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CHAPTER 6.

            IT was late in the autumn when Sophia wrote as follows to Noel from Rome: –

            ‘What do you think, my dear Edmund, was Margaret’s reason for objecting to come here? Solely because she had learnt Rome with James, and did not like visiting it without him. How much more good we women are to you men than you deserve! And what do you suppose made her change her mind? James again: at least, I suspect so, for she has engaged the master whose style of painting he most approved, and is working as if she had her living to make by it. Our coming here is the result of a sort of compromise. I didn’t want to pass the winter away from all society, and Margaret said that if we went home, she would stay abroad and paint; and mamma, who is hardly up to Linnwood just now, was glad to fix upon Rome as reconciling all difficulties. I expect to meet a good many of my old chums here; and between the old and the new – I mean the antiquities and the visitors – I dare say I shall get on very well. Of course, you will manage to look in upon us at some time. I have heaps to talk to you about. My grand project, the one child whereby I seem to have any chance of surviving in my posterity, obstinately refuses to be born. Of course, I cannot carry out my plan alone, and everybody raises a fresh difficulty, until I begin to think that so far from England being a free country, we are the most servile people in the world. You always twitted me with my respect for conventionality, and hinted mysteriously at some standard, higher or deeper, or somewhere, which would be a better guide for poor bewildered mortality. But if you had read the letters I have received from people who are generally regarded as prodigies of liberalism, you would think that there is but one true faith, and that conventionality is its prophet. I had gradually enlarged my scheme until its prospectus included all the most recent suggestions, even that very nice one of Margaret’s about a sick department for teaching nursing. With respect to the students, I proposed no restriction as to class or social rank, considering that, as with men it is the conduct and education that make the gentleman, so with us the mere fact of any girl having the means and desire to enter our university would make her a fit student.

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Well, I am met on the very threshold by the demon of Caste. One correspondent asks, “Is it an institution for gentlewomen? because in that case you must not admit girls whose fathers are in business.” I wrote back very civilly to request a definition of the term “business.” “All who make money by buying and selling.” I replied that I feared the definition was so comprehensive as to exclude the entire population of the country, inasmuch as the Queen and the dukes breed and sell horses, cattle, and sheep, and that my own surplus stock of game, poultry, and butter, is sent to the market. “That, of course,” said the answer, “was not intended by ‘business,’ but people who have offices and shops.” I was determined to make my correspondent, who is a very leading member of society, convict herself of absurdity; so I replied again that it seemed hard to exclude the daughters of bankers, merchants, artists, and all professional men up to the Lord Chancellor, and that I must request a still closer definition. It at last came down to her agreeing to the admission of all except the retail classes.

            ‘This is no solitary instance, I assure you. On nearly all sides I am met by this question of class. “For whom is it intended?” And it is in vain that I reply by asking, “For whom are the universities we already have, intended?” Women, they say, are in an altogether different category to men. I took an interest not long ago in the formation of a sort of club for women who have to work at a distance from their homes, such as teachers, embroiderers, and painters, knowing that it would be an immense boon to them to have a resort of their own in the centre of their avocations – for I hoped they would gradually extend all over London – where they could pass their unoccupied time, and make engagements with employers. But the scheme broke down on the question whether the members should be allowed to receive visitors of the other sex. It was so essential, I considered, to give every facility for the making of engagements for work, and so conducive to propriety to have these engagements made under the eyes of their fellow-members, that I insisted on the point, and found myself deserted by the bulk of the projectors. Their objection was that ladies are not admitted as visitors to men’s clubs! and that the engagements formed might be flirtatorial rather than industrial. And why, in the name of goodness, should they not be?

            ‘Whose fault is it that all schemes for our especial benefit come to failure? Is it we women, or you men, that are so bad?

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A friend of mine lately come from Washington tells me, that on his complimenting an American lady on the large amount of liberty accorded to her sex in the United States, as proving the goodness of the women there, she replied modestly, –

            ‘ “Oh no; it is the American gentlemen who are so moral.”

            ‘I cannot help thinking that there must be something very wrong in the relations of the sex with us, when every proposition for our benefit is met by objections of this nature. I do not see why our universities should not be as independent of men as yours are of women. We might accept help from you at first, until we raise professors from among ourselves. Though I don’t see why tutors and masters should not be employed on the strength of pure merit, irrespective of sex. I know that men have a lurking belief that we are unable to take care of ourselves, and would be apt to fall a prey to those who do not mean well by us. But to bring us up with such an idea is surely not the way to foster independence among us. If the consequences of error are more serious to us, the knowledge of that very fact must tend to make us more cautious in the use of our independence. One of the results that I hope from my scheme is the gradual emancipation, of girls from their present home slavery. You don’t know what it is to be tied to the home, subject to the tyranny or caprice of parents or sisters, long after one has reached the age of discretion, simply because one is unmarried, and to be unable to follow one’s own bent, or develop one’s own individuality. Call women silly, weak, and emotional! I only wonder that most of us don’t go out of our minds altogether under the treatment we receive. The brothers in a family go out into the world to fight their way and make homes for themselves, and to sink or swim, as the case may be; and the poor sisters are left to pine in idleness, and in envy of the more fortunate lot of their brothers; and for want of a congenial and healthy engrossment for their faculties, are too often tempted to accept offers of marriage from men who are altogether unworthy of them. You recognise but one career in life as open to us, and that is a career which depends upon your sweet wills to accord or to refuse us. I have read somewhere that the white population in America is even more degraded by slavery than the black. Is it not possible that men suffer more by the degradation of women than we ourselves do? Think about this, and you will see my meaning.

            ‘I begin to suspect that my scheme will be a success only

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when, by means of endowments, it offers the material inducement of scholarships and other emoluments to students. When parents find that their daughters can win honourable pecuniary rewards for themselves, they will withdraw their prejudices. It is not many mighty, not many noble, who will join us at first; but we shall gradually draw them in time. It is no small revolution that I aim at, I can assure you; but I want to avoid making it ridiculous at starting, by setting up all kinds of pretensions on our behalf, which, for a long time at least, we certainly shall not be able to sustain.

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