Chapter XI: New Englandism 433 (8)

Not only is nature able to maintain this, but in cases where, because of some serious disturbance of natural conditions, a decided inequality of the ratio occurs by accident, nature is able to restore conditions to the previous normal, without our being quite able to understand just how this is {260} accomplished. We do not know how sex is determined. There have been many explanations offered, but all of them have proved inadequate and most of them quite nugatory. In spite of our lack of knowledge there have been times in history when a striking manifestation of nature's power has occurred. For instance, after the Thirty Years' War in Germany the ratio between the sexes had been so much disturbed that, according to some historians, there were probably nearly twice as many women as men in existence in the Germanic countries. The men had been cut off by the war itself, by famines consequent upon it, by extreme and unusual efforts to support their families and by epidemic diseases in camps and campaigns. The disproportion was so great that a relaxation of the marriage laws was permitted for a time in certain of the countries and men were allowed to have two wives.

Under these conditions nature at once began to reassert herself, the number of male births was greatly increased and the disproportion between the sexes immediately began to lessen. At the end of scarcely more than three generations the normal equilibrium of the sexes was restored and there was about an equal number of men and women again. Here we have the effect of one of these curiously interesting biological checks upon man's foolish quarrelsomeness which might result in a too great disproportion of the sexes.

We shall not be surprised, then, if we find other {261} such biological checks and compensations exerting themselves. In recent years Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Darwin, who is recognized as the best living authority in statistical biology, and Professor Karl Pearson, who has done more than any one else to bring out many curious and interesting but very important biological laws by the study of statistics, have insisted in their studies of the effect of the law of primogeniture, that when there are small families, the children are more likely to be nervous, oftener have an inclination to mental disease and have less resistive vitality against disease in general than the average child of the larger families. There is a small but significant advantage in vitality that accrues to later children of a family. This is so contrary to the frequently expressed opinion that only the children of small families can be brought up properly to resist disease and have such advantages in their education and nutrition as to be of better health, that I should hesitate to quote it, only that it has behind it the authority of such distinguished scientists as Galton and Pearson. They are both conservative Englishmen, they have no theory of their own that they are supporting, they have no axe to grind in things social and political for the launching of the new theory, they are only making observations on the facts presented and the data that have been collected.

Here is another striking example of a check on certain tendencies in humanity that apparently {262} nature does not approve of, or to avoid personifying a process, we had better say are not according to nature's laws. The small family does not perpetuate itself. It has certain natural disadvantages that work against it. It gradually disappears and the races of larger families maintain themselves. We need not have had recourse to Galton's and Pearson's principle in this matter, for we see the results of the small family in present-day history. France is decreasing in population. Our own Puritan families are dying out. American families generally of more than three generations are not perpetuating themselves. The teeming fertility of the poor immigrants who come to us is, with immigration itself, supplying our increase in population. Our nation is, as a result, gradually becoming something very different from what our forefathers anticipated.

What has apparently happened, then, in the history of feminine education and influence is that, whenever women became occupied with such modes of education, or the cultivation of phases of feminine influence that took them out of their houses, away from family life and far from the hearthstone, the particular classes of women who thus became interested did not propagate themselves, or propagated themselves to such a limited degree that, after a time, their kind disappeared to a great extent. The domestic woman with tendencies to care much more for her maternal duties than for any extra-domiciliary successes {263} propagated herself, raised her children with her ideals, cultivated domesticity and consciously or unconsciously fostered the mother idea as the main feature of woman's life and her principal source not only of occupation, but of joy in the living, of consolation and of genuine accomplishment. The tendency, as can readily be seen in our own time, of the other class of woman is largely to foster, often unconsciously, but of course often consciously also, the opposite notions. She talks of the slavery of child-raising, the limitations of the home woman, the drudgery of domestic life, forgetting that life is work and that the only happiness in life is to have work that you want to do, whatever it may be, but all this talk has its inevitable effect upon all but the born mother woman, and the result is the fad for public occupation instead of domestic life.

It is easy to see what the result of the opposite opinion is. Every tendency of the intellectual woman so-called is to repress such natural instincts as lead to the propagation of the race and the continuance of her kind. Of course it will be said that intellectual women are quite willing to have one or two children. First, this is not true for a great many of them. Secondly, for those who have one or two children losses by death and failure to marry in the second generation, because of conscious or unconscious discouragements and the exaggeration of ideas with regard to the danger of maternity, lead often to a complete {264} suppression of the family in the second or third generation.

