Miscellaneous.

Make your Girls Independent.

BY HENRY F. FRENCH.

  Everybody in New England knows exactly what to do with a boy. Give him as a matter of course, the best education you can afford, and whether he is poor or rich, prepare him for some business, some regular useful business in life, so that whatever be the turn of Fortune's Wheel, he may be independent. A good education and a profession or trade, without property, is enough for him—enough to place him beyond the charities of a cold world, enough to give him hope and courage and assurance of success in life.

  But what is to become of the daughter? Do we consider this question sufficiently? Is not all New England grossly negligent on this point? Does the public voice answer this question satisfactorily?

  Let us examine the matter fairly. You have a daughter of sixteen, in a family of half a dozen children. You have a small property, a comfortable home, a farm perhaps, are tolerably "well off," worth perhaps eight or ten thousand dollars. You are still a young man, at least not so very old, that you need necessarily die for some years yet. Suppose this young lady has progressed as well as most girls, in her studies. She can read and write respectably, has cyphered as far as square root, can read French a little, though she cannot speak a sentence of it correctly. She can play on the piano, so that a person of common discernment can distinguish her Old Hundred from the Battle of Prague, but has developed no very decided taste for music. Still she is intelligent, active, and promising. Suppose she were, some pleasant morning, to propose the question directly to you, and ask a serious reply, "What do you intend I shall do when my education is finished?" What answer would you make, which should satisfy both you and herself? The probability, perhaps, is, that within ten or twelve years, she may marry; for that is the fate of a majority of ladies. Still, I think, you would not like to answer her reasonable question by such a suggestion, because such a probability is, after all, a vague uncertainty, and you would be quite unwilling a child of yours should make marriage a matter of necessity, or even of calculation. No, you could not say to her that she has but one chance in life, and that of such a nature, that she cannot seek to avail herself of it.

  Can you say to her deliberately, that you have a home which shall always be hers, also that you have means to maintain her, and that she need take no thought for the future? This is practically, what most fathers are saying to their daughters, but frequently, with less regard to truth than they profess. Your own life is uncertain. Your business enterprises may fail. Is it safe to risk the welfare of others entirely on your own continued prosperity? Besides, is there enough in the subordinate duties which usually fall to the share of a daughter in a family, to fill up the aspiring of human nature, to develop the faculties of the soul? Look at the course of life of grown up daughters in the families about you. They are usually regarded by the mother as children in all matters pertaining to the household. They do not take a share even of the responsibility of the family. If required to do a share of the work, they do it as a disagreeable task, to which a life of ease is far preferable. In the duties of wife and mother, there is enough to occupy the heart, and exercise the intellect of an educated woman; but the mere drudgery of housework, the cooking and mending and scrubbing, especially in a subordinate position, have in them nothing peculiarly attractive or ennobling to anybody. Usually, however, the daughter is not a working bee in the hive. She is better educated than her mother, perhaps, and not half so good a housekeeper, and so she naturally takes to fashion and light literature, receives calls and returns them, dusts the parlour for her share of the housework, works worsted cats and dogs for intellectual discipline, and wears a stylish bonnet to church by way of morals and religion. Without a definite object, how can she be expected to rise early in the morning, or to take an active interest in the affairs of life.

  But the question recurs, what better can be done? What shall be done that our daughters may have courage to look the future calmly in the face, and feel that their position is in some measure dependent upon their own exertions?

  A definite hope for the future, can alone make a rational being happy. Give every child, then, male or female, an education for some business. The discipline of acquiring it will be, in itself, salutary, and the consciousness of possessing it will at all times give dignity and independence to the character. Whatever your position in society, educate your daughter for some business in life, educate her according to your means and condition, and according to her tastes and capacity. The "sphere of a woman," which has always reduced far below the hemisphere which all accord to her as a right, includes, certainly, the whole range of teaching—in letters, in science, in music and drawing, and whatever else is learned in our schools. "Woman's Mission" surely is to teach, and the demand for female instructors, of a high order, is by no means supplied. Academies and high schools are now paying salaries of five hundred and a thousand dollars to college graduates, as mere temporary teachers, and would be glad to exchange them for well qualified females, who would enter upon their duties with some probability of permanency. Then there are the thousands of district schools, which are fast changing from the hands of college boys, to the "milder influences" of the gentle sex. If your daughter has a decided taste for music, or any ornamental acquirement, assist her to appreciate the gift which Heaven has offered her. Make her excel in something which the world deems excellent, and her superior attainment will always command respect, and the means of honorable subsistence.

  But there are many who cannot afford the means, thus to qualify their daughters for teachers. What shall they do? I answer, believe that labor is honorable, and teach them a trade, or manual occupation of some kind. I have never chanced to live in any place, where dressmakers and milliners did not keep the ladies of the village in complete subjection, dealing out their favors of dress-fitting and bonnet-trimming as if they were pearls and diamonds. I venture to say, sir, to you who are reading this paper, that you can build a forty-foot barn in less time, than your wife and daughters can procure their winter hats. Teach every young lady to cut and make her own dresses, and if you go further, and educate her to the trade, her support in life is secured. The printing offices, the counting-rooms or shops, the manufacturing establishments of various kinds, are furnishing respectable employment for females, and gradually the "era of freedom" for woman's labor and talent, is enlarging everywhere in New England. The means of education have not yet been supplied to boys and girls alike. Even Boston, I believe, which affords to every boy, at the public cost, a four years' course in a Latin or High school, gives to girls as an equivalent, only one additional year in the grammar schools.

  New England has her colleges—her Harvards, her Yales, her Dartmouths, for the boys, but nothing of the kind for girls. But these wants will soon be met.—Horace Mann, whose opinion is entitled in this matter to higher authority, perhaps, than any other individual in this country, has accepted the Presidency of a college in Ohio, where the sexes enjoy equal advantages of instruction.

  The want of the means to give to girls, at the public expense, the same thorough and systematic education as boys are receiving at our colleges, is the great defect in our New England system of instruction. Notwithstanding this want of opportunity for education, a great share of our best writing of a literary character, both in books and magazines, is from the pens of ladies, and he who doubts the capacity of the better-half of creation, for any literary labor deserves to have his ears pulled by Fanny Fern, and to be classed among slave-catchers in Mrs. Stowe's next edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Education for all, according to the capacity of each, is the true law of love and of progress.

Exeter, N.H., Sept., 1854.

New England Farmer.