![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The life