The Family and the School : Part 3

The Family and it's Members
by Anna Garlin Spencer

(Page 17 of 22)

First of all, we must remember that we have inherited the fruits of a long race-experience in which men and women were for the most part so separated from, each other in functioning that the education of boys and girls was made wholly unlike after sex-differentiation began, and sometimes, as in Sparta, before that period. The difference in ideal and in method of training was not, as some have said, that "boys were trained for human and socialized work" and "girls were fitted for personal and generally menial service alone." Both were trained for personal character and for social ends. The men were tied to the land, and the political order, and the family responsibility for parenthood, and some distinct personal service in behalf of the group life, as were the women. The difference, the tremendous difference, was this: that the service demanded of men, whatever their part or lot might be, was early seen to require a definite schooling for some particular vocation, demanding some measure of intellectual concentration and technical skill; while the service demanded of women was supposed to be of a nature requiring only general apprenticeship within the family life.

The specialization of labor, as is often shown, took from that family apprenticeship of women, one by one, its vocational elements of manual work until the housemother seemed to need only that general ability which can quickly and wisely use the fruits of others' expert knowledge and technical training. It as surely added for men, in every division of vocational alignment, an increasing differentiation of training and of labor. The reaction upon the educative process of this specialization and organization of industrial and institutional life has been distinct and far-reaching. The girls were left to the experiential apprenticeship of the family, since they were not counted as citizens. Even the ancient education of boys was in comparison formal and definite, having at its core the group loyalties which united them in patriotic devotion to "the collectivity that owned them all." When, again, the peaceful industries which women had started in their primitive Jack-at-all-trades economic service to the family and clan life needed organization into separate callings of agriculture manufacture and commerce, and primitive means of transportation had to be perfected for interchange of products between nation and nation, women were again left out of control of the processes which man's organizing genius set in motion. Hence, neither political nor industrial changes in the social order gave to popular thought any conception of the need for sending girls to school.

In point of fact, as we need often to be reminded, the fine talk about an educated common people referred for the most part to boys alone until near the middle of the nineteenth century. All that women needed to know it was believed "came by nature." Much of it did come by imitation and unconscious absorption, aided by the occasional better training of exceptionally able and fortunate women; but the general illiteracy of women was both a personal handicap and a social poverty. It is not true, however, as some have said, that women have been "left out of the human race" and have had to "break in" to man's more highly organized life in order to taste civilization. Men and women have stood too close in affection, girls too often "took after their fathers," the family, even under the despotic rule of men, bound all other social institutions to itself too vitally for the sexes to be wholly separated in thought and activity. Even when most women had to make a cross instead of signing their names on official documents and could not have passed the fourth-grade examinations of a modern school, they often became truly cultured and by reason of the very demands of family and group life upon them. The reason most women were denied formal school training so long after such denial became actively injurious to the family and group life was because the popular conviction still held that the most useful service which women could render the state did not require, would even find inimical to its best exercise, the kind of schooling which had been developed to fit boys for "a man's part in the world."

Formal School Training of Women New. - When the principle of democracy began to work in women's natures with an irrepressible yeast of revolt against longer denial of opportunity for individual achievement, and the vitally necessary and too-long-delayed "woman's rights movement" was born, its first pressure was against the closed doors of the "man-made" school. Enlightened women now demanded equal chance with men for preparation for vocations. The school they sought to enter was inherited from a past in which not only sex lines but class lines held the opportunities of higher education for a small clique. The ancient college and university did indeed lead towards vocations, but only the three "learned professions" and general training for commanding leadership in state and industrial affairs. When physical, economic, and social sciences were born the study disciplines they introduced into higher education appeared in answer to an imperious social demand that leadership should be provided in a vastly more varied range than the older civilization required.

At first the leaders in the higher education of women, like all nouveaux riche, showed determination to prove themselves adept in the traditions of the scholastic world into which they had so recently entered. Classic curricula were strictly adhered to and all "practical" courses viewed with open distrust except those leading to the inherited professions, and to teaching, as these were pushed upward toward college professorships. Happily, however, almost coincident with the entrance of women into larger educational opportunity came the broadening of that educational opportunity itself to which reference has been made; and the marvelous growth of the State Universities in the United States rapidly increased both the more varied vocational stimuli and the wider preparation for leadership now opening in our country for women as for men.

New Training for Social Service. - Two movements have resulted from the widening of the field of higher education, movements not yet recognized at their full social value, but already showing immense influence both upon the vocational alignment of trained women and upon the courses of study in colleges and universities. These two movements are, first, so to improve the social environment as to make average normal life more easily and generally accessible to the requirements for human well-being; and, secondly, the movement to put the social treatment, ameliorative and preventive, of abnormal or undeveloped life, under scientific direction. When it was discovered that to lose in death one baby out of every three born, to prematurely age or kill mothers in a hopeless endeavor to make good that waste, to leave the majority of the human race the helpless prey of preventable disease, poverty, feeble-mindedness, vice, and crime, was to show lack of rational social consciousness and effective social control, then it speedily became a recognized social duty to provide schools, both higher and lower in grade, which might do something to lessen ignorance and increase knowledge in the practical arts of race culture and of social organization for common human welfare.

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.