Apparently the rule of history is that there are four or five generations of women interested in intellectual things particularly, who follow one another in these periods of special feminine education and exertion of influence outside of the home. Then there comes a distinct decadence of the feminist movement, because of the gradual diminution in number of women who are interested in such things, and then, while there are always certain women who develop great intellectual abilities which require a larger stage than the home for their display, and while there are always some who find an intellectual career or rather make it, very little is heard of feminism and women's claims. They are satisfied to rule their husbands, to raise their children, to be saints to their sons and elder sisters to their daughters, and the feminine world has its simple joys and not much fuss about rights.

It may seem far-fetched thus to appeal to a biological check or a great underlying natural law in a matter of this kind, but in recent years biology has so often been appealed to to justify unsocial conditions that its true application needs to be pointed out. We have heard, for instance, much of the struggle for life and the competition that is supposed to be inevitable in nature, while all the time it has apparently been forgotten that there is no struggle for life within the species {265} except when there is some disturbance of the ordinary order of nature, as in times of famine, or when a mother is foraging for her children. On the contrary, mutual aid is the rule within the species and there is no animal small or large, from the ant to the elephant, that does not help its kind and has not certain wonderful instincts for helpfulness, the origin of which we do not know, but which are founded in nature itself. Man justifies inhumanity to man by the supposed struggle for life, while all the time nature teaches us the opposite law.

Nature's way is that of elimination. Her interest is the race. She cares very little for the individual and guards only her great purpose of securing the propagation of the race. Apparently such intense preoccupation with the intellectual life as provides opportunity for serious education, for literary work and for the exertion of diffuse influence in a community, does not make for the propagation of the race or its proper preservation. We can see this easily in the world around us, in the limited progeny of those who live the intellectual or selfish life to the exclusion of racial interests. This is opposed to nature's purpose and she proceeds to eliminate those who stand in her way. This is not done by any cataclysmic process but by a law of nature. Those involved in the influence disturbing to her purpose eliminate themselves. This is as true for indulgence in toxic substances that produce certain personal {266} momentary good feelings, as for the more deliberate avoidance of certain of nature's burdens which brings about a certain negative pleasure at least by lessening the amount of pain that has to be borne and trouble to be endured. To these pains and troubles nature has attached some of the best of the compensations of life. The domestic joys are properly man's highest source of unalloyed pleasure without remorse.

Our review of the phases of feminine education and influence would seem to show that there has occurred a series of cycles about three centuries apart in the history of the race, during which women become very much occupied with things external to their household. Such cycles are represented by our own period, that of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century, that of the university period in the thirteenth century, and then that at Charlemagne's court earlier, though the barbaric conditions following the migration of nations probably did not allow a natural expression of the tendencies at this time. Earlier in history, in the first century before Christ and just after and in the fourth century before Christ in Greece, there had been, as we have pointed out, such cycles. During the intervening centuries there is a negative phase in the movement, so that feminism, under which is understood woman's expression of herself outside of her home and the exertion of her influence apart from her family and immediate friends, is very little in {267} evidence. During these times the domestic woman reasserts herself. During the positive phases of the movement she continues to have her children, the feminists do not, or at least not to the same extent. They and their kind are gradually eliminated, at least to a great degree, and so the negative phase comes on.

This is not an argument and is not meant as such. It is meant to be a scientific reading of the meaning of certain phases of the history of the race as they can be studied. I would be the last in the world to think that I could influence present-day activities by any such indications of a great law in the history of the race that takes three centuries from phase to phase. After all, who cares for a law that does not affect our generation, but at most the third and fourth succeeding generations, and the manifestation of whose phenomena can only be recognized in three-century periods?

What I have tried to do is to point out just what are the cycles of feminine influence and education in the world's history, and then to work out the reasons why, quite contrary to what might be expected, these phases have not continued, but are interrupted by periods of utter decadence of feminine influence or interest in public life and education. Perhaps in our time we are going to change all that. That is the feeling that we are prone to have. Others may have made progress and forgotten about it, or {268} may have made mistakes and been eliminated for them, but we are so consciously active in our affairs that we cannot think of ourselves as likely to suffer the fate of our predecessors. There is much of that feeling abroad in the present day, there has always been much of that feeling abroad in every other day, for each succeeding generation in its turn is perfectly sure that what it is doing means more than ever before, though it can see very clearly the mistakes made by its predecessors. It is somewhat like our feeling towards other persons and their accomplishments in life as compared to our own. Most of us are quite sure that whatever we are doing is quite significant, though we can see plainly that what most of our friends are doing, or are trying to do, is altogether trivial and insignificant.

