ABSTRACT
In France, the question of girls’ education was seriously examined in 1689 in Fénelon’s Traité de l’Education des Filles, a book which was revised and translated into English in 1750 by the non-juror Dr George Hickes, who would himself have liked to see the establishment of girls’ schools in England run on the same lines as men’s colleges. Fénelon, who had been Superior of a Roman Catholic institution for girl converts, was ideally equipped to study and comment upon the effects of an imperfect education on young women. ‘There is nothing more neglected, than the education of daughters’, he declared: ‘it is often wholly determined by custom and the capricio’s of mothers, upon a supposition, that a small share of instruction is due to this sex, whereas the education of sons, passes for one of the principal affairs, with relation to the public good.’1 Again: ‘The ignorance of a young woman is the cause she is commonly so burdensome to herself, and knows not how to spend her time innocently.’ He saw a young girl’s mind as ‘a vast empty space which there is little or no hope to get ever filled with solid matters, therefore frivolous and impertinent ones take their place; and sloth which is weakness and sickness of the soul, is an inexhaustible spring of discontents’.2
