The Education of Catholic GirlsStuart, Janet Erskine
Religion
The Education of Catholic Girls
Stuart, Janet Erskine
Catholic Church -- Education; Women -- Education
in this general movement there have been successive stages of activity.
The higher education movement has gone on its own course. The first
pioneers had clear and noble ideals; Bedford College, the growth of
Cheltenham, the beginnings of Newnham and Girton Colleges, the North of
England Ladies' "Council of Education" represented them. Now that the
movement has left the port and gone beyond what they foresaw, it has met
the difficulties of the open sea.
Nursing was another sphere opened about the same time, to meet the
urgent needs felt during the Crimean War; it was admirably planned out
by Florence Nightingale, again a pioneer with loftiest ideals. There
followed a rush for that opening; it has continued, and now the same
complaint is made that it is an outlet for those whose lives are not to
their liking at home, rather than those who are conscious of a special
fitness for it or recognized as having the particular qualities which it
calls for. And then came the development of a new variety among the
unemployed of the wealthier classes, the "athletic girl." Not every one
could aspire to be an athletic girl, it requires some means, and much
time; but it is there, and it is part of the emancipation movement. The
latest in the field are the movements towards organization of effort,
association on the lines of the German _Frauenbund_, and the French
_Mouvement Feministe_, and beside them, around them, with or without
them, the Women's Suffrage Movement, militant or non-militant. These are
of the rising tide, and each tide makes a difference to our coast-line,
in some places the sea gains, in others the land, and so the thinkers,
for and against, register their victories and defeats, and the face of
things continues to change more and more rapidly.
It seems an ungracious task, unfair--perhaps it seems above all
retrograde and ignorant--to express doubt and not to think hopefully
of a cause in which so many lives have been spent with singular
disinterestedness and self-devotion. Yet these adverse thoughts are in
the air, not only amongst those who are unable to win in the race, but
amongst those who have won, and also amongst those who look out upon
it all with undistracted and unbiassed interest; older men, who look
to the end and outcome of things, to the ultimate direction when
the forces have adjusted themselves. Those who think of the next
generation are not quite satisfied with what is being done for our
girls or by them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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