The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (63 page)

Part of the problem was the lack of adequate women teachers to instruct girls in anything remotely taxing, because they themselves had not been so instructed. ‘From an Ignoramus that writes, and a Woman that teaches,
Libera nos Domine
’ – so ran ‘The New Letanie’, a satirical jingle of 1647. This was the vicious circle to which Margaret Duchess of Newcastle drew attention: ‘women breeding up women; one fool breeding up another; and as long as that custom lasts, there is no hope of amendment’, she wrote, castigating the kind of ‘ancient decayed gentlewomen’ at whose mercy girls found themselves.
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At a lower level in society there was a strange lack of interest in the subject, compared to the attention paid to the boys’ teachers; women teachers occasionally coming to prominence for some misdemeanour, as one Isabel Reun was presented to the ecclesiastical court at Ely in 1682 for teaching scholars and at the same time keeping company with a man not her husband. The ecclesiastical licensing system which was supposed in theory to concern itself with petty teachers as well as grammar masters does not seem in practice to have concerned itself with women. The tendency towards teaching girls what was immediately economically useful remained: as in the case of the dame of a village school in Sussex in 1699 who put her children to making clothes in school (much as the ‘Red Maids’ of Bristol were put to embroidery); she contracted out reading and writing lessons, taking a distinctly lower place, to visiting schoolmasters. There is no evidence that Basua Makin herself was licensed as a teacher.
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So the girls tripped in dainty slippers down the ornamental
paths of their education; so very different from the demanding courses of classics and grammar set for their brothers. Whatever the latter’s application (Basua Makin answered the point that girls did not desire education with the perfectly accurate riposte: ‘Neither do many boys’),
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the intellectual difference between the two sexes was becoming ever more sharply defined; as the quality of education offered to boys also improved, the gap only increased. This had the makings of another vicious circle. A lady who had received a lightweight education – in the words of Lady Chudleigh,

As if we were for nothing else designed

But made, like puppets, to divert mankind

– such a one was generally only capable of filling her mind with lightweight matters. Charges of frivolity against the sex were thus all too easy to substantiate, summed up by Rochester’s sneer:

Love a Woman! you’re an Ass

’Tis a most insipid passion

To choose out for your Happiness

The silliest part of God’s Creation.
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At the same time, such outward frivolity, indolence even, became the mark of a lady, to be aped by those (not only Mrs Pepys) who aspired to rise higher in society.

The growth of ‘frivolity’ in this apparently secure and certainly leisured society following the traumatic period of the wars was the subject of widespread comment. Halifax gave to his daughter Betty his own zeugmatic picture of an idle lady of quality, ‘wrapped up in Flattery and clean Linen’. Mary Evelyn, John Evelyn’s daughter, gives an amusing picture of the world of the fashionable – and frivolous – in her
Mundus Muliebris: Or
,
The Ladies Dressing-Room Unlock’d
, published after her death in 1690. Her bedroom would include, in addition to its tea table, cabinets, screens, trunks and silver plate:

An hanging Shelf, to which belongs

Romances, Plays, and Amorous Songs;

Repeating Clocks, the hour to show

When to the Play ’tis time to go,

In Pompous Coach, or else Sedan’d

With Equipage along the Strand …

Her ‘Implements’ would include, besides a mirror, ‘one Glue Pot, One for Pomatum, and what-not Of Washes, Unguents, and Cosmetics’, while of perfumes she would employ orange-water, millefleur and myrtle ‘Whole Quarts the Chamber to Bequirtle’. As for the gallant courting this cosseted beauty, he must pursue her to ‘the Play, the Park and the Music’, even to Tunbridge Wells at the season of drinking the waters: ‘You must improve all occasions of celebrating her Shape, and how well the Mode becomes her.’
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It was perhaps this kind of life that Rachel Lady Russell had led as a young married woman, haunting the theatre, choosing a church with a short sermon, impatient to reach the fashionable world of the park, and occupying herself with telling her mother-in-law malicious stories; many years afterwards she wrote of her frivolous conduct with regret.
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But Rachel Lady Russell had to endure exceptional sufferings; most women, not subject to her tragic destiny, were also not subject to her regrets.