In recent years we have come to realize more and more how much history needs to be studied in the light of biology. The decadence of Greece was probably due, to a great extent, to the bringing back by Alexander's conquering soldiers of malaria from the Orient, and thus the vanquished proved the ruin of their conquerors. The great plagues of the olden time which sometimes carried away nearly one-half the human race in a single visitation, were due to insect pests of various kinds, which all unknown to men conveyed the disease and diffused it widely. It will not be easy always to read the lessons of biology in history aright. Whether I have done so for you {269} or not, in this matter of the history of feminism, I cannot tell. The story, however, has been interesting to work out, and I do not think that its conclusions have ever been presented to the public in quite this form before. They are now presented not with the idea that they should be accepted as absolute, but for the criticism and consideration of those who are most vitally interested and who want to know all that can be known about the conditions surrounding woman's influence in the world and her place for good in the history of the race.

{270}

{271}

THE CHURCH AND FEMININE EDUCATION

{272}

"It is your duty to see that your daughter loves study and work,
securing this by the promise of rewards or some other means of
emulation. Above all you must take care not to give her disgust for
study for fear that this may continue as she grows older. Let her
not learn in her childhood what she should unlearn later in life."
--_Letter of St. Jerome to Leta, the wife of Toxolus, the son of St.
Paula_.

"The sum of education is right training in the nursery. The soul of
the child in his play should be trained to that sort of excellence
in which, when he grows up to manhood, he will have to be
perfected."
--Plato, _Laws_ (Jowett), Vol. IV, p. 174. Scribner, 1902.

"The minds of children are most of all influenced by the training
they receive at home."
--Pope Leo XIII.

{273}

THE CHURCH AND FEMININE EDUCATION [Footnote 18]

[Footnote 18: The material for this address was gathered originally
for the normal courses on the History of Education for many of the
teaching sisterhoods in this country. In its present form it was the
address to the graduates of St. Elizabeth's College, Convent
Station, N. J., on the occasion of the celebration of the jubilee of
the foundation of its teaching work.]

Lady Bachelors: I have had frequent occasions to address all sorts of bachelors on their graduation, of science and arts and letters and pedagogy, but this is my first opportunity to address ladies crowned, at least symbolically, with the laurel berries of the bachelorhood in art. We are apt to think of young ladies rather as masters of arts innumerable, and as needing no degree to attest their abilities. While I am glad, indeed, to address you as lady bachelors I do so with the fondest hope that you will all proceed to further degrees either academic or domestic and not remain in that nondescript class of bachelor-maids.

I should like to be able to tell you how much pleasure it gives me to have the privilege of addressing you on this Fiftieth Anniversary of the Foundation of St. Elizabeth's. There is an apt illustration of the Communion of Saints in your title as a college. Founded in honor of that noble, saintly American woman, Elizabeth Seton, {274} and yet called particularly after that Saint Elizabeth whom the Mother of the Lord set out to visit as the first act of her Motherhood of the Church, there always rises in my mind besides, the thought of that other Saint Elizabeth whom the Germans delight to call the dear Saint Elizabeth, who, though she died when she was scarcely twenty-four, has left a name undying in the annals of helpfulness for others.

This St. Elizabeth, whose name I recall with special willingness now that I see you ready to go out to do your world's work, lived in the midst of what has been until quite recent years the despised Middle Ages, out of which as little good might be expected as out of Nazareth in the olden time, yet she so stamped her personality on the world of her day that now the after-time, neglectful, as a rule, of the individual, so careless even of the world's (supposed) great ones, will not willingly let her name die. She is still with us as a great living force. They read a sketch of her life, I have heard, at the meeting of the Neighborhood House in New York within the last few months, as an incentive to that devotion to the needy that characterized her. She was a woman who thought not at all of herself, but all of others. As a consequence, mankind in its better moods has never ceased to turn to her. Evidently the formula for being remembered is to forget yourself. I am sure, however, that that has been brought home to you so well during your {275} years at St. Elizabeth's that it would, indeed, be bringing coals to Newcastle for me to say anything about it in the few minutes I have to talk to you.

What I have chosen to say to you refers to that higher Catholic education for women of which you are now going out as the representatives. I do it all the more readily because, through the kindness of your beloved teachers, I have had the privilege of co-operating a little in that education, for I appreciate that privilege very much.

Apparently a good many people cherish the idea that the Catholic Church is opposed to feminine education, or at least to the higher education of women as we know it now, and that in the past her influence has been constantly and consistently exerted against any development of this phase of human accomplishment. In the liturgy of the Church women are usually spoken of as the devout female sex, and it is supposed that the one effort of the Church itself, the unerring purpose of ecclesiastical authorities, was to prevent women from becoming learned lest they should lose something of their devoutness. Apparently it is forgotten that some of the greatest devotees in the Church, the saintly women who were held up to the admiration and emulation of their sisters in the after-time, women like St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Angela Merici, St. Jane Frances De Chantal and, above all, St. Teresa, {276} were eminently intellectual women as well as models of devotion.

