Quote:  “As Sydney Smith remarked, “A woman’s love for her offspring hardly depends on her ignorance of Greek, nor need we apprehend that she will forsake an infant for a quadratic equation.” A priori, the thing is not probable, and actually we see that a very different doctrine holds good. Few of us, I think, would fail to cite in their own circles the best cultivated women as precisely those whose homes are the happiest, who exercise therein that spirit of order and love of beauty, and, above all, that sense of the sacredness of even the smallest duties, which comes of true culture of mind”(82)

Comment: I understand that in order to get these ideas across to an audience who is already skeptical and probably deeply threatened by the changes in women’s status following the previous Acts such as Married Women’s Property that there would need to be an argument formulated around those traditional roles of women. Trying to dispel the counterargument that education would make women bad wives or mothers or less devoted to their domestic sphere. To us now, we might think it’s ridiculous to continue associating women with those things as their only true relevance in society – I do see how much effort it would take to even get people to listen and expand the ideas of where women can be in relation to men’s traditional roles. There is a summative paragraph on page 88 that lays out I also felt was interesting, and it expands upon the “natural duties” of women and how education won’t change a woman’s innate being or challenge the role of men. 

Question: 

As this was written in 1862, a few years before the Education Act in 1870, I felt that Cobbe was addressing higher education in terms of university – but does not mention the idea of young girls having access to elementary education. Cobbe’s also mentioned briefly that this was accessible for higher class women, mostly or perhaps women who, from circumstance, already had some exposure to education, just not formally. I wondered if this was part of the growing rhetoric surrounding class division in education and if elementary schools were the better place to begin exploring the ability of the public, possibly free, secular education.