Little Essays of Love and Virtue | Page 3

necessary for the girl as
for the boy to be trained to the meaning of life. Margaret Paston,
towards the end of the fifteenth century, sent her daughter Ann to live
in the house of a gentleman who, a little later, found that he could not
keep her as he was purposing to decrease the size of his household. The
mother writes to her son: "I shall be fain to send for her and with me
she shall but lose her time, and without she be the better occupied she
shall oftentimes move me and put me to great unquietness. Remember
what labour I had with your sister, therefore do your best to help her
forth"; as a result it was planned to send her to a relative's house in
London.
[1] This was illustrated in England when women first began to serve on
juries. The pretext was frequently brought forward that there are certain
kinds of cases and of evidence that do not concern women or that
women ought not to hear. The pretext would have been more plausible
if it had also been argued that there are certain kinds of cases and of
evidence that men ought not to hear. As a matter of fact, whatever
frontier there may be in these matters is not of a sexual kind.
Everything that concerns men ultimately concerns women, and
everything that concerns women ultimately concerns men. Neither
women nor men are entitled to claim dispensation.
It is evident that in the fifteenth century in England there was a wide
prevalence of this method of education, which in France, a century later,
was still regarded as desirable by Montaigne. His reason for it is worth
noting; children should be educated away from home, he remarks, in
order to acquire hardness, for the parents will be too tender to them. "It
is an opinion accepted by all that it is not right to bring up children in
their parents' laps, for natural love softens and relaxes even the
wisest."[2]

[2] Montaigne, Essais, Bk. I., ch. 25.
In old France indeed the conditions seem similar to those in England.
The great serio-comic novel of Antoine de la Salle, _Petit Jean de
Saintré_, shows us in detail the education and the adventures, which
certainly involved a very early introduction to life, of a page in a great
house in the fifteenth century. We must not take everything in this fine
comedy too solemnly, but in the fourteenth century _Book of the
Knight of the Tour-Landry_ we may be sure that we have at its best the
then prevailing view of the relation of a father to his tenderly loved
daughters. Of harshness and rigour in the relationship it is not easy to
find traces in this lengthy and elaborate book of paternal counsels. But
it is clear that the father takes seriously the right of a daughter to
govern herself and to decide for herself between right and wrong. It is
his object, he tells his girls, "to enable them to govern themselves." In
this task he assumes that they are entitled to full knowledge, and we
feel that he is not instructing them in the mysteries of that knowledge;
he is taking for granted, in the advice he gives and the stories he tells
them, that his "young and small daughters, not, poor things,
overburdened with experience," already possess the most precise
knowledge of the intimate facts of life, and that he may tell them,
without turning a hair, the most outrageous incidents of debauchery.
Life already lies naked before them: that he assumes; he is not
imparting knowledge, he is giving good counsel.[3]
[3] If the Knight went to an extreme in his assumption of his daughters'
knowledge, modern fathers often go to the opposite and more foolish
extreme of assuming in their daughters an ignorance that would be
dangerous even if it really existed. In _A Young Girl's Diary_
(translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul), a work that is
highly instructive for parents, and ought to be painful for many, we find
the diarist noting at the age of thirteen that she and a girl friend of
about the same age overheard the father of one of them--both well
brought up and carefully protected, one Catholic and the other
Protestant--referring to "those innocent children." "We did laugh so,
WE and innocent children!!! What our fathers really think of us; we
innocent!!! At dinner we did not dare look at one another or we should

have exploded." It need scarcely be added that, at the same time, they
were more innocent than they knew.
It is clear that this kind of education and this attitude towards children
must be regarded as the outcome of the whole mediæval method of life.
In