This same idea as to the Church deliberately fostering ignorance has been quite common in the writings of certain types of historians with regard to other departments of education, and those of us who are interested in the history of medicine have been rather surprised to be told that, because the Church wanted to keep people in readiness to look to Masses and prayers and relics and shrines for the cure of their ailments,--and, of course, pay for the privilege of taking advantage of these,--the development of medicine was discouraged, the people were kept in ignorance and all progress in scientific knowledge was hampered. It is, indeed, amusing to hear this when one knows that for seven centuries the greatest contributors to medical science have been the Papal physicians, deliberately called to Rome, many of them, because they were the great medical scientists of their day, and the Popes would have no others near. For centuries the Papal Medical School was the finest in the world for the original research done there, and Bologna at the height of its fame was in the Papal States.

With so many other presumptions with regard to the position of the Church towards education, it is not surprising that there should be a complete misunderstanding of her attitude toward feminine education, an absolute ignoring of the realities of the history of education, which show {277} exactly the opposite of anything like opposition to be true. I have had a good deal to do in laboring at least to correct many false ideas with regard to the history of education, and, above all, with what concerns supposed Church opposition to various phases of educational advance. I know no presumption of opposition on the part of the Church to education that is so groundless, however, as that which would insist that it is only now with what people are pleased to call the breaking up of Church influence generally, so that even the Catholic Church has to bow, though unwillingly, to the spirit of the times and to modern progress, that feminine education is receiving its due share of attention. Most people seem to be quite sure that the first serious development of opportunities for the higher education of women came in our time. They presume that never before has there been anything worth while talking about in this matter. Just inasmuch as they do they are completely perverting the realities of the history of education, which are in this matter particularly interesting and by no means lacking in detail.

Whenever there is any question of Church influence in education, or of the spirit of the Church with regard to education, those who wish to talk knowingly of the subject should turn to the period in which the Church was a predominant factor in human affairs throughout Europe. This is, as is well known, the thirteenth century. The {278} Pope who was on the throne at the beginning of this century, Innocent III, is famous in history for having set down kings from their thrones, dictated many modifications of political policy to the countries of Europe whenever secular governments were violating certain great principles of justice, and in general, was looked up to as the most powerful of rulers in temporal as well as in spiritual affairs. A typical example of the place occupied by the Church is to be seen when Philip Augustus of France repudiated his lawful wife to marry another. Pope Innocent set himself sternly against the injustice, and the proud French King, at the time one of the most powerful sovereigns of Europe, had to take back the neglected wife from the Scandinavian countries, the distance and weakness of whose relatives would seem to make it so easy for a determined monarch to put her aside. When King John in England violated the rights of his people, Innocent put the country under an Interdict, released John's subjects from their allegiance and promptly brought the shifty Plantagenet to terms. The Pope at the end of the century, the great Boniface VIII, was scarcely less assertive of the rights of the Church and of the Papacy than the first of the thirteenth-century Pontiffs. While he was not so successful as his great predecessor in maintaining his rights, the policy of the Church evidently had not changed. Most of the Popes of the interval wielded an immense influence for good {279} that was felt in every sphere of life in Europe in their time.

Now it is with regard to this period that it is fair to ask the question, What was the attitude of the Church toward education? Owing to her acknowledged supremacy in spiritual matters and the extension of the spiritual authority even over the temporal authorities whenever the essential principles of ethics or any question of morals was concerned, the Church could absolutely dictate the educational policy of Europe. Now, this is the century when the universities arose and received their most magnificent development. The great Lateran Council, held at the beginning of the century, required every bishop to establish professorships equivalent to what we now call a college in connection with his cathedral. The metropolitan archbishops were expected to develop university courses in connection with their colleges. Everywhere, then, in Europe universities arose, and there was the liveliest appreciation and the most ardent enthusiasm for education, so that not only were ample opportunities provided, but these were taken gloriously and the culture of modern Europe awoke and bloomed wonderfully.

Some idea of the extension of university opportunities can be judged from the fact that, according to the best and most conservative statistics available, there were more students at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge to the population of the England of that day, than there are {280} to the population of even such an educationally well provided city as Greater New York in the present year of grace 1910. This seems astounding to our modern ideas, but it is absolutely true if there is any truth in history. The statistics are provided by men who are not at all favorable to Catholic education or the Church's influence for education. At this same time there were probably more than 15,000 students at the University of Bologna, and almost beyond a doubt 20,000 at the University of Paris. We have not reached such figures for university attendance again, even down to the present. Students came from all over the world to these universities, but more than twenty other universities were founded throughout Europe in this century. The population was very scanty compared to what it is at the present time; there were probably not more than 25,000,000 of people on the whole continent. England had less than 3,000,000 of people and, as we know very well by the census made before the coming of the Armada, had only slightly more than 4,000,000 even in Elizabeth's time, some two centuries later.

