Part 2 (1/2)
It seems, as far as can be judged, that future opportunities are likely to occur when the right candidates for posts are there in sufficient numbers to make their exclusion on the ground of s.e.x, already seldom explicitly stated, impossible or inexpedient. Meanwhile it is probable that individual women will continue, in some cases, to suffer injustice, while in others, by virtue of their unquestionable attainments and strength of personality, they may attain the positions they desire. Slow progress is not altogether bad for the ultimate cause of women at the Universities: nothing could injure that cause so much as mistakes at the initial stage. An important appointment given to the wrong woman, or to one in any respect inferior to her colleagues, would be used as an argument against further experiment for many years.
University women teachers can best help to secure equality of opportunity by rendering themselves indispensable members of the body corporate. In their case much is required of those to whom little is given. Above all they must avoid the temptation to live entirely in the absorbing interests of the present: they must remember that it is the business of a University to make contributions to learning as well as to teach. Secondly, they must insist on equality of payment and status when there is any disposition, overt or acknowledged, to differentiate on the score of s.e.x. It is not right to yield on these points, for an important principle is at stake. On the other hand the time and place for insistence must be wisely selected, and any claim made must be incontrovertible on the score of justice and practicability. Lastly, women on committees and elsewhere are not justified in keeping unduly in the background. When they have something worth contributing to the discussion, it is not modesty but lack of business capacity, which makes them silent. ”Mauvaise honte”
is as much out of place as undue pertinacity. Women who are unwilling or unable to a.s.sert themselves when necessary, are not in place at a co-educational University. Most women, however, will derive intellectual stimulus from the free interchange of opinion, possible only when both s.e.xes are working happily together, with common interests and common aims.
If relatively too much s.p.a.ce in this article has been given to women's work at mixed Universities, the excuse lies ready to hand. In Women's Colleges there is, of course, no s.e.x bar, and the way lies clear from the bottom to the top of the ladder. Conditions of appointment, tenure, and work do not greatly differ from those described, except in so far as the stipends tend to be lower, especially for more responsible posts, when these are ordinarily occupied by women. It is a sign of the times that in at least one Women's College in a mixed University, it has been recently necessary to rule that posts are open to men as well as to women, unless it is specially stated to the contrary. Thus, when the power is theirs, women also may be unwisely tempted to erect a new form of s.e.x barrier. To do so would be to play into the hands of those enemies who are always raising the voice against equal pay for equal work. The most suitable candidate for a post is the one who should be selected, irrespective of s.e.x. It is this principle that women are endeavouring to establish. They must do so by scrupulous fairness when the power is theirs: by making themselves indisputably most fitted, when they are knocking at the closed door.
One further topic needs discussion in this section--the continued employment of married women in University posts. At present there is no universal rule, and every case has to be judged on its merits.
Every lecturer who marries, can and ought to help to form the precedent that continuance of professional work is a matter for her own decision and is not one that concerns governing bodies. Already a good many women, mothers as well as wives, have set the good example and have established their own position, sometimes without question, sometimes as the result of a difficult struggle. It is clear that Universities, with their long vacations, and with their established recognition of long absences for specified purposes, have less ground than most employers to raise difficulties for married women. Thus the holder of an A.K. scholars.h.i.+p may travel for a year, in order, by the wise provision of the founder, to enlarge his or her mind and bring back new experience to University organisation, research, and teaching. The woman who fulfils the claims of s.e.x, and to do so journeys into the realm where life and death struggle for victory, cannot thereby be unfitted for the profession for which she has qualified. Enlargement of mind and new experience will help her too, in the daily routine. It is for her alone to decide whether new claims and old can be reconciled. If in practice in an individual case they cannot, then and only then has the University or College a right to interfere, and on no other ground than that the work suffers. Since women workers are as a rule only too conscientious, this contingency is unlikely often to arise.
[Footnote 1: Her local authority may, however, have claims upon her, if she has promised to teach in an elementary school.]
[Footnote 2: Trained teachers only, men and women, will be admitted to the new Register.]
[Footnote 3: See tables at the end of this section, pp. 82 to 136.]
[Footnote 4: On the Continent even in Germany, and in the U.S.A.
several women have been elected to University chairs.]
[Footnote 5: Dr Benson, Staff Lecturer at Royal Holloway College, was raised to the status of University Professor of Botany in 1912 without open compet.i.tion; Dr Spurgeon was appointed to the new University Chair of English Literature, tenable at Bedford College as from 1st September 1913, after open compet.i.tion. These professors.h.i.+ps are the only two held by women at the University of London but there are several women Readers.]
