Mistaken Views on the Education of Girls.
Earliest Documented Feminist Tract In New Zealand
[Education]. Lohse, Johanne. Mistaken Views on the Education of Girls. Christchurch, N.Z.: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1884.
12mo.; hinges tender; fore-edge foxed; black cloth, bright stamped in gilt and blind; rubbed; extremities worn; library label on cover. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of the second book published by Whitcombe and Tombs, the first serious New Zealand publisher, and certainly the first feminist tract published in that country. An Encyclopedia of New Zealand notes that “there was not much local publishing before the [eighteen] eighties,” with the exception of pamphlets which were produced primarily by newspapers and concerned almost exclusively with politics or religion. Whitcombe and Tombs, founded in Christchurch in 1882 by bookseller George Whitcombe and printer George Tombs, was one of the first establishments to extend itself beyond these subject boundaries, devoting a good deal of space on their list to education. Their first books were Alfred Cox’s Recollections, and this slim treatise by Johanne Lohse, a school teacher with twenty years experience abroad and in the United States, “…written in the hope that some good may be done by pointing out to parents the grave mistakes they often make unconsciously in the education of their daughters” (preface). Another of Whitcombe’s eighties publications, and more in keeping with their fare, was a series of copy books. “Apart from purely educational publishing, Whitcombe’s built up a very large general list and for many years had no real competitors as publishers until the rise of A.H. and A.W. Reed (qq.v) in the nineteen thirties” (An Encyclopedia of New Zealand Volume Two, by A.H. McClintock, ed., Wellington, N.Z.: R.E. Owen, Government Printer, 1966, p. 884).
Lohse writes in her preface:
The life of many a nice girl belonging to the middle and upper classes of society, is marred by the sad consequences of mistakes made in home training, in the choice of a governess or a school, and in the pursuit of studies injudiciously undertaken in the belief that by gaining distinction at examinations, they also gain true culture. …The elaborate educational systems of modern times are often inadequate to the task of developing aright all the powers of the young, and many a certificate and diploma covers a world of ignorance. …In writing these pages it has been my aim to show what hinders and what promotes harmonious culture.
A lengthy pencil annotation by a previous owner in the margin of page 80 merits quoting. Lohse writes on this page:
If it were not for the mistake of withholding a good education from their daughters of which so many parents belonging to the middle and upper classes are guilty, the greater majority of women attending Lectures at our Colleges and Universities would in all probability be ladies, and those belonging to the lower classes of society would have a far more difficult stand-point in gaining distinction than they will have, as long as the preparatory education of the former is so deficient, that they cannot matriculate and study successfully.
Our reader responds,
The author knows nothing about the type of women at the English Universities—College-life is much too expensive to admit of a low class of women students amongst whom there are a great many daughters of the English clergymen, the daughters present [ ] archbishop have swelled the number of women-graduates.
Rare; OCLC and Rlin report a total of five copies.
(#3955)
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