Here is abundant evidence of the attitude of the Church towards education. Now comes the question for us. What about feminine education at the time of this great new awakening of educational purpose throughout Europe? If we can find no trace of it, then are we justified in saying that if the Church did not oppose, at least she did not {281} favor the higher education for women. Let us see what we find. The first university in our modern sense of the word came into existence down at Salerno around the great medical school which had existed there for several centuries. Probably the most interesting feature of the teaching at Salerno is the fact that the department of the diseases of women in the great medical school was in charge of women professors for several centuries, and we have the books they wrote on this subject, and know much of the position they occupied. The most distinguished of them, Trotula, left us a text-book on her subject which contained many interesting details of the medicine of the period, and we know of her that she was the wife of one professor of medicine at Salerno and the mother of another. She was the foundress of what was called the school of Salernitan women physicians, using the word school in the same sense in which it is employed when we talk of a school of painters.

This is all the more interesting because the University of Salerno was mainly under monastic influence. Originally the schools in connection with the school of medicine were founded from the great Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino not far away. The first great teacher of medicine at Salerno, Constantine Africanus, whose influence was dominant in his own time and continued afterwards through his writings, became a Benedictine monk in his early middle age. The {282} preparatory schools for the medical courses at Salerno were largely in the hands of the Benedictines. The university itself was under the influence of the Archbishop of Salerno more than any other, and the one who did most for it, the great Alphanus, had been a Benedictine monk. Ordinarily this would be presumed to preclude any possibility of the development of a great phase of education for women, and especially professional education for women at the University of Salerno. Just the contrary happened. The wise monks, who knew human life and appreciated its difficulties, recognized the necessity, or at least the advisability, for women as medical attendants on women and children, and so the first great modern school of medicine, mainly under monastic influence, had the department of women's diseases in the hands of women themselves.

In Naples women were allowed to practise medicine, and we have some of the licenses which show the formal permission granted by the government in this matter. An almost exactly similar state of affairs to that thus seen at Salerno developed at Bologna, only there the university was founded round the law school, and the first women students were in that school. When Irnerius established his great lectureship of Roman Law at Bologna, to which students were attracted from all over Europe, he seems to have seen no objection to allow women to attend his courses, and we have the names of his daughter {283} and several other women who reached distinction in the law school. As the other departments of the University of Bologna developed we find women as students and teachers in these. One of the assistants to the first great professor of anatomy at Bologna, Mondino, whose text-book of anatomy was used in the schools for two centuries after this time, was a young woman, Alessandra Giliani. It is to her that we owe an early method for the injection of bodies in such a way as to preserve them, and she also varnished and colored them so that the deterrent work of dissection would not have to be carried on to such an extent as before, yet the actual human tissues might be used for demonstrating purposes.

As the result of the traditions in feminine education thus established women continued to enjoy abundant opportunities at the universities of Italy, and there is not a single century since the thirteenth when there have not been some distinguished women professors at the Italian universities. Nearly five centuries after the youthful assistant in anatomy of whom we have spoken, whose invention meant so much for making the study of medicine less deterrent and dangerous, came Madame Manzolini, who invented the method of making wax models of human tissues so that these might be studied for anatomical purposes. Made in the natural colors, these were eminently helpful. In the meantime many women professors of many subjects had come and gone at {284} the Italian universities. In the thirteenth century there was a great teacher of mathematics who was so young and handsome that, in order not to disturb the minds of her students, she lectured from behind a curtain. It is evident that the educated women of the Middle Ages could be as modest as they were intelligent and thoughtful of others, quite as much as if they had devoted their lives to gentle charity and not to the higher education. Women physicians, educators, mathematicians, professors of literature, astronomers, all these are to be found at the universities of Italy while the Church and the ecclesiastics were the dominating influences in these universities.

Unfortunately the spread of this feminine educational movement from Italy to the west of Europe was disturbed by the Heloise and Abelard incident at the University of Paris, and as all the western universities owe their origin to Paris, they took the tradition created there after Abelard's time, that women should not be allowed to enter the university. When, however, three centuries later, the Renaissance brought in the new learning, the schools of humanism independent of the universities admitted women on absolute terms of equality with men, and some of the women became the distinguished scholars of the time. The Church's influence is plainly to be seen in this, and the women took part in plays given in Greek and classic Latin before the cardinals and prominent ecclesiastics, and everywhere the {285} feeling developed that, if women wanted to have the higher education of the humanities or, as it was then called, the New Learning, they should have it. This feminine educational movement spread all over Europe. Anne of Bretagne organized a school at the French Court for the women of the court, and such women as Mary Queen of Scots, Margaret of Navarre, Renee of Anjou, Louise La Cordiere are a few of the French women of the Renaissance who attained distinction for broad culture and education at this time.

