ABSTRACT
‘Isn’t marriage your vocation? Isn’t it what you’re all brought up for?’ Lawrence Selden, a young New York lawyer, asked of Lily Bart, in The House of Mirth (1905). 1 The heroine had to admit it was true. ‘What else is there?’ she replied. The alternatives for a young woman of the leisure class were few. Changes taking place in the educational and employment opportunities for middle-class women scarcely altered the attitudes of the elite towards women’s role in life. While feminists of the late nineteenth century were agitating for women to be given access to higher education and the professions or arguing, as Charlotte Perkins Gilman did, that housework was merely a means by which women ‘paid’ for their security, 2 the leisure class was at pains to stress its financial ability to make paid work and most domestic work unnecessary for its women. Consequently, the education of daughters was ornamental and centred around accomplishments which would win a husband, such as music, dancing, and foreign languages, and these were usually acquired with the aid of governesses or at one of the few fashionable schools for young ladies. Nancy Astor, for example, was sent to Miss Brown’s Academy in New York to round off her education and prepare her for her debut. 3 Consuelo Vanderbilt, another American who married into the British peerage, had both a French and a German governess as a young child and later ‘two so-called finishing governesses in residence’. 4 In the nineteenth century the wealthier classes did not take seriously the education of daughters: governesses and finishing schools were more a proof of parental income and pretensions to gentility than an attempt to give daughters a thorough academic training. The flourishing of women’s colleges from the 1850s onwards, e.g. Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and 52Bryn Mawr, 5 did little, in their early years at least, to alter the obdurate habits of a plutocratic class which viewed its daughters in terms of collateral. 6
