Rensselaer Union and Jasper Republican, Volume 8, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 May 1876 — Women in the Old Time and in the New. [ARTICLE]

Women in the Old Time and in the New.

Mr. George William Curtis lectured in New York a few evenings agoon “Women in the Old Time and in the New.” The following extracts are taken from an abstract of his lecture published in the N. Y. Timet; The dress of a fashionable woman—and never were men so alive to it as at this moment—the dress of- a -fashionable woman, says the social moralist, costs her husband hundreds, yes, thousands of dollars. “It is shameful; it was not so in the simple old time." Softly, softly. Here is Queen Elizabeth, 300 years ago, who died the happy owner of 2,000 dresses, and who issued her solfenin proclamation against extravagance in dress. We bewail our society, so giddy, so gross. Young men content to drive fast horses and play billiards; young women in the finest dresses, hobbling on high heeled shoes that pinch their feet into Chinese deformity, in bonds that squeeze their waists. It is shameful, we crv. But were the olden times much simpler? In Sinollet’s “ Humphrey Clinker,” the picture of society one hundred years ago, we see a fiimous belle dressed for a ball. “ I was not six hours in the hands of the hairdresser and he stuffed my head full of black tow that would have made a quilted petticoat.” And yet it was the smallest head with one exception. The position of women is always the test of civilization, and the great illustration of its advancing sentiment is the opening up of every opportunity of education. To-day, as I stand in the ample halls of some great school for girls, humming with intellectual activity, as I think of the daily use of that household, of the libraries, of the cloister of learning, of the nuns immured, not for solitary and useless worship, but' daily training to praise God by the larger and still larger development of the faculties He has given, I reflect that if those girls had been Greeks of the age of Pericles, instead of Americans of to-day, if they had lived in what we are apt to call the finest civilization, it would have been simply accepted as an indication that they were fitting themeelves for lives of disgrace instead of honor. In the old times of Greece, the best educated, the most accomplished women, women whose wit and intelligence were like the ladies who are the pride of society to-day, were for that reason an outlawedclass._ : _ The lecturer then spoke of the first attempts toward Ihe higher education of women. He told how a young woman was mobbed in France for attempting to establish a school in which she might teach girls; referred to the accomplishment of ladies in the early days as consisting of nothing more than a knowledge of writing and arithmetic, and in seme few cases music and dancing. Sometimes in those early days girls were allowed to attend school when there were not boys enough to fill the class-room, and in summer girls were in a few instances permitted to attend the boys’ school for a few hours a day. The city of Boston was the first to give girls an opportunity tp gain a better education, and after a discussion of three years it was decided by the common council to establish a high school for girls similar to that for boys. When the school was opened its doors were actually besieged by girls, and .the city fathers were amazed at this crowd of “ fellows of the other sex, you know.” At the establishment of the school the people were horrified, and begpn to make suggestions and to ask questions as to how far this higher education was to be carried. The question suggests itself to those city fathers: Suppose, suppose that Boston women Bhould come to know more than Boston men; suppose and suppose, Mr. President, there Bhould be a Board of Aiderwomen instead of Aldermen, who should rule the city? As the old deacon said, “ Suppose and suppose, fellow-sinners, you should wake up in the morning and find yourselves dead, what would you say then?” -v

Mr. Curtis thought that Sidney Smith would stand aghast could he see how rapidly these views on education had advanced. Schools and colleges were being everywhere established for women, and even in the shadow of Cambridge University in England there stood a female college, for which examinations were held throughout the whole land. It was argued by some, he said, that a woman could not stand the strain of a college education, and it was a woman who replied: “ I would like you to take 1,300 young men and lace them, and hang ten or twenty pounds of clothes upon their waists, perch them on three-inch heels, and stick 10,000 hair-pins in their scalps, and if they can stand this they can also slaud a littie Latin and a little Greek.” Among savages, he said, woman was regarded as little more than a child or a beast, and even poets considered her as only fit to attend to flowers and such other things as that. He considered that compliment was insult to a woman, and in order to illustrate how woman was sometimes complimented and at the same time insulted, the speaker gave a very lively and very graphic description of a supper, at which men, when half intoxicated, toasted women, and then sang “ We won’t go home till morning.” He reversed this scene, and presented one of half-fud-dled *vi)meu toasting men in the same manner. In answer to the question which he said he presumed the audience would put to him as to whether home was not the proper sphere of woman, he said that for some it was, but every woman had talents and certain faculties which God had given her, and which it was her duty and her place to develop.