Kitabı oku: «Education: How Old The New», sayfa 10

Above all, these generations had a training in personal service for one another. Every one exercised charity. It was not a few of the very wealthy who practised philanthropy. They had safeguards which, as far as is possible, prevented abuse of this charity. The alms, for instance, that was given on the occasion of a brother's funeral was not distributed hit or miss and all at one time, but members of the gild bought from the treasurer tokens which might be redeemed in bread and meat or in cast-off clothing or in some other way. These were distributed to the poor as they seemed to need them. If you met a poor man who seemed really in want you could give him one or more of these tokens and then be sure that while he would get whatever was necessary to supply his absolute needs, he would not be able to abuse charity. In our time we constantly have stories of large accumulations on the part of street beggars who own valuable property and have accounts in savings banks and the like. There was no possibility of this under the mediaeval system and yet charity was widely exercised, every one took some part in it, and there was that training, not only in effective pity for affliction, but also in helpfulness for others, which means so much more than the exercise of occasional charity, because, for the moment, one is touched by the sight of suffering or has remorse because one feels that one has been indulging one's self and wants the precious satisfaction that will come from a little making up for luxurious extravagance.

In our time, when we have gradually excluded moral teaching and training almost entirely from our schools and our methods of education, this phase of the ideal education of the masses is particularly interesting. Milton declared that "the main skill and groundwork of education will be to temper the pupils with such lectures and explanations as will draw them into willing obedience, inflamed with the study of learning and the admiration of virtue, stirred up with high hopes of living to be brave men and worthy patriots." Their great stone-books, the cathedrals, where all who came could read the life of the Lord, the frequent reminders of the lives of the saints, doers among men who forgot themselves and thought of others, the fraternal obligations of the gilds and their intercourse with each other, all these constituted the essence of an education as nearly like that demanded by Milton as can well be imagined. It seems far-fetched to go back five, six, even seven centuries to find such ideals in practice, but the educator who is serious and candid with himself will find it easy to discover the elements of a wonderful intellectual and, above all, moral training of the people, that is the whole people from the lowest to the highest, in these early days.

CYCLES OF FEMININE EDUCATION AND INFLUENCE

"And if I am right nothing can be more foolish than our modern fashion of training men and women differently, whereby one-half of the power of the city is lost. For reflect–if women are not to have the education of men some other must be found for them, and what other can we propose?" –Plato, Laws (Jowett), p. 82. Scribner, 1902.

CYCLES OF FEMININE EDUCATION AND INFLUENCE ¹⁵

Nothing is commoner than to suppose that what we are doing at the present day is an improvement over whatever they were doing at any time in the past in the same line. We were rather proud during the nineteenth century to talk of that century as the century of evolution. Evolutionary terms of all kinds found their way even into everyday speech and a very general impression was produced that we are in the midst of progress so rapid and unerring, that even from decade to decade it is possible to trace the wonderful advance that man is making. We look back on the early nineteenth century as quite hopelessly backward. They had no railroads, no street-car lines, no public street lighting, no modes of heating buildings that gave any comfort in the cold weather, no elevators, and when we compare our present comfortable condition with the discomforts of that not so distant period, we feel how much evolution has done for us, and inevitably conclude that just as much progress as has been made in transportation and in comfort, has also been made in the things of the mind, and, above all, in education, so that, while the millennium is not yet here, it cannot surely be far off; and men are attaining at last, with giant strides, the great purpose that runs through the ages.

Probably in nothing is the assumption that we are doing something far beyond what was ever accomplished before, more emphatically expressed than in the ordinary opinions as to what is being done by and for women in our generation. We have come to think that at last in the course of evolution woman is beginning to come into something of her rights, she is at last getting her opportunity for the higher education and for professional education so far as she wants it, and as a consequence is securing that influence which, as the equal of man, she should have in the world. Now there is just one thing with regard to this very general impression which deserves to be called particularly to attention. This is not the first time in the world's history, nor the first by many times, that woman has had the opportunity for the higher education and has taken it very well. Neither is it the first time that she has insisted on having an influence in public affairs, but on the contrary, we can readily find a very curious series of cycles of feminine education and of the exercise of public influence by women, with intervals of almost negative phases in these matters that are rather difficult to explain. Let us before trying to understand what the feministic movement means in our own time and, above all, before trying to sum up its ultimate significance for the race, study some of the corresponding movements in former times.