Spain, too, had its women of the Renaissance. One of the first of them was Isabella of Castile, whose assistance to Columbus was no mere accident, nor due so much to personal influence exerted on her, as to her own broad interest in the things of the mind in her time. Her daughter Catherine, who became Queen of England, was deeply educated, while her daughter, Queen Mary of England, knew the classics and especially Latin very well. During her time in England many of the nobility of the higher classes were distinguished for education. Lady Jane Grey preferred to study Greek to going to balls and routs, and sacrificed hunting parties for her lessons under Roger Ascham, in the great Greek authors. Queen Elizabeth knew Greek and Latin very well. The famous Countess of Arundell at this time was a distinguished scholar. Margaret More is a bright example of opportunities for the higher education given and taken in the lower classes of {286} the nobility of the England of her time. One thing we can be sure of in the England of that time, if the Queen and the highest nobility were interested in education and devoted their time to it so sedulously and successfully, then without doubt those beneath them in rank did so likewise. The upper classes are not alone imitated in things unworthy, but also in what is best if they only provide the good example.

To anyone who knows the history of the Church, however, these incidents in feminine education will not be surprising. Every time, as a rule, that there has been a great new awakening in education, women, too, have demanded the right to have their share in it, and the Church, far from discouraging, has always helped to provide educational opportunities. When in the ninth century Charlemagne reorganized the education of Europe, or, at least, reinstituted it for his people, the women of the Palace had their opportunities to attend the Palace school as well as the men. That Palace school was a very wonderful travelling university, wandering wherever the Court went. It was at Aix, it was probably at Paris for a time; when Charlemagne went down to Italy it went with him and seems to have held some sessions even while he was in Rome; there is a tradition of its existence while he stayed one winter in Verona. Though the teachers in it were monks, for Charlemagne and Alfred, the great, broad-minded rulers, who did so much for {287} their people, had no illusions about the high place that the monks held in life in their time, women were taught at the schools as well as men. Charlemagne and Alfred were in the best possible position to know who were the best teachers in their time, and they turned with confidence to the monks. People generally, and, above all, their great rulers, knew nothing of the condemnation of the monks in the Dark Ages which came a thousand years after their time; from people who knew nothing about them and who had even less sympathy with them. They both knew them and sympathized with all they were doing, therefore their cordial encouragement of them. Their attitude was eminently justified by the fact that the monks were broad enough, in spite of their monastic habits and their supposed lack of appreciation for women, to take up to a great extent even the teaching of women. There are letters from the women of the court of Charlemagne written to Alcuin and to other teachers of the time, which show how interested were the women in the school work.

This is not surprising if we recall that, when Benedict founded the monks of the west, who were to provide the homes where culture was to be maintained and the classics preserved for us and education gradually diffused, his sister St. Scholastica did the same thing for the women as her brother was doing for the men. Anyone who knows the story of the Benedictine convents for {288} women and the books there produced, plays, stories, even works on medicine and other sciences, will realize how much was accomplished for the higher education of women in these institutions in unpromising times. The women who wanted to follow the intellectual life were given the opportunity and many of them did excellent work. Within the last year I have written and published sketches of the lives of St. Hildegarde, who wrote books on medicine in the twelfth century, and of Hroswitha, the nun of Gandersheim, who wrote Latin comedies in imitation of Terence in the tenth century. These serious literary and scientific writings by women in what is usually presumed to be the darkest period of the so-called Dark Ages, and preserved for us out of the wreck and ruin that came down on nearly everything produced in those times, shows us very clearly how much more than we have been accustomed to think these women of the Middle Ages were interested in the intellectual life. Books are written only when there are readers and appreciation for them, and the interest of contemporaries and the hope of future interest as an incentive.

Of course, even before the foundation of the Benedictines we have a great living example of the encouragement of the Church for the higher education of women. It came at a time and under circumstances that furnish abundant evidence of how much the Church appreciates and is ready to encourage education and how precious she realizes {289} it is for her children. When the first nation was converted as a whole to Christianity, when the Irish people came over under the Apostolic Patrick's wonderful missionary zeal, the first thing that was done in this first Christian nation was to found schools. Ireland became the Island of Saints and of Scholars. While the barbarians had overrun Europe and destroyed the schools there, Ireland became the home of the best teachers in the world and men flocked to her from all over Europe.

