lace. Boys play football, why shouldn't girls play football; boys
have school colors, why shouldn't girls have school-colors; boys go
in hundreds to day-schools, why shouldn't girls go in hundreds to
day-schools; boys go to Oxford, why shouldn't girls go to Oxford--in
short, boys grow mustaches, why shouldn't girls grow mustaches--that is
about their notion of a new idea. There is no brain-work in the thing
at all; no root query of what sex is, of whether it alters this or that,
and why, anymore than there is any imaginative grip of the humor and
heart of the populace in the popular education. There is nothing but
plodding, elaborate, elephantine imitation. And just as in the case
of elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and reckless
inappropriateness. Even a savage could see that bodily things, at least,
which are good for a man are very likely to be bad for a woman. Yet
there is no boy's game, however brutal, which these mild lunatics have
not promoted among girls. To take a stronger case, they give girls very
heavy home-work; never reflecting that all girls have home-work already
in their homes. It is all a part of the same silly subjugation; there
must be a hard stick-up collar round the neck of a woman, because it is
already a nuisance round the neck of a man. Though a Saxon serf, if he
wore that collar of cardboard, would ask for his collar of brass.

It will then be answered, not without a sneer, "And what would you
prefer? Would you go back to the elegant early Victorian female, with
ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in water colors, dabbling
a little in Italian, playing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar
albums and painting on senseless screens? Do you prefer that?" To which
I answer, "Emphatically, yes." I solidly prefer it to the new female
education, for this reason, that I can see in it an intellectual design,
while there is none in the other. I am by no means sure that even in
point of practical fact that elegant female would not have been more
than a match for most of the inelegant females. I fancy Jane Austen was
stronger, sharper and shrewder than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain
she was stronger, sharper and shrewder than George Eliot. She could
do one thing neither of them could do: she could coolly and sensibly
describe a man. I am not sure that the old great lady who could only
smatter Italian was not more vigorous than the new great lady who can
only stammer American; nor