The most interesting phase of the woman movement in history is that which occurred at the time of the Renaissance. Because it is typical of the phases of the feministic movement at all times, and then, too, because it is closer to us and the records of it are more complete, it will be extremely interesting to follow out some of the details of it. It may be necessary for that to make a little excursion into the history of the period. During the early fifteenth century the Turks were bothering Constantinople so much, that Greek scholars, rendered uncomfortable at home, began making their way over into Italy rather frequently, bringing with them precious manuscripts and remains of old Greek art. Besides commerce aroused by the Crusades was making the intercourse between East and West much more intimate than it had been and, as a result, a taste for Greek letters and art was beginning to be felt in certain portions of Italy. When Constantinople fell, about the middle of the fifteenth century, the prestige of the old capital of the Greek empire was lost, and scholars abandoned it for Italy in large numbers. This is the time of the Renaissance. The rebirth that the word signifies, is not a rebirth of art and architecture and literature into the modern world, as if there had been nothing before, for Gothic art and architecture and literature is quite as wonderful, if not more so, than anything that came after, and there are good authorities who insist that the Renaissance hurt, rather than helped, Europe. The Renaissance was a rebirth of Greek ideas and ideals in aesthetics into the European world, and while we may not agree with Sir Henry Maine that whatever lives and moves in the intellectual world is Greek in origin, there is no doubt that Greek can be the source of most wonderful incentive and such it proved to be during the fifteenth century.

Men and women began to study Greek and they paid much more attention as a consequence to the Latin classics modelled on the Greek, and so the New Learning, the so-called humanities, became the centre of intellectual interest. They were studied first in private schools, but before long a place for these new studies was demanded in the curriculum of the universities. The universities, however, were occupied with the so-called seven liberal arts, which were really scientific studies. There was geometry, astronomy, music, grammar, rhetoric, logic and metaphysics, with considerable ethics and political science, so that they resembled in many ways our modern universities as they have been transformed since the re-introduction of scientific studies into them. The university faculties were content and conservative after the fashion of universities ever, and they quite naturally refused to entertain the notion of such a radical change as the introduction of classical studies into the curriculum. This is just exactly what the classical universities of the early nineteenth century did when they were asked by scientific enthusiasts to re-introduce scientific studies into the curriculum, which in the course of 800 years had come to be made up almost exclusively of classical studies. In this curious way does history repeat itself.

Unable to obtain a place for the studies in humanism in the universities, ruling princes and wealthy members of the nobility proceeded to found special schools for these subjects. In these schools without the traditions of the past, the women asked and obtained the privilege of studying. There had come a noteworthy change in intellectual interest, a novelty was introduced into education. Whenever that happens woman always asks and always obtains the privilege of the higher education. During the Renaissance period she proceeded to show her intellectual power. Many of the women of the Renaissance became distinguished for scholarship. Perhaps one thing should be noted with regard to that. Their reputation for scholarship was largely confined to their younger years. They were more precocious, or applied themselves better to their studies, and accordingly knew more of the classics at twenty than their male relatives who had the same opportunities. Indeed we hear of them as brilliant scholars at sixteen and seventeen and eighteen. They took part in Latin plays that were brilliantly performed before the nobility, higher ecclesiastics, cardinals and even the Popes. They were brilliant in music, in the languages and in their taste for art. Later on in life we do not hear so much of them. They evidently were ready to leave the serious work of scholarship to the men and content themselves with being enlightened patrons of literature, beneficent advocates of the arts, liberal customers of the artistic geniuses of the time. Above all, we find no great original works from them. They are charming appreciators but not good inventors–at this time, of course.

While they do not occupy themselves with dry-as-dust scholarship, there is no doubt at all that much of the glory of the Renaissance, with its great revivals in art and letters, is due to the women of the time. It was they who insisted on the building of the town houses, finely decorated and with charming objects of art in them. It was for them that the artists of the time made many beautiful things. They were very often the patrons who enabled churches to obtain from artists the wonderful paintings of the time. The sculptors made for them many charming pieces of bric-a-brac. The artists laid out beautiful gardens that we are only just beginning to appreciate again now that our taste for outdoor life is being properly cultivated. They bought the books that were issued by the Manutiuses at Venice. Isabella D'Este had a standing order that all the books issued from this great Venetian press should be sent to her. Books were costly treasures in these times. A single volume of one of these incunabula of printing so beautifully issued from Manutius's printing establishment was worth nearly one hundred dollars in our money.

