Intellectual Education.
[Education]. Shirreff, Emily. Intellectual Education and its Influence on the Character and Happiness of Women. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1858.
8vo.; bookbinders label on rear pastedown; maroon cloth, stamped in blind and gilt; spine and upper panel evenly faded to brown. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition; with eight pages of publishers advertisements in the rear. Divided into eight chapters, including, “Application of General Principles to Female Education,” “Moral Training and Influence of Health Upon Character,” “Early Teaching,” and “Some Peculiarities of Woman’s Social Position.” Shirreff was a life-long advocate for women’s education, though she believed women should educate themselves solely for intellectual enlightenment, not in pursuit of a career. She insists, “But for women…to find any career of activity analogous to men’s professions, seems to me utterly chimerical, and of very questionable advantage could it be found.” (p. 417). The inscription on the title page, from one unknown woman to another, reads: Mrs. Head/with Lady Lamb’s affectionate regards/June 1858.
Intellectual Education is considered a pioneering work in favor of women’s education. It has been described as a “major polemical work” (Liberators of the Female Mind: the Shirreff Sisters, Educational Reform and the Women’s Movement, by Ellsworth, 1979, p. 5), but Shirreff achieved the delicate balance of supporting women’s education while conscientiously avoiding attacks on men. The beginning chapter concludes with the following paragraph:
The very fact that women have no professions to exercise their abilities, or make them feel the need of knowledge, which has been the plea for giving them little or no solid mental cultivation, is then in truth…the reason why they need a higher and more severe tone of education; since, unless we would allow their faculties to be wasted both to themselves and society, they must be educated to feel from within what comes to the more active portion of mankind from without. They must be educated to feel the constant necessity of self-improvement and their responsibility as members of society, although not sharing in its active labours. …In educating a young girl we must feel that her future is too uncertain, too much beyond her own control, to venture to train her altogether for a position that may never be hers. The only safe course is to hold up individual perfectness, as far as such a term may be used, as the aim of education; in other words, the harmonious development of all her powers as her own individual right and duty; to train her, in short, as God’s creature, not as man’s subordinate. (p. 29)
For Shirreff, laying the groundwork of a solid education – and cultivating lifelong enthusiasm for it – is the duty of the mother, especially in the case of educating girls. She explains, “in speaking of the education of girls, teacher is really synonymous with mother; at least that the latter must inevitably exercise a degree of influence which makes any other almost nugatory. …In a word, the tuition may be left to others, but the spirit and the method of the education must be given by her.” Shirreff insists, in the beginning chapters of her book, that the most effective early education comes from an intelligent mother and governess; it is their duty to set an example of steadfast morality for their children.
Shirreff’s message adheres to a “separate but equal” formula for men and women; she supports education for women as long as it makes them better “feminine” women: better housewives, better mothers, or better governesses. Since women’s education in the 19th century abruptly concluded with high school graduation, Shirreff advocates teaching women how to be curious about the world, and, once they are through with elementary schooling, inspire them to educate themselves. In her concluding chapter, Shirreff writes,
I have founded the plea for higher education for women
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