III
SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHING
The girls' secondary day schools of this country, largely built up in the first place by the individual pioneer work of broad-minded women during the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, are now in most cases coming, if not under State control, at least into the sphere of State influence. These women educationists in some cases worked on old foundations, in others obtained from guilds or governors a share for girls' education of funds previously allocated to various benefactions or to the education of boys only. Private enterprise, individual or, as in the case of the Girls' Public Day School Company, collective, added schools in most important towns.
Thus by the beginning of the twentieth century there was provision for a large number of girls of the middle cla.s.s up to eighteen years of age, in schools which as High Schools were a.n.a.logous to the Grammar Schools for boys dating to a corresponding burst of educational activity rather more than three centuries earlier. Dependent on the fees of their pupils or on special funds or endowments, these schools could not, for the cla.s.ses unable to pay a fee, adequately supplement the elementary schools of the country, which provide for such children education at most up to fourteen or fifteen years of age. The Education Act of 1902, therefore, placed education beyond this age in the hands of local authorities, the Board of Education supplementing the rates by grants for secondary education--so that publicly owned schools have been started by munic.i.p.alities and County Councils, while other inst.i.tutions receive grants on certain conditions.
Schools of all the types mentioned and a few others, providing education at least from ten to sixteen (or eighteen) years of age, are known as secondary schools, and it is to work in them that this article refers.[1] Various as may be their origins, and different their aims, the teachers in them form a fairly h.o.m.ogeneous group, with definite points in common, resulting from the requirements of the Board of Education for the earning of the grant now paid to most of these schools, or for the register in force for a short time--as well as from the co-ordinating influence of members.h.i.+p of the Headmistresses' or the a.s.sistant Mistresses' a.s.sociations and other professional and educational bodies, and of educational literature from the publications of the Board of Education downwards.
It would be well if for this, as for other parts of educational work, people of middle age, or in fact all whose school days lie in the past, would dismiss their ideas gained from schools of even the end of the nineteenth century, and realise that the daily life of a school to-day is, in most cases, very different from that which they have in their minds. The time-table and the cla.s.s-room work may not appear dissimilar to the casual observer, but a difference there is, nevertheless. The chief alteration, however, is that a girl's education is increasingly carried on by many agencies other than these. In the school society rather than in the cla.s.s-room lesson, at net-ball and hockey rather than in the drill lesson, on the school stage or in the school choir she learns, rather than is taught, her most valuable lessons. Examinations still exist, it is true; but these come later in a girl's school life, and are more frequently based on the school curriculum and held in the school than used to be the case.
What does all this new life mean in the work of the teacher and her preparation for it?
Miss Drummond, President of the Incorporated a.s.sociation of a.s.sistant Mistresses, spoke thus on the subject[2]:--
”In a lesson in a good school there is most often a happy give and take between the teacher and the cla.s.s.
The teacher guides, but every girl is called on to take her part and put forward individual effort. The homework is no longer mere memorizing from some dry little manual, but requires thought and gives scope for originality. The whole results in a rigorous mental discipline, real stimulus to power of original thought, eager enthusiasm in learning.... It means an enormously increased demand upon the teacher.” Again, ”it must not be thought, however, that the work of the school is limited to lesson hours. We aim not only at giving a definite intellectual equipment but at producing independence and self-reliance together with that public spirit which enables a girl quite simply and without self-consciousness to take her part in the life of a community.”
Besides games, which may be organised by a special mistress (see p.
59) or by ordinary members of the school staff,
”there are nearly always several societies, run again by the girls as far as possible, but almost always with the inspiration and sympathy of some mistress at the back of them. Thus there are social guilds of various kinds.
These vary from mere working parties for philanthropic purposes to large organisations which embrace a number of activities.... Of something the same kind are the archaeological and scientific, the literary and debating societies.... These societies are among the most interesting and important parts of the work of a teacher, as they are also among the most exacting. Games and societies together tend to lengthen the hours of a school day, but even on leaving school, her work is not finished. There are always corrections to be done.... Still this is not all if lessons are to be kept as alive and stimulating as they should be.
First and foremost, it is absolutely essential that the teacher should not be jaded. She must get relaxation, she must mix with other people and exchange ideas, she must go about and keep in touch with all kinds of activities. But at the same time she has to read in her own subject, she has to keep up with modern methods of teaching, she has to think out her various lessons.”[3]
Just as the headmaster of a public school often seeks for a cricketer rather than a cla.s.sical scholar for his staff, so the headmistress thinks not only of academic attainments but seeks for an a.s.sistant who can keep going a school society or a magazine (while leaving it in the hands of the girls), who enjoys acting and stage management, who can take responsibility for a dozen girls on a week's school journey (the nearest approach to camping out--and experience of this would perhaps be a recommendation!). She wants some one not merely to teach or manage or discipline girls, but a woman who can share the life of the girls, or at least understand it well enough to let them live it.