The women designed their own dresses. They encouraged the miniature painting of the time and the illumination of books and occasionally took up these arts themselves. They fostered the development of textile industries, lacemaking and the various kinds of figured cloth, so that we have some of the most beautiful inventions in this kind at this time. Tapestry-making took on a new vigor and beauty because of their patronage. They wanted beautiful glass, and new periods of marvellous development of glass-tinting and making were ushered in. As can be readily understood these are the sort of things that men are not interested in, and whenever in the history of the race we find a period of development of this kind we can be sure that educated women are responsible for it. These women of the Renaissance decorated their homes beautifully, had them built substantially, with wonderful taste and, above all, had them set charmingly in the Italian Renaissance gardens that are so deservedly admired.

While they were thus occupied with the beautiful things of life some of them wrote poetry that has lived (Lucrezia Tornabuoni dei Medici, Vittoria Colonna), some of them indulged in fiction (Marguerite of Navarre) that is still read, and a great epoch of fiction-writing responded to their interest as readers; some of them mixed in politics and proved their power, at times some of them acted as regents for their sons (Forli, D'Este), and succeeded magnificently, so that we have every phase of development of woman's power. There can be no doubt that at this period woman was afforded every opportunity for the development of her intellectual life, and that she took her opportunities with great success.

We have from this time probably the names of more distinguished women than from any other corresponding period in the world's history. There was a wonderful group of women at the Court of Giovanna of Naples in the first half of the fifteenth century, because Naples got her Renaissance impulses first, being closer by sea to Constantinople and having many Greek traditions from the old days when Southern Italy was Magna Graecia. Then there are a series of finely educated women connected with the Medici household at Florence. The mother of the great Lorenzo is the best known of them, and her poems show real literary power. The D'Este family is better known generally, and then there were the Gonzagas, some of the women of the house of Forli, Vittoria Colonna, whose influence over art and artists shows her genius quite as well as does her writing, and many others. Everywhere women are on a footing with men as regards the intellectual life. Everywhere they direct conversations seriously with regard to literary and artistic subjects, and, indeed, it is they who, in what we would now call salons, serve to make intellectual subjects fashionable, and so concentrate attention on them and secure the patronage so necessary for artists and writers if they are to subsist while doing their work.

It would be a great mistake, however, to think for a moment that it was in Italy alone that such opportunities for higher education and intellectual influence were allowed to women. Just as the Renaissance movement itself spread throughout Europe affecting the education, the literature, the art, the architecture, the arts and crafts of the time and the nations, so did the feministic movement spread, and everywhere we find striking expressions of it. In France, for instance, the Renaissance can be traced very easily in letters and architecture, and was not much behind Italy in feminine education. Queen Anne of Bretagne organized the Court School of the time, and interest in literature became the fashion of the hour. Marguerite of Navarre is a woman of the Renaissance, and so is Renée of Anjou, while the name of Louise La Cordière shows, for la cordière means the cord-wainer's daughter, that higher education for women was not confined to the nobility. Mary Queen of Scots, educated in France, whose letters and whose poetry with occasional excursions into Latin, show us how thoroughly educated she was,–it must not be forgotten that she was put into prison at twenty-four and never again got out,–is a typical woman of the French Renaissance. Sichel has told the story of these women of France very well, and those who want to know the details of the feministic movement of the time should turn to him.

In Spain, too, the Renaissance movement made itself felt in every department. Most of Spain's cathedrals were finished during the Renaissance time, and some of the work is the admiration of the world. Spain's literary Renaissance came a little later, but when it did it contributed at least two great names to the world literature–Cervantes and Calderon. The women of the nation were also affected, and Queen Isabella was a deeply intellectual woman of many interests. Spain contributed to the feministic movement probably the greatest name in the history of feminine intellectuality in St. Teresa. How much of sympathy there was with this great expression of feminine intelligence will be best appreciated from the fact that Spanish ecclesiastics talk of Teresa as their Spanish Doctor of the Church, and that in Rome there is amongst the statues of the Doctors and the Fathers in the Church one woman figure, that of St. Teresa, with the title mater spiritualium--mother of spiritual things. Her books, profoundly admired by the Spaniards, Were the favorite reading for such extremely different minds as Fénelon and Bossuet, and have been the storehouse ever since for German mystics. They were beautifully translated by Crashaw into English, and have been the subject of great interest during the present feministic movement, especially since George Eliot's reference to her in the preface of "Middlemarch."

