Bluestockings by Jane Robinson Read Free Book Online Page A

available to cover the apprentice’s costs from the age of fourteen until she graduated at eighteen into teaching full time. But with more schools opening, even though compulsory education was not introduced until 1870, demand for teachers was in danger of exceeding supply. The National Society decided to keep that supply ‘in house’ by opening a London training college, Whitelands, in 1841. Its aim was ‘to produce a superior class of parochial schoolmistresses’; their aim was to teach their girls to be good, ‘and let who will be clever’. Another five teacher-training colleges for women appeared over the next four years, and by 1850, of 1,500 women teachers working in England, 500 were professionally trained. 9 To an extent, anyway: the curriculum was neither rigorous nor challenging, but it was a start. Indeed, Whitelands was the first establishment to come anywhere close to Astell’s and Defoe’s visions of the future. The colleges were not residential (at first), nor highfalutin in their academic expectations, but they took women, young and not so young, and educated them for a career, just as Nightingale’s school for nurses did later on. The next step, of course, was to offer women non -vocational higher education.
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    Not all those registering for training at college were straight from school. Many were governesses, with several years’ experience behind them, but not much expertise: a little like Ellen Weeton. Constance Maynard had governesses from time to time (in fact her family seems to have run the gamut of educational opportunities). Their lessons were dreadful. Constance was expected to read aloud page after page of the dullest of history books (but never to take notes); endlessly to repeat French verbs without necessarily knowing what they meant; learn useless facts such as ‘which of our four British Queens have given the greatest proofs of courage and intrepidity’, or what tapioca was, and why the thunder did not precede the lightning. ‘I do not think I remember a spark of real interest being elicited… Of all the arithmetic I learned, and there was a little every day for several years, I can call to mind only one single rule, and it ran thus: “Turn the fraction upside down, and proceed as before.”’ 10
    One of Constance’s fellow students at Cambridge in the early 1870s, Mary Paley, had the same experience. All she could remember of her governess’s teaching was the date at which black silk stockings were first worn in England, and (following a theme, here) ‘What to do in a thunderstorm at night’. The pragmatic answer was to ‘draw your bed into the middle of the room, commend your soul to Almighty God and go to sleep’. 11 There is no doubt both Constance and Mary were taught by their governesses to draw, sing, probably dance, and to make polite conversation. There was even a lugubrious textbook available for the latter, with common examples of mistakes – one should not, for example, say ‘I have lost my doll’s pretty bonnet that I took so much trouble to make, and I am quite miserable about it. I told the nurse she must find it for me,’ but ‘I have met with a heavy loss. The doll’s bonnetyou saw me making the other day: mama said it was pretty; and I am grieved lest she should be angry with me for not taking better care of my things. I have intreated [sic] nurse to assist me in seeking it.’ 12 This was the tinselly stuff of a governess’s education. Expectations were so low.
    But it is unfair to blame the governess generically for this, nor for the pervasive frivolity of female education and its emphasis on accomplishment over understanding. After all, attempts to reform her meagre career were responsible, ultimately, for the foundation of sound secondary schooling for girls, which eventually led to university access.
    These attempts first got off the ground with the foundation of the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution (GBI) in 1843, two years after