WOMEN AND THE EDUCATION BILL.
[To THE EDITOR OP THE " SPECTATOR."' SIR,—In your paragraph in the Spectator of October 18th on the position in which the Education Bill places women you argue that because they may be appointed managers and co-opted on to Education Boards, their position as regards education will be " improved, not injured." You say : "It must not be supposed that the Bill in any sense excludes women from direction and control in public elementary education." Now this is the very misapprehension which Mr. Balfour at Manchester, in dealing with clerical influ- ence as affected by the Bill, spent a great part of his speech in exposing. In the most emphatic manner he stated that the only directing and controlling authorities are those County and Borough Councils on which women are incapable of sitting ; that managers are merely the servants of those bodies ; and that inasmuch as clergymen are ineligible to sit on one of them—tbe Borough Council— by so much is their power as regards education lessened. You say : "All they [women] lose is the right to be elected on School Boards, since School Boards will be abolished." But School Boards, as Mr. Balfour points out, are at present the controlling authority, and it is impossible by law that women should sit on the Councils which are to succeed them as authorities ; so that " all they lose " is all that they think, on public grounds, they ought to have. You cannot have it both ways ; either Mr. Balfour is wrong when he claims for this Bill that it places the clergy in an altogether inferior position, or it is true that women will be reduced from a position of power in regard to education which they have held for thirty years to that of subalterns carrying out a policy which they are unable to shape or modify. Authority is with the purse; common sense tells one that to urge reforms on a body from an equal standpoint as part- controllers of the purse is a much more efficient operation than to make suggestions to a body by whom you have been appointed, and by whom if you are importunate you may be dismissed. And experience is not wanting in support of common-sense ; one or two women are serving both on School Boards and on Boards of technical in- struction, and their evidence as to the relative effect of their work on the different Boards is conclusive. No, Sir, it may be held that the incidental sacrifice of women to the principle of the Bill as laid down by Mr. Balfour—viz., that "education should be in the hands of the unifying authority of the Borough or County Councils "—is justified on a balance of advantages, but you cannot persuade those who are offered up that there has been no sacrifice at all. Nor can those who believe that in the existing state of educa- tion in England the value of women's work can hardly be over-estimated cease from an endeavour to awaken the public to a knowledge of what they are losing.—I am, Sir, &c., A LIBERAL UNIONIST WOMAN.
[We admit that when the Bill is passed the claim of women to be eligible to sit on Town and County Councils will be greatly strengthened, but we cannot agree that the fact that the existing law is not altered in the Bill is a good ground for wrecking it, as it certainly would be wrecked if the problem of female representation on Town and County Councils were added to the other problems of the Bill.—En. Spectator.]
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