DUTY OF WOMEN

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 March 1928, Page 2

DUTY OF WOMEN

17th CENTURY . PRONOUNCEMENT. “The Ladies’ Calling” is the title of a treatise written by an old bachelor, Bishop FeTl, of Oxford, in the early years of King Charles the First. It had long been his habit to produce a voltihi^‘every twelve months for the instruction of the students under his charge. In this year of 1627 he seems to have exhausted the pbyious subjects of interest 'pir which he, could sp.eak with authority' and they listen with profit• He felt some; not unnatural basjifujnesg in proposing the whole duty of women for his young men’s study,* and introduces it with a ■dramatic fiction which was probably new to that 17th .century audience (says M.R.B. in the Manchester “Guardian”).- He had lately, so he said, received a roll of papers, addressed by an unknown hand, with the request that he would peruse them, and afterwards, as he judged them worthy, commit them either to the flames or to the press. “’’Twill be superfluous/’ he continues, “ to say how much I was surpriz’d with this so unusual mldress—how much- affected with the singular modesty and humility which it expressed ; and after all, how much transported upon viewing the treasure, which was thus as from the clouds, dropt into my hands.” Having thus in all modesty given a flaming send-off to his treatise, he proceeds to develop it without further embarrassment. It is rarely that one opens any serious work of the 17th century without meeting with the theory that women have no souls. A few years from this date George 'Fox was to encounter a group of thinkers who were eager to debate the question, but were easily silenced by an appeal to the literal word of Scripture. If women have no souls; how then could the Virgin Mary declare: “My soul doth magnify the

Lord”? Bishop Fell, hovyever, is very generous. ‘‘Let it bp admitted,” he says, “that in respect of their intellects they are below men ; yet sure in the sublimest part of humanity they are their equals, they have souls of as divine an original, as endless a duration, and as capable of infinite beatitude.,” This being so, religion alone provided a safe subject for their contemplation : for the women’s own sake, no encroachment must be permitted upon the preserves of masculine learning : for other knowledge, as the Apostle observed, obviously with an eye to the female student! may puff up. We can gauge the value which scholars of that day set upon their own acquirements by the fact that they believed it impossible for women to emulate them withentirely losing their heads. “Were we sure,” the old Don continues, and no breath of experience had ever blown to ruffle his gentle patronage—“were we sure they would have ballast to their sails, have humility enough to poise them against the vanity of learning, I see not why they might not more frequently be entrusted wfEli it.” After this elaborate introduction, he proceeds to fill the first half of his book with a rehearsal of the virtues peculiar to women, and bearing in mind the warning which he has already given we are not surprised to find that modesty takes the first place in the list. Why men should not cultivate rfiodesty the Bishop does not pause to explain. The division gives him the opportunity for a very pleasing pronouncement, which reads like An echo of Lear’s praise of Cordelia: “A woman’s tongue should indeed be Tike the imaginary music of the l

spheres—sweet and charming, but not to be heard at a distance.”

His feminine virtues have a strong family likeness, and meekness is the trait which he next urges upon women, as particularly becoming ‘‘in respect of their natural imbecility.” Compassion and affability are his third and fourth virtues, ■ and finally, returning to the theme of his introduction, he sums up the whole duty of women under tfte head of piety, which he quaintly declares is a special obligation of ladies of quality. “If the Great Master of the universe has placed some in a higher’ orb than others it is that they may have an auspicious influence on those below them, and if they fail in this, they are no longer stars bjit comets, things of ominous and unlucky , abode to all aboutlhem.” Having sketched the character of the ideal woman, he lays down rules in the second part of the book for the employment of her time, dealing at some length with the deportment suitable to virgins, both young and old. Perhaps to our modern minds the little excursion on qk! maids is the most racy of all his pronouncements, and the advice given them by this old bachelor the most entertaining. “An bld maid,” he premises, rr is now thought such a curse, as no poetic fury can exceed, look’d on as the most calamitous creature in nature.” Let them cultivate gravity and reservedness, and eschew what Rosalind calls

a “coming-on disposition,” that so their condition may appear to the beholder to be their choice and not their necessity. As for the young virgin, the only way to secure herself from the danger which he vaguely indicates as “foreign assaults” is to employ every moment with offices of piety. “The vacancies of her time may be filled up not unusefully by acquiring any of those ornamental improvements, such as writing, needlework, languages, music, or the like, not forgetting the art of economy and household managery.” When her father thinks her ripe for marriage, she must neither anticipate, nor contradict his choice and one is puzzled to read that it is the child’s right, even in these conditions, to have a negative voice. When she is married “a patient submission is the one catholicon in'all distresses,” while a “wise dissimulation” is to be recommended, and is as much a woman’s interest as duty. “We have naturally some regret to see a lamb ufider the knife, whereas the impatient roaring of a "swine diverts our pity.” Patient Grizel, however, may hope to get some of her own back in the nursery. Like Susanna Wesley one hundred years later, the bishop held that a child’s will could not be crushed too early. Let his mother nip the first bud of self-assertion in his infancy, “’twill much ease the next part, that of the childhood ; for where the sinew in the neck is broken, where the native stubbornness is subdued so early, the yoke will fit easy.” It was a dreary round of mutual distrust and deception to which the ladies were called by Bishop Fell, and one wonders whether they or the potential husbands to whom the book was primarily addressed were the more attracted by it. A manuscript note on the fly-leaf of the copy in the British Museum records that the author died unmarried, “in spite of his recommendations of the married state.”