For them there was rarely anything better than a superior dame's school ...

For them there was rarely anything better than a superior dame's school in a parlour or a very inferior visiting governess. That the education of girls, as codified by eighteenth-century manners and moralized by nineteenth-century respectability, tended to a certain repression of personality in the interests of a favourite sexual type, can hardly be denied.

But in the Victorian age this type was moulded

by the pressure of an uncompromising religion: if

the convention was that eighteenth-century man preferred his women fragile, and nineteenth-century man liked them ignorant, there is no doubt at all that he expected them to be good; and goodness, in that age of universal charity, imported the service of others, and if service then

training for service.

Children and the sick had always been within the lawful scope of women's activities, and, in a generation not less scientific than benevolent, the evolution of the ministering angel into the professional teacher, nurse, or doctor was inevitable. Often obscured by agitation for subordinate ends-the right to vote, to graduate, to dispose of her own property after marriage-the fundamental issue of feminism was growing clearer all through the century, as women, no longer isolated heroines but individuals bent on a career, drew out into the sexless sphere of disinterested intelligence, and the conception of autonomous personality took body; a process which may be truly named Victorian if only for the horror with which Victoria regarded it.

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