Sanitary and Social Lectures and EssaysKingsley, Charles
Science
Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays
Kingsley, Charles
Essays; Social problems
One word more, and I have done. Let me ask women to educate themselves,
not for their own sakes merely, but for the sake of others. For, whether
they will or not, they must educate others. I do not speak merely of
those who may be engaged in the work of direct teaching; that they ought
to be well taught themselves, who can doubt? I speak of those—and in so
doing I speak of every woman, young and old—who exercise as wife, as
mother, as aunt, as sister, or as friend, an influence, indirect it may
be, and unconscious, but still potent and practical, on the minds and
characters of those about them, especially of men. How potent and
practical that influence is, those know best who know most of the world
and most of human nature. There are those who consider—and I agree with
them—that the education of boys under the age of twelve years ought to be
entrusted as much as possible to women. Let me ask—of what period of
youth and manhood does not the same hold true? I pity the ignorance and
conceit of the man who fancies that he has nothing left to learn from
cultivated women. I should have thought that the very mission of woman
was to be, in the highest sense, the educator of man from infancy to old
age; that that was the work towards which all the God-given capacities of
women pointed; for which they were to be educated to the highest pitch.
I should have thought that it was the glory of woman that she was sent
into the world to live for others, rather than for herself; and therefore
I should say—Let her smallest rights be respected, her smallest wrongs
redressed: but let her never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into
the world to teach man—what, I believe, she has been teaching him all
along, even in the savage state—namely, that there is something more
necessary than the claiming of rights, and that is, the performing of
duties; to teach him specially, in these so-called intellectual days,
that there is something more than intellect, and that is—purity and
virtue. Let her never be persuaded to forget that her calling is not the
lower and more earthly one of self-assertion, but the higher and the
diviner calling of self-sacrifice; and let her never desert that higher
life, which lives in others and for others, like her Redeemer and her
Lord.
And if any should answer that this doctrine would keep woman a dependent
and a slave, I rejoin—Not so: it would keep her what she should be—the
mistress of all around her, because mistress of herself. And more, I
should express a fear that those who made that answer had not yet seen
into the mystery of true greatness and true strength; that they did not
yet understand the true magnanimity, the true royalty of that spirit, by
which the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and
to give His life a ransom for many.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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