Historians are very far from agreement in the information they give us as to the manner in which young girls were educated in those days. An old, but false, proverb runs: “The mother feeds, the father instructs”; which signifies in plain language that the mother never instructed, suckling being the top of her capacity. On the other hand, as the treatises on education speak only of the boys, or at most of “children,” and practically never use the word “daughters,” some historians have concluded that the girls were left to vegetate and that their education was never considered, while others, on the contrary, and these not the least important—such as Burckhardt and Minghetti—have believed that the girls merely followed the same course as the boys. We shall not traverse these two opinions, contradictory as they are, because they both appear true to a certain extent. The question of education really depends on another question, of much greater moment, which we have set ourselves to answer in this book: What ought women’s life to be? Where ought they to seek their happiness? And at the outset we are brought face to face with a very troublesome problem. Is a woman to continue to be married passively, as we have seen her married—to be left almost a slave? or is she to be put into a condition of self-defence? Is she to be made an obedient tool, a mirror of the ideas of others, destitute of all mind of her own, and all the happier in knowing nothing beyond the narrow bounds of her bedroom? or does it seem better to render her an active, educated creature, with an individuality of her own, capable of reasoning and acting? Is the mother to remain merely a temporary guardian, charged with watching over a little girl for a master of undisputed title, who will form her and train her after his own fancy, and to whom she will belong at the earliest moment, even in her first flower? or is the mother to be at perfect liberty to link herself closely with her daughter, and, precisely because the girl is one day to be given to another, to arm her with independence and intelligence, even although she knows that sooner or later some portion of this armour must be dropped on the way? There is the whole question. And on that question depends the education of girls.