In England the Renaissance did not affect art much, nor architecture, though it did profoundly stir the men of letters, and the great Elizabethan period of English literature is really an expression of the Renaissance in England. Here almost more than anywhere else in Europe the women shared in the uplift and devotion to things intellectual that developed. Queen Mary was a well-educated woman, Queen Elizabeth read Greek as well as Latin easily, Lady Jane Grey preferred her lessons in Greek, under Roger Ascham, to going to balls and routs and hunting parties, and was a blue-stocking in the veriest sense of the term. It has been hinted that it was perhaps this that disturbed her feminine common sense and allowed her to be led so easily into the foolish conspiracy in which she lost her life. The losing of one's head in things deeply intellectual may sometimes mean the losing of it more literally when crowns are at stake. There are many other names of noble women of this time that might be mentioned and that are well known for their intellectual development. That the movement did not confine itself to the higher nobility we can be sure, for when the better classes do ill they are imitated, but so also are they imitated when they do well. Besides, the story that we have of Margaret More and her friends shows that the middle classes were also stirred to interest in things intellectual.

The usual objection, when this story of the Renaissance and the feministic movement connected with it is told, if the narrator would urge that here was an earlier period of feminine education than ours, is that, after all, the education of this period was confined to only a few of the nobility. This is not true, and there are many reasons why it is not true. First, the upper classes are always imitated by the others, and if there was a fashion for education we can be sure that it spread. We have not the records of many educated women, but those that we have all make it clear that education was not confined to a few, and that those of the middle classes who wanted it could readily secure it. There were probably as many women to the population of Europe at that time enjoying the higher education as there are proportionately in America at the present time. Europe had but a small population altogether in the fifteenth century. There were probably less than 4,000,000 of people in England at the end, even, of the sixteenth century. In Elizabeth's time when the census was taken, because of the Spanish Armada, these were the figures. There were not many more people in all Europe then than there are now in England. If out of these few, comparatively, we can pick out the group of distinguished women whom I have just spoken of, then there must have been a great many sharing in the privileges of the higher education.¹⁶

It is true that it was, as a rule, only the daughters of the nobility who received the opportunity for the higher education, or at least obtained it with facility. It must not be forgotten, however, just what the nobility of Italy, and, indeed, of other countries also, represented. The conditions there are most typical and it is worth while studying them out. The Medici, for instance, of Florence, whose women folk were so well educated, were members of the gilds of the apothecaries, as their name indicates, who made a fortune on drugs and precious stones and beautiful stuffs from the East, and then became the bankers of Europe. Noblemen were created because of success in war, success in politics, success in diplomacy, but also because of success in commerce, and occasionally success in the arts. Not many educators and artists were among them any more than in our time, because they were not, as a rule, possessed of the fortune properly to keep up the dignity of a patent of nobility. The daughters of the nobility of Italy, however, were not very different, certainly their origin was very similar to that of the daughters of the wealthy men of America, who are, after all, the only ones who can take advantage of the higher education in our time. We must not forget that, compared to the whole population, the number of women securing the higher education is very limited.

To think that the Renaissance with this provision of ample opportunities for feminine education was the first epoch of this kind in the world's history would be to miss sadly a host of historical facts and their significance. Unfortunately history has been so written from the standpoint of man and his interests, that this phase of history is not well known and probably less understood. History has been too much a mere accumulation of facts with regard to war, diplomacy and politics. While we have known much of heroes and battles, we have known little of education, of art, of artistic achievement of all kinds. We have known even less of popular movements. We have known almost nothing of the great uplift of the masses which created the magnificent arts and crafts of the Middle Ages, that we are just beginning to admire so much once more, and our admiration of them is the best measure of our own serious artistic development. Kings and warriors and kings' mistresses and ugly diplomacy and rotten politics, have occupied the centre of the stage in history. Surely we are coming to a time when other matters, the human things and not the animal instincts, will be the main subject of history; when fighting and sex and acquisitiveness and selfishness shall give place in history to mutual aid, uplift, unselfishness and thoughtfulness for others.

As soon as history is studied from the standpoint of the larger human interests and not that of political history, it is easy to find not only traces but detailed stories of feminine education at many times. Before the Renaissance the great phase of education had been that of the universities. The first of the universities was founded down at Salerno around a medical school, the second that of Bologna around a law school and the third that of Paris with a school of philosophy and theology as a nucleus. This seems to be about the way that man's interests manifest themselves in an era of development. First, he is occupied mainly with his body and its needs; then his property and its rights, and finally, as he lifts himself up to higher things, his relations to his fellow-man and to his Creator come to be profound vital interests. Such, at least, is the story of the origin of the universities in the thirteenth century.

