor life, which somehow our grandmothers—for the change is as true of professionals as of peers— lacked. Many among us assert, and a few perhaps believe, that they were the better for lacking it ; that it was well for women to think the storing of preserves a serious work, and the counting of napery a solemn duty, that Nancy Lammeter was nearer the ideal woman than Esther Lyon. We disagree with them more heartily than we care to express, but it is needless to argue, for those who lament admit that that time is past and cannot be recalled ; that Mary, whether nobler than Martha or not, is so accounted ; that in the battle of the world the girl who is housewife, and nothing else, has very little chance. But this inability to be content with small things is in itself neither evil nor of evil tendency ; it is only a symptom of a great change which is passing over men as well, though it produces in them different symptoms. Forty years ago a lad of twenty who bothered himself much about the object of life, the whence and whither, and was discontented till he had got some mental foothold, would have been pronounced dreamy or silly ; but to-day, what lad of that age with cultivation does not so bother himself ? That the lads are the better for careers and the necessity of pursuing them is unquestionable ; and so might girls be, provided they previously received a strengthening education. When everything has been written that can be written, it all comes back, in this and almost every other department of social progress, to the tiresome word " education." Men are not so inclined to shut women up as some of their advocates believe, but are growing fairer every day. Their one selfish interest in the matter is the monopoly of power over property still assigned to them by the lingering feudalism in our laws, and that, as they showed last session, they are quite willing to resign. That injustice, a very gross one, as we think, will be swept away in a session or two, and if women were once educated to accept the conditions of work, work would be thrown open to them. Nobody really wants to keep them out of the Civil Service, for example, if they are competent to be civil servants, but then competence means something more than competence to pass an examination. If they wish to do serious work they must be rid of the giggle, and all that the giggle implies, and be content if they enter the strife to accept its conditions, one of which is no doubt a suppression, as far as may be, of the idea of their own need of deference. It is through evidence of the capacity which comes of education, of self-restraint, industry, and seriousness that women must win their way to the new position so many of them obviously desire. Whether they will be happier when they have won it may be doubtful, for after all the protected life has charms, but the doubt is of very little moment. Happiness is not the end of life, and if women who might be idle and pass what so many men desire, lives of lettered ease, are athirst for work, and competent to do it, any legal or social prohibition is pure tyranny, as purely tyranny as if the same disqualifications were laid on all men with brown hair. But then the competence must be secured or when the barrier is thrown down women will be trampled to death in the rush ; and though "A Belgravian Young Lady's" panacee of female colleges sounds like an anti-climax, her thought is, we believe, correct. The present education of well-to-do girls is the very worst ever given to human beings, and all reform, either in their position or their rights, must be based, first of all, on a reform in that.
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