These schools, however, were not reserved for the men, but abundant opportunities were also afforded women for scholarship and for culture of every kind. Only second in importance to St. Patrick's great school at Armagh during the first century in the history of Ireland as a Christian nation was St. Brigid's school at Kildare. We know from Giraldus Cambrensis, now better known as Gerald the Welshman, that, in his travels in Ireland centuries afterwards, but before the destruction of Kildare, he saw many wonderful evidences of the intellectual life of that institution. Above all, he saw a famous copy of the Holy Scripture so beautifully illuminated that he thought it the finest book in the world. His description would show us that if this copy of the Scriptures which Gerald saw was not the book of Kells as some have ventured to suggest, it was at least a copy not unlike that famous illuminated volume which is, perhaps, the most {290} beautiful book that ever came from the hand of man. The arts and the crafts evidently were studied and practised as well as book-learning at Kildare, and Brigid's influence brought to her at her college of Kildare, literally thousands of the daughters of the nobility of Ireland, of England and of portions of the Continent, attracted by her sanctity and her scholarship and the wonderful intellectual and artistic work that was being accomplished there.

With these facts in mind it is easy to see that the Church, far from opposing in any way the higher education for women, has not only encouraged but actually patronized it whenever there is a demand for it on the part of any generation in history. Feminine education comes and goes, so though in less markedly cyclical fashion does masculine education. Just what the law behind these cycles is we do not know as yet. One thing is sure, now that another cycle of interest has come to feminine education in the world, the Church is not only willing but anxious to give her children the benefit of it, and the growth of the higher education among Catholics for Catholic young women in America in the last decade is the best evidence of this. Our teaching Sisterhoods in this country have nobly lifted themselves up to the occasion demanded, and we may well be proud of our Catholic colleges for women. Personally I know what is being done at some half a dozen of them, and I have no hesitation {291} in saying that they are giving a better, solider, though perhaps, a less showy education than their secular rivals. Of your work at St. Elizabeth's I have had such personal information as makes me realize how thorough are the efforts to provide every possible opportunity for higher feminine education and how successful they are.

Only less absurd than the notion that the Church is in any way opposed to feminine education is the thought that seems to be in many people's minds in our day, that the Church would prefer to keep woman in the background and does not want her to do great influential things when those are demanded of her. The feeling seems to be that only modern evolution has brought such opportunities for women to exert the precious humanitarian influence that is sometimes possible for her. How much those who talk thus forget the history of the Church if they ever knew it, but also of feminine influence in the world, is very clear from even a short resume of feminine achievements in Christian times. Whenever there has been a great movement in the Church that meant much for the men and women of a time, beside the man who initiated it, if she was not, indeed, the initiator herself, stood a great woman only a little less significant in influence, as a rule, and sometimes even greater than he. In the conversion of the first people to Christianity, beside St. Patrick stood St. Brigid. In the foundation of the monks of the west that {292} great institution that meant so much for the Church and for Europe, beside St. Benedict stood St. Scholastica, his sister, doing and organizing for the women of her time and succeeding generations, what her brother did for the men. When, in the newer dispensation of the foundation of the Mendicant Religious Orders, St. Francis came to bring a great new message to the world, beside him and only a little less influential than he in his lifetime, and saving his work for its genuine mission after his death, came St. Clare. When the tide of the religious revolt spreading down from Germany, was pushed back in Spain, beside St. Teresa, for here the greater protagonist of the movement was a woman, stood St. John of God. When St. Francis De Sales came to do his great work for education and for the uplift of the better classes, beside him and scarcely less influential than he in every way, was St. Jane Frances De Chantal. In the great new organization of modern charity under St. Vincent De Paul beside that wonderful friend of the poor whose work is the underlying impulse of all modern organized charity in the best sense of that much abused term, stood the modest and humble but strongly beautiful woman, the foundress of the Sisters of Charity, Madame Le Gras. Even in the nineteenth century with the newer organizations of education demanded by changed conditions, when such foundations as those of the Sacred Heart and of the Sisters of Notre Dame {293} came into existence, men and women co-operated in these works and only now are we realizing to the full the sanctity of such women as Blessed Madame Barat or the Venerable Julie Billiart and their adviser and friend, Father Varin, the Jesuit.

Nor was it only in connection with work accomplished by men or initiated by them that we find women doing great work. It must not be forgotten that many of the religious orders which are accomplishing fine work in every line of helpful endeavor, often hundreds of years after their foundations, in conditions very different from those in which they were established, originated in the minds of women and had their constitutions worked out practically without any help from men, and often, indeed, against the judgment of men. The world of our day is not prone to appreciate at its proper worth these great works of women who took for an aim in life unselfish purpose, rather than any more personal ambition. It must not be forgotten, then, that the first settlement worker of modern times, the dear St. Elizabeth of Hungary, is one of the great influences that will never die. The cathedral erected in her honor within a few years after her death is the most beautiful monument to woman anywhere in the world. What St. Elizabeth was to the thirteenth century, St. Catherine of Sienna was to the fourteenth. Without her influence and her place in it, it would be impossible to {294} understand the history of that century, though sometimes history has been written without a mention of her. In the fifteenth century came Joan of Arc, in the sixteenth and seventeenth some of the brave women who founded great humanitarian works in connection with the early missionaries in this country. Everywhere in history you find Catholic women accomplishing great things.