The surprise for us who are considering the story of feminine education and influence is what happened at Salerno. Here some twenty miles back from Naples, in a salubrious climate, not far from the Mediterranean, where old Greek traditions had maintained themselves, for Southern Italy was called Magna Graecia, where the intercourse with the Arabs and with the northern shores of Africa and with the Near East, brought the medical secrets of many climes to a focus, the first modern medical school came into existence. In the department of women's diseases women professors taught, wrote text-books and evidently were considered, in every sense of the word, co-ordinate professors in the university. We have the text-book of one of them, Trotula, who is hailed as the founder of the Salernitan School of Women Physicians, the word school being used in the same sense as when we talk of a school of painting, and not at all in the sense of our modern women's medical schools. Trotula was the wife of the professor of medicine at the university, Plataerius I, and the mother of another professor at the university, Plataerius II, herself a professor like them.

There are many other names of women professors at the University of Salerno in this department. Women, however, were not alone allowed to practise this single phase of medicine, but we have licenses granted to women in Naples, of which at this time Salerno was the university, to practise both medicine and surgery. It seems to have been quite common, I should say, at least as common as in our own time for women to study and practise medicine, and their place in the university and the estimation in which their books were held, show us that all the difficulties in the way of professional education for women had been removed and that they were accepted by their masculine colleagues on a footing of absolute equality.

Probably the most interesting feature of this surprising and unexpected development of professional education for women is to be found in the conditions out of which Salerno developed. The school was originally a monastic school under the influence of the Benedictine monks from Monte Cassino not far away. The great Archbishop Alphanus I, who was the most prominent patron and who had been a professor there, was himself a Benedictine monk. How intimately the relations of the monks to the school were maintained can be realized from the fact that when the greatest medical teacher and writer of Salerno, Constantine Africanus, wanted to have leisure to write his great works in medicine, he retired from his professorship to the monastery of Monte Cassino. His great friend Desiderius was the abbot there, and his influence was still very strong at Salerno. Desiderius afterwards became Pope, and continued his beneficent patronage of this Southern Italian university. In a word, it was in the midst of the most intimate ecclesiastical and monastic influence that this handing over of the department of women's diseases to women in a great teaching institution occurred. The wise old monks were thoroughly practical, and though eminently conservative, knew the needs of mankind very well, and worked out this solution of one series of problems.

When the next great university, that of Bologna, was founded, it developed, as I have suggested, around a law school. Irnerius revived the study of the old Roman law, and his teaching of it attracted so much attention that students from all over Europe flocked to Bologna. Law is different from medicine in many respects. The right of women to study medicine will readily be granted, their place in a system of medical education is manifest. With regard to law, however, there can scarcely be grave question as to the advisability of woman studying it unless economic conditions force her to it. This was particularly true at a time when woman could own no property and had no rights until she married. In spite of the many inherent improbabilities of this development, the law school was scarcely opened at Bologna before women became students in it. Probably Irnerius' daughter and some of her friends were the first students, but after a time others came and the facilities seem to have been quite open to them. As out of the law school the university gradually developed, opportunities for study in the other higher branches were accorded to women at Bologna. We have the story of their success in mathematics, in philosophy, in music and in astronomy.

According to a well-known and apparently well authenticated tradition, one distinguished woman student of Bologna, Maria Di Novella, achieved such success in mathematics about the middle of the thirteenth century that she was appointed professor of mathematics. Apparently the faculty of Bologna had no qualms of educational conscience nor betook themselves to such halfway measures as one of our modern faculties, which accords a certificate to a woman that she has passed better in the mathematical tripos than the Senior Wrangler, though they do not accord her the Senior Wranglership. The story goes on to say that Signorina Di Novella, knowing that she was pretty, and fearing that her beauty would disturb the minds, at least, of her male students, arranged to lecture from behind a curtain. This would seem to indicate that the blue-stockings of the olden time could be as surpassingly modest as they were intelligent. I remember once telling this story before a convent audience. The dear old Mother Superior, who had known me for many years, ventured to ask me afterwards, "Did you say that she was young?" and I said yes, according to the tradition; "and handsome?" and I nodded the affirmative, "Well, then," she said, "I do not believe the rest of the story." But then, after all, what do dear old Mothers Superior know about the world or its ways, or about handsome young women or their ways, or about the significance of traditions which serve to show us that even pretty, intelligent women can be as modestly retiring and as ready to conceal their charms as they are to be charmingly courteous and careful of the feelings of others?