A charter for girls’ education
“In Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female. This is the Magna Charta (sic) of our womanhood. He committed the Gospel of Resurrection first to the lips of women! How little did those women understand their obligation to their true Emancipator.” This bold declaration was written in 1884 in the pamphlet to mark the 50th anniversary of the Society for Promoting Female Education in the East ( SPFEE) which was often shortened to the Female Education Society. The women who ran and were sent out by that society were among the pioneers of girls’ education in Africa, China, India and the Far East.
I have been fascinated by the stories of how these women fought against all odds in the nineteenth century to provide girls with a chance to have an education. That’s not surprising because one of my earliest memories is of the wife of the headmaster at my primary school ridiculing my mother for encouraging me to work hard so that I could go to the grammar school like my brothers. “She’ll only get married and have children – it’s a waste to send her,” my mother was told. The reason why I was not suitable material for a grammar school was because I came from a working class family.
The obstacles facing girls in the nineteenth century were much bigger. Florence Nightingale wrote in Cassandra in 1852 : “Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity – these three – and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?”
Mary Wollstonecraft in her Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 wrote that women were raised to be blindly obedient to their menfolk or just to be playthings. For most of the nineteenth century British women were seen as homemakers and as legal minors with no rights regarding their own children. It was not until 1875 that an Act of Parliament was passed allowing women to be admitted to any university.
When the author of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (born in 1816) was a child she was asked by her father what was the best mode of education for a woman. She answered: “That which would make her rule her house well.” Like many middle class girls her education had started in the home and had been dependent upon her father and his library, as well as either her mother or her aunt teaching her household duties. When she and her sisters were sent to a school for the daughters of Anglican clergy the curriculum included: history, geography, the use of the globes, grammar, writing and arithmetic, plus all kinds of needlework and the nicer kinds of household work.
In Jane Eyre she described a school where girls, after receiving a basic education themselves, moved up to being teachers themselves. She and her sisters became famous writers but initially had to hide their identities under male pseudonyms.
One writer in The English Woman’s Journal in 1858 commented: “Whatever is done women must do it for themselves. If they claim independence of action they must take it with its resultant good or evil.”
The women whose stories I will tell did just that. Whatever education they had managed to obtain in Britain, in Europe or in the USA, they were determined to share with girls in India, Africa and China. The stories of the girls they inspired are equally as fascinating.
One of the first women who dared to try and set up schools for girls in India was Mary Ann Cooke Wilson. She was sent by the British and Foreign School Society in the early 1820s. In India and China many girls were confined to their homes once they reached puberty.
In Hong Kong, once it was under British control, the Chinese feared that educating girls would upset the whole fabric of their society. Life has certainly changed for many women since then – and the women of the Female Education Society played a significant part in bringing about that change.
Those women were, by our standards, a very non-pc (politically correct) lot. They were usually evangelical missionaries who truly believed that their Western culture was the best in the world. It is not surprising that they were often equated with Western imperialism. And as they carried the banner for girls’ education throughout the world they played a significant part in the globalisation of English and of Western culture.