After all, this is only what is to be anticipated from what is symbolized and prefigured in the story of the foundation of the Church. When the Son of God came as the Redeemer of Mankind, beside Him in His life and mission, the highest of mortals in the influence that she was to have over all succeeding generations, stood the Woman, whose seed was to crush the serpent's head, the Mother from whom He had chosen to take His human flesh. The Mother of the Messiah became the Mother of the infant Church and the Mother of all Christians ever since. Surely this was given for a sign not to be contradicted in the after-time. As the Mother beside the Son, so was woman ever to stand as the most precious influence in the work of Christianity. As the great scheme of redemption was dependent on her consent, so ever was woman to be God's greatest auxiliary in the accomplishment of good for humanity.

You can understand, then, that when I say to you graduates of St. Elizabeth's, go out and fulfill your missions, whatever they may be, I mean {295} that you shall be ready to take up any work for which your education and your training fit you, and God grant it may bring you such opportunities for good as have been exemplified in the lives of so many Catholic women all down the ages. There is nothing more than this that I could say to you. Our mother Church, far from wanting to keep women in the background, has always accorded them full and equal rights in their own domains and, above all, has given them absolute independence in the religious organizations as far as that is compatible with effective co-operation in good work. You may be sure, then, that any work that you find to do worthy of you, and that you take up whole-heartedly, will have not only her blessing but you shall find every encouragement. The glorious examples of the Catholic women of the past, educated, intellectual women, some of whom like St. Teresa, St. Catherine of Sienna, St. Jane Frances De Chantal and St. Brigid are high among the greatest intellectual women that ever lived, will be your guiding stars, and if you keep them in mind you shall not go wrong. Remember that we expect much and we have a right to expect much of the women graduates of our Catholic Women's Colleges--you have a great mission, you have put your hand to the plow, do not look back,--onward and upward. God's in his world and all's well. Only our co-operation is needed.

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ORIGINS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION

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"Libenter homines id quod volunt credunt."
--Caesar, _Bell. Gall., iii:8._

[Men believe readily what they want to.]

"Great additions have of late been made to our knowledge of the
past; the long conspiracy against the revelation of truth has
gradually given away .... It has become impossible for the
historical writer of the present age to trust without reserve even
to the most respected secondary authorities. The honest student
finds himself continually deserted, retarded, misled by the classics
of historical literature."
--_Preface of "Cambridge Modern History."_

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ORIGINS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION [Footnote 19]

[Footnote 19: The material for this address was collected for a
lecture on the History of Education for the Sisters of Charity of
Mount St. Vincent's, New York, and the Sacred Heart Academy,
Kenwood, Albany, N. Y. Subsequently it was developed for an address
to the parochial school teachers of New Orleans and for the summer
normal courses of St. Mary's College, South Bend, Ind., and St.
Mary's College, Monroe, Mich. Very nearly in its present form the
address was delivered in a course at Boston College in the spring of
1910.]

Here in the United States we have been somewhat amazingly ignorant of our brother Americans of Mexico and of South America. Our ignorance has been so complete as to have the usual result of quite intolerant bigotry with regard to the significance of what was being done in these Spanish-American countries. A distinguished ex-president of one of our American universities said in his autobiography, that a favorite maxim of his for his own guidance was, "The man I don't like is the man I don't know." If we only know enough about people, we always find out quite enough about them that is admirable to make us like them. Whenever we are tempted to conclude that somebody is hopelessly insignificant then what we need to correct is our judgment by better knowledge of them. For most Americans, for we have arrogated to ourselves the title of Americans to the exclusion of any possible share {300} in it of our South American brethren, Spanish America has been so hopelessly backward, so out of all comparison with ourselves, as to be quite undeserving of our notice unless it be for profound deprecation.

Fortunately for us in recent years our knowledge of Spanish America has become larger and deeper and more genuine, and as a consequence there has been less assumption of knowledge founded on ignorance. Every gain in knowledge of Spanish America has raised Spanish America and her peoples in our estimation. Not long since at a public dinner the president of a great American university said, "We have only just discovered Spanish America." This is literally true. We have thought that we knew much about it, and that that much showed us how little deserving of our attention was Spanish America, while all the while a precious mine of information with regard to the beginnings of the history of education, of literature, of culture, nay, even of physical science on this continent, remained to be studied in these countries and not our own. Our scholars are now engaged in bringing together the materials out of which a real history of Spanish America can be constructed for their fellow-Americans of the North, and their surprise when it is placed before them is likely to be supreme. In the meantime there are some phases of this information that, I think, it will be interesting to bring together for you.

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