A Paper read by the Author, before the Social Science Association, London, 1862.

The subject of the Education of Women of the higher classes is one which has undergone singular fluctuations in public opinion. There have been times when England and Italy boasted of the literary attainments of a Lady Jane Grey and a Vittoria Colonna, and there have been times when the Chinese proverb seemed in force, and it was assumed that ”the glory of a man is knowledge, but the glory of a woman is to renounce knowledge.“ For the last half-century, however, the tide seems to have set pretty steadily in the direction of feminine erudition. Our grandmothers understood spelling and writing, Blair's Sermons and long whist. Our mothers to these attainments added French and the pianoforte, and those items (always unimportant in a woman's education), history and geography. In our own youth we acquired, in a certain shadowy way peculiar to the boarding-schools of that remote period, three or four languages and three or four instruments, the use of the globes and of the dumb-bells, moral philosophy and Poonah-painting. How profound and accurate was this marvellous education (usually completed at the mature age of sixteen) it is needless to remark. A new generation has appeared, and he who will peruse the splendid curriculum of one of the Ladies' Colleges, of Bedford Square, or Harley Street, for instance, will perceive that becoming an accomplished young lady is a much more serious affair now than it was in “the merry times when we were young.”