SEX-EDUCATION 177 



For though at its best these Renaissance 

 ladies excelled our own, despite our better 

 established " educational advantages," in 

 sheer intellectual attainments, were not these 

 also associated with an intensive ideal of 

 feminine perfection? Men were then not a 

 little inspired by the heroines of antiquity, 

 and above all by the Goddesses and Muses 

 of its ideals. If so, may we not do well to 

 recover these, and not merely see progress in 

 subjecting women to the more masculine edu- 

 cational influences and ambitions of to-day ? 



Consider now even a second step backwards, 

 back to the convent and its school. May 

 we not thus come to understand more fully, 

 to judge more patiently, that respect which 

 even some of our own scientific and free- 

 thinking friends in other countries still have 

 for it, with preference even for their own 

 daughters ? In countries so Protestant as 

 ours, none need fear any wholesale accept- 

 ance of what seem to us their limitations. 

 But may not the sympathetic study of them 

 help us to abate some of our own converse 

 limitations ? 



Return, however, to education as we find 

 it at home among ourselves. A notable sign 

 of progress is surely that of the rise of colleges 

 of Domestic Economy, with their vast crowds 

 of girl students in Edinburgh alone some 

 four thousand, and this with but a few years' 

 growth. Moreover, these, from modest be- 

 ginnings of household management, are grow- 

 ing up prominently both in London and 

 Edinburgh to claim academic rank, as a new 

 and true Faculty of the University. 

 M 



