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L'idée d'université

Troisième partie. L'émergence des universités 1853-1919

13. L'éducation supérieure des femmes

1889

William Dawson

Résumé

Dans la deuxième moitié du XIXe siècle, aux États-Unis, en Grande-Bretagne et au Canada, les femmes cherchent à accéder aux études supérieures. Ainsi, au Canada, plusieurs établissements s’ouvrent aux femmes : Mount Allison (1862), Queen’s (1872), Victoria College (1877), Acadia (1880), Dalhousie (1881), le plus souvent dans des classes séparées de celles des hommes. En 1871 est fondée la Montreal Ladies’ Educational Association qui organise des conférences par des professeurs d’université pour des auditoires féminins, et dont le premier conférencier invité est le principal de McGill, William Dawson. L’année suivante, à McGill, le professeur de philosophie John Clark Murray prononce une conférence favorable à l’éducation des femmes. Personnellement sympathique à la formation supérieure des femmes, notamment pour en faire de meilleures épouses et mères, Dawson contribue à convaincre le Protestant School Board of Greater Montreal d’ouvrir une école secondaire (high school) pour filles. Une première cohorte de dix étudiantes est diplômée en 1877. La question de l’admission des femmes à McGill se pose avec une acuité croissante et suscite, en 1882 et 1883, de nombreux débats. Dawson s’engage à préparer un rapport détaillé sur la question. Avant que le rapport ne soit déposé, soit à l’été de 1884, l’homme d’affaires Donald A. Smith (futur Lord Strathcona) offre à McGill la somme de 50 000 $ pour mettre sur pied un programme de baccalauréat pour les femmes, à condition qu’elles suivent leurs cours séparément des hommes. Dawson convainc l’université d’accepter ce don, le programme ouvre dès l’automne 1884 et un premier groupe de celles qu’on appelle les «Donaldas» (en référence à leur bienfaiteur Donald A. Smith) obtient le baccalauréat ès arts en 1888.
En 1889, Dawson profite d’une invitation de la Delta Sigma Society of McGill University pour réfléchir sur la question de l’éducation supérieure des femmes. Il soutient la légitimité de cette éducation, non seulement la formation culturelle générale correspondant au baccalauréat ès arts de l’époque (premier cycle universitaire), mais aussi des formations professionnelles pour l’enseignement, les soins infirmiers (« that higher kind of medical nurse »), éventuellement la médecine, et même, pour des sujets d’élite, une formation supérieure en littérature, en sciences, en philosophie. Car le génie ou les grands dons intellectuels se trouvent dans les deux sexes. Pour Dawson, donc, l’université doit être aussi accessible aux femmes qu’aux hommes.

Note de l’éditeur

Source : William Dawson, Educated Women : An Address Delivered before the Delta Sigma Society of McGill University, Montréal, 1889, p. 10-14.

Texte intégral

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1It remains for us to ask how are our women best to attain some of that great and glorious heritage of light and learning on the borders of which we have been touching? The first preliminary is the erection of good elementary and high schools for girls, as preparatory to higher education. In this respect our larger seats of population in Canada are not badly provided; but it is the true policy of all the friends of higher education to be zealous in promoting the prosperity and improvement of these schools. The next requisite is that girls and their parents should be prepared to give some years of their time after leaving school to the work of higher culture; and undoubtedly some portion of the enjoyments and social gaieties of life must be sacrificed for this purpose. If this cannot be done to the extent of taking the full course for a degree, then a well-selected partial course is the best substitute, and may be followed without engrossing the whole time of the student. Our universities would much rather have undergraduates than partials; but at present we must provide for the fact that many ladies desirous of higher culture are prevented by circumstances from pursuing the complete course of study. We are the more under obligation to make such provision, as having succeeded to the excellent work of the Ladies’ Educational Association, which was so efficient in this department, and which prepared the way for a regular academic course.

2It would be invidious to make comparison of the modes which different universities in this country have adopted to provide for the higher education of women, under circumstances often of extreme difficulty; but I may be permitted to say that the method introduced here, by the liberality of Sir Donald Smith, while still imperfect, enables us at present to secure equal instruction for the sexes in separate classes with identical examinations and degrees, and bids fair in its full development to place the Canadian ladies of the coming time in a position to be envied by their sisters abroad, while its influence on our school systems and on our colleges for men cannot fail to be in the highest degree beneficial. The time may come when instead of the question, “How shall our young women obtain the same advantages with our young men?” it may be “How can our courses of study for men be so reformed as to make them equal to those of our colleges for women?”

3Nothing in the preceding part of this address refers to what may properly be termed professional education, but only to that general culture which should be accessible to every educated woman, and this with the view that her profession is to be that which we referred to in the outset and which is the highest in the world — that of a wife and mother — the high priestess of the family, earth’s holiest shrine — the ruler of the well-regulated household, which is the sole possible basis of any sound public morality and true prosperity — the wise and thoughtful regulator of all those social reunions, charities and benevolences which make life agreeable. If women must be prepared for permanent professions it is because the world is out of joint — because it has sunk into a lower fall than that which deprived our first parents of paradise, and has thrown down women not only from the position of equal helpmeet in innocent Eden, but from the subject helpmeetness established after the fall, and has driven her out, not with the man but alone, to contend with the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. Alas! That our boasted civilization has fallen so low that it should be necessary even to contemplate the isolation of woman in the battle of life. Happily, Christianity is not to blame for this; for under its system women, while allowed to engage in all useful avocations, were ordinarily to be sustained in the privileges of domestic life by their male relations, or failing these, by the church itself: and those who had been deprived by death of their natural protectors were to be employed in missionary work. These were the “widows indeed” of Apostle Paul. The work of this Christian ministry, whether educational, benevolent, or religious, was evidently the sole public profession recognized for women in the New Testament. But the world is not yet sufficiently Christian or sufficiently civilized to appreciate fully the social beauty of Christianity. Hence it is full of wrangling as to the rights and privileges of women who must earn their daily bread, and especially of those who must earn it by the labour of the brain rather than of the hands.

