Abigail Read Online Free

are women. Most of them are daughters of tradesmen and artisans. They need the money. No! It isn’t money. Money isn’t that important—it’s only a barometer. What I mean is that teaching is one of the few honourable ways a woman has to an independent life.”
    “Lots of women keep shops.”
    “One shopkeeper in five, if you want to be precise. And they start with capital, or an inheritance or something. I’m talking about women. Womankind. Not a lucky few. Teaching—the teaching profession ,if that doesn’t make you laugh—is our Trojan horse. It’s going to be the way up for countless women. Up onto a plateau from where we’ll spread outwards into other jobs. There are ninety-five thousand office clerks in this country—d’you know how many are women? Three hundred! Yet there’s over three and a half million women at work up and down the land—and you know where most of them are: wherever there’s muck and no money!”
    “And in some obscure way,” Nora challenged, “this impressive display of statistical research has led you to have second thoughts about your curriculum?” She let her tongue linger on her lip. Secretly Winifred the Campaigner always excited her. All her life Winifred had been a solemn, studious, earnest girl—frequently childish in the way that only highly intellectual people can be childish; but she always took care to master a subject before she spoke of it to others. And on any subject she had mastered she was always impressive—in that unanswerable way which frightened off potential husbands by the sackful.
    “Yes…no! Well, in a way. What I mean is that more and more women of the artisan and tradesmen’s classes are going to get education and independence. It can’t be long now before we have universal and compulsory schooling for all children. My God! We’ll be the last civilized country to do so. Already the schooling given to girls of the lower classes is vastly superior to the useless mixture of mindless accomplishments and trivia drilled into middle-class girls at vast expense. What I’m saying is that this country will soon face the paradox of having a discontented and angry regiment of well-educated women of the poorer classes—and where may they look for a lead, eh? To the ignorant, fatuous, empty-headed hoydens who are allegedly their social superiors?”
    The point of Winifred’s argument suddenly struck Nora. “But,” she said, aghast, “what you wish to do, then, is to educate girls of good class into that same state of anger and discontent!”
    “Exactly!” Winifred said excitedly. Then she sank her head into her hands and repeated, in despair, the selfsame word: “Exactly.”
    “You tell the parents this? Before you take their fees?”
    “Some.”
    “You mean, I suppose, that you tell the ones who you know already agree with you!”
    “I tell everyone exactly what sort of daughter they may expect to get back. They must draw their own conclusions.”
    “But is that fair? You have given the subject a great deal more thought than they. It’s a kind of intellectual bullying.”
    “If they’re too stupid, or too lazy, or too impressionable to see where the choice may lead, is it my duty to guide them?” Winifred broke into laughter even before she had finished speaking, for she knew she had picked exactly the argument her mother would find unanswerable. To make the point doubly certain, she added, “ Caveat emptor— let the buyer beware—surely. In education as in everything else.”
    “Well…” Nora dipped her head, conceding. “We seem to have resolved your ethical doubts at least.”
    Winifred’s face fell. “Not at all. It’s the girls, don’t you see. I have no qualms about the parents. But the girls…Here is young Jane, who could be taught embroidery, dancing, music, and sketching, and grow up frivolous and empty-headed, and marry a gay hussar, and lead a life of mindless domestic tranquility. Or I can teach her, first that she