It is certainly a picture echoed over and over again in the plays of the period. Victoria and Olivia, daughters of Sir John Everyoung in Sedley’s
The Mulberry Garden
, to give only two examples out of many, were said to dance and play at cards ‘till morning’; they were described as ‘more in their Coach than at home, and if they chance to keep the house an afternoon, to have the Yard full of Sedans, the Hall full of footmen and Pages, and their Chambers covered all with Feathers and Ribands’. In 1712 Addison, parodying the life of a society lady, began his account: ‘Wednesday: from eight to ten drank two dishes of chocolate in bed and fell asleep after them exhausted by the effort.’
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There were plenty of prototypes in real life; when one reads an account of Ursula Stewkeley, daughter of Cary Verney by her
second marriage, it is difficult to suppose these pictures were much exaggerated. This energetic young woman loathed country life and was furious if she could not dance twelve hours out of the twenty-four, and have music whenever she wanted. After eight months of pleasure in London, she returned to her country home in 1674 in the middle of the night, bringing a group of her friends with her, including a certain disreputable Mr Turner, who had been associated with a murder case; this uninvited party then proceeded to sit up till three in the morning loudly roistering. The next day Ursula borrowed a coach and took off for Salisbury races, returning that night with the same merry crew to sit up once more till the early hours of the morning.

‘All this has sufficiently vexed me’, wrote her mother, with feelings of parental indignation with which it is easy to identify even at a distance of 300 years. But in addition the unwelcome Mr Turner’s linen had had to be mended and washed by her household and sent after him to London!
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The first serious attempt to interest women in higher education as such was that of Mary As tell at the end of the seventeenth century (as opposed to Basua Makin’s desperate avowal that she was only preparing women properly for marriage, or such isolated ventures as a sympathetic paper on the subject by the Anglican minister and writer Clement Barksdale in 1675). Mary Astell was born in 1666, to a prominent commercial family in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Nothing is known about her own education, except that she came late to French; it seems it was her mother’s death which brought her down from the north to London.
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She lived in Chelsea, probably in Swan Walk, and included many of the clever socially prominent women of her time among her friends: Lady Betty Hastings, granddaughter of Lucy Countess of Huntingdon by her only son Theophilus and a tribute to the tradition of intelligent women in that family, was one. But the friendship which provoked Mary Astell into her first proposal for a form of women’s college was a bird of a more gorgeous but less respectable feather. This was Hortense Mancini,
Duchesse de Mazarin, ex-mistress of Charles II, a flamboyant woman with the looks of ‘a Roman eagle’. She had acceded with pleasure to the advances of Charles II, but had not subsequently managed to stabilize her career, being the subject of numerous scandals, each one leaving her rather worse off than before.
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It was Mary Astell’s conviction that the ‘unhappy Shipwreck’ of her friend had been due to ‘the dangers of an ill Education and unequal Marriage’, the former contributing to the latter. Had Hortense been properly educated, wrote Mary Astell, there would have been a ‘right improvement of her Wit and Sense, we should not have found her seeking Relief by such imprudent, not to say Scandalous Methods as the running away in Disguise with a Spruce Cavalier’. Perhaps in her generous assessment Mary Astell had not totally understood the character of her fallen friend; it is possible to argue that as long as there are spruce cavaliers, there will be at least some scandalous elopements. Nevertheless the conclusion which Mary Astell drew was in itself significant. She saw in her ‘college’ a refuge – an all-female refuge of course – where heiresses could elude the fate of an unwanted marriage, ‘decayed’ gentlewomen could teach, and daughters without dowries could be educated.
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Was there not something about Mary Astell’s proposal which came very close to suggesting a kind of teaching convent? Of the sort only available since the Reformation to those Catholic girls like Mary Ward and her colleagues who were sent abroad. Ironically enough, this point was fully appreciated by Mary Astell’s contemporaries, but only to denounce her suggested college for this very reason, as being ‘Romanist’. Bishop Burnet in particular criticized her design on the grounds that it smacked of popery. It was only towards the end of his life, depressed by the ‘ill methods’ of the schools and colleges he saw around him, giving ‘chief rise to the irregularities of the gentry as the breeding young women to vanity …’ and being ‘the source of corruption of that sex’ that he came to see that Mary Astell had been right all along. ‘Something like monasteries without vows would be a glorious design,’ wrote the Bishop, ‘and might be set on foot as to be the honour of a Queen upon the throne …’
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Mary Astell herself was already drawing a distinction between the two different kinds of women. Upon those who loved their ‘chains’ she poured scorn: ‘Let them Housewife or Play, Dress and be entertaining in Company …’, these ‘
Very
women’ as she termed them, whose accomplishments were ‘most acceptable to all sorts of Men’. Then there were the other sort, who helped the poor and read pious books, who were accorded the honourable title of ‘
Good Devout Women
’. Mary Astell did not attack marriage as such, calling it ‘the Institution of Heaven, the only Honourable Way of continuing Mankind’; it was however the plight of ‘we poor Fatherless Maids and widows’ which explicitly concerned her.
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Yet by her distinction between the ‘
Very
women’, acceptable to men, and those who were not, she helped to promote the notion of the learned lady as one who dwelt on the other side of some great divide; a more than slightly ridiculous figure, when viewed at a distance.

