Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877. Vol XX - No. 118Various
History
Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877. Vol XX - No. 118
Various
Literature, Modern -- 19th century -- Periodicals; Science -- Periodicals
At Dehra, at the foot of the Himalaya Mountains, there is a high school for
girls organized on the plan of the Mount Holyoke Seminary. Here English is
spoken, and the pupils are carried through a course of training that may
justly be termed _high_. One of the pupils of this school has lately been
appointed by the government to go to England and qualify herself as a
physician, under a contract to return and serve the government by taking
charge of a hospital and college for training young women as midwives and
nurses.
Of course, in a country containing a population of over one hundred and
fifty-one millions, one thousand public schools for girls, supplemented as
these are by missionary schools of many denominations, are inadequate to
meet the needs of the people. There is an increasing demand in all the
provinces for schools and colleges; and the native young men especially are
eagerly seeking the educational advantages of the colleges and
universities, because they know that these are a sure road to preferment.
"The government takes care to give employment to those who wish it."
The difficulties in the way of female education in India are well expressed
in a late letter from one of the most distinguished native reformers, Baboo
Keshub Chunder Sen of Calcutta. "No words of mine," he says, "would convey
to you an adequate idea of the great obstacles which the social and
religious condition of the Hindoo community presents in the way of female
education and advancement. In a country where superstition and caste
prejudices prevail to an alarming extent, where widows are cruelly
persecuted and prevented from remarrying, where high-caste Hindoos are
allowed to marry as many wives as they like without undertaking the
responsibility of protecting them, and where little girls marry at a most
tender age and sacrifice all prospects of healthy physical and mental
development, it will take centuries before any solid and extensive reform
is achieved."
Until recently, scarcely one woman in ten thousand learned to read or
acquired any of the accomplishments common to women of Christian countries.
Occasionally, women of vicious lives in cities, having leisure, became
quite learned, and this made learning a shame for women of irreproachable
reputation. Moreover, Hindoo husbands declared, and believed, that if you
taught a woman to read she would be sure in time to have illicit relations
with some one. Ignorance was innocence, the safeguard of both rank and
chastity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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