Side by side with these worked others, both men and women, who had come to realise the deplorable condition of girls’ education. On the one hand, complaints were heard of their incompetence in domestic matters. ‘They cannot keep house accounts,’ says one writer; ‘they neither can make puddings nor direct servants in making them; they cannot make or mend their clothes; in a sick-room they are either so nervous or so senseless that their presence is worse than useless.’ On the other, we hear of the terrible strain consequent on what was by curious irony called over-education—girls sitting at their books or piano from morning to night, loading their memories with undigested facts. Both evils proceeded from the same cause. ‘Everything that is taught is taught dogmatically, and consequently the powers of research, inquiry, analysis, and reason either are altogether crushed out or rust from want of use.’[11] At this time public schools for girls were practically unknown. Teaching was no profession for women—it was the acknowledged resource of the middle-aged spinster left penniless by her father, or the widow whose husband had made ducks and drakes of the money. It was the one thing that anybody could do, since it required neither knowledge nor experience. All that was necessary was to hire a house, with a little saved or borrowed capital, and put up a brass plate on the door, announcing the existence of a select establishment for young ladies. Each schoolmistress did what seemed good in her own eyes or those of her pupils’ parents, and though, when the principal was herself a cultivated woman, she often inspired her pupils with a love of books that remained with them in after years, these cases were the exceptions. The condition of the great mass of cheap day-schools was deplorable. An attempt to penetrate beyond these brass-plated doors was made by Madame Bodichon, who as Barbara Leigh Smith had attended some of the earliest classes at Bedford College. The results of her inquiry were given to the Social Science Congress at Glasgow in 1860. She strongly denounced the little cheap private day-schools, academies, and such like, ‘often conducted by broken-down trades-people, who failing in gaining a livelihood in a good trade, take in despair to what is justly considered, in consequence of the competition of the schools assisted by government, as a very bad business.’ Happily, times have changed, and we can afford to smile at the picture of these ‘genteel’ establishments, with their ‘insufficient room and ventilation,’ where the young ladies were taught about the ‘four elements, earth, air, fire, and water,’ and, shutting their eyes and their windows, studied the wonders of nature in little cheap catechisms.