Elizabeth Elstob was that pioneer of Anglo-Saxon studies who had arrived at Oxford unofficially, by courtesy of her brother William’s presence there. Described as ‘the justly celebrated Saxon nymph’, Elizabeth Elstob was responsible for the first Anglo-Saxon grammar, the first critical edition of one of Aelfric’s sermons and the first attempt at a complete edition of Aelfric’s homilies. With her brother, she formed part of a brilliant group at the university.
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Her work of 1709,
An English-Saxon Homily on the Birth-Day of St Gregory
, was dedicated to Queen Anne, hopefully relating her to such figures of history as Bertha the first English Queen, and the British-born Empress Helena. ‘I know it will be said, What has a Woman to do with Learning?’, she wrote. ‘Why therefore should those few among us, who are Lovers of Learning, although no better account cou’d be given of it than its being a Diversion, be denied the Benefit and Pleasure of it, which is both so innocent and so improving? But perhaps most of these Persons mean no more than that it makes them neglect the Theatre, and long sittings at Play, or tedious Dressings, and visiting Days, and other Diversions, which steal away more time than are spent at study.’
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William Elstob died prematurely. Whereupon Elizabeth had at once to leave the university town. For many years subsequently she struggled in poverty. When she was trying to found a dame’s school at Evesham the distinguished scholar was obliged to issue a nervous apology concerning her lack of certain skills: ‘There are some things to be taught in such a school which I cannot pretend to; I mean the two accomplishments of spinning and knitting. Not that I would be thought to be above doing any commendable work proper to my sex’, she added hastily. ‘And as an instance of the truth of this, the gown I had on when you gave the favour of a visit was part of it my own spinning, and I wear no other stockings but what I knit myself.’
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At one point Elizabeth Elstob was to be found ‘in her sleeping room, surrounded by books and dirtiness’; one who had ‘pursued too much the drug called learning’. This brilliant woman would in the opinion of her contemporaries have enjoyed a happier life if she had pursued instead the two accomplishments of spinning and knitting. As it was she became dependent on the patronage of the (female) great: Queen Caroline, wife of George II, was persuaded to make her a small allowance. After the Queen’s death, it was arranged that Elizabeth Elstob should enter the household of the Duchess of Portland – as governess to her children. And here in 1756, after eighteen years as a governess, the ‘Saxon nymph’ ended her days.
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