4I may sum up the position of women in a truly Christian society by an exemple which, though old, bears on present question. When Paul the apostle crossed over from Troas, there may not have been a solitary Christian in all Europe. In Philippi he went on the Sabbath day to the meeting-place of his Jewish countrymen. He found there a few pious women holding a prayer meeting. There must have been Jewish men in Philippi, but all were too careless or too busy to attend to the obligations of the Sabbath. A few women represented all the true religion of the place. The hearts of some of these women were touched by the message of Paul, and in the house of Lydia — a dealer in purple, and a Christian lady — met the first Christian Church in Europe. This instance illustrates the position of women in the Jewish and early Christian church. The heathen women of the period were degraded to the lowest point by the licentious character of their idolatry and by its failure to recognize anything true or good in the nature of woman. The Jewish women everywhere occupied a higher plane, based upon the spiritual and moral teaching of the Old Testament, and as was natural, their religion was less that of the law and more that of the prophets and psalmists then that of the men. Hence in every Gentile city the Jewish women were a pure and holy element to which we find that many of the better natures among the Gentile women, “the honourable women,” of the Acts of the Apostles, joined themselves. It was from these that the women of early Christianity were recruited, those efficient helpers of the Apostles to whom Paul so often refers. Christianity was especially the gospel of women, but its progress was arrested by the ambition of men and the growth of ecclesiasticism, the inroads of barbarian and the wars and desolations succeeding the downfall of the Roman Empire, while the chivalry of the middle ages did little except for a privileged class. The world has yet to see the full blessings of the ministry of educated Christian women, which perhaps not be realised before that Saviour who, as he was called a friend of publicans and sinners, has also been sneered at as too womanly in his teaching, shall return in power to reign.

5In the midst of present controversies one can at least see two professions, both intimately connected with the family, and both very near to the mission of the primitive widows and ministers of the Apostolic Church. The first of these is teaching, a profession most suited in every way to woman; and the arrangements whereby young women trained in our Normal Schools have in the United States and Canada almost engrossed to themselves the work of instruction, especially in the elementary schools, constitute one of the best and highest features of our educational system. Our Normal Schools are now to a great extent professional colleges for women, and they should be developed still further in this direction, more especially since the profession to which they lead is one which does not in any way interfere with the true functions and duties of woman. Another profession almost equally important is that of the trained and scientific nurse, that higher kind of medical nurse who is so much required to supplement the comparatively scanty attentions of the physician, and to govern and instruct or to replace altogether less competent attendants on the sick. That the medical profession itself, more especially in so far as female patients are concerned, should be open to women, I do not doubt is a possible feature of that higher civilization to which the world may one day reach, but in the meantime there can be no question as to claims and position of the educated nurse. Beyond this I would go one step further. Great mental endowments and special genius, those grand and direct gifts of God, are not limited by sex; they belong to the world, and must not be repressed by neglect or prejudice. Those women who in the course of their education, show pre-eminent gifts in literature, in art, in science, or in philosophy, should be trained for their special fields, and the highest places in public and educational institutions should be open to them equally with men, otherwise mankind must continue lamely to halt along in the march of progress, deprived of half of the most precious endowments showered by heaven upon the earth. In conclusion, the sum of the whole matter is that the highest possible culture for women is necessary if we would be more than half civilized. If the education of men were carried to the highest perfection, and that of women neglected, we should have only a half culture, and this deteriorated by the absence of the reaction and stimulus which would spring from educated women; and by the vanity and frivolity flowing from the influence of those whose minds have been left uncultivated.

6Thus whatever functions in society the educated woman may be called on to fill, she must be an important factor in the higher civilization and in the progress of humanity, and her precise relation to the various avocations of life will develop itself as higher education becomes more and more general. Permit me to close with two historical pictures of educated and talented Englishwomen, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Victoria. The former; placed at the helm in a great and terrible crisis of the history of our country, had loneliness forced upon her by the necessities of her position. She must employ and govern all sorts of men but could mate with none. This was her God-given mission, which she performed heroically at whatever sacrifice of her own feelings and affections. The latter; a loving wife and mother, guiding with gentle hand at once her own family affairs and those of the state, suffering the sorrows and trials incident to domestic life; yet a firm, wise and benevolent ruler, but not like the other doomed to dwell apart and alone. Both women present an example of greatness and goodness in the highest sphere of public activity, yet how different in their history and surroundings. Every educated and intellectual woman must be a queen in her own sphere, whether small or great. She may be an Elizabeth or a Victoria. She cannot be both. The question of which may not depend altogether on herself; but with God’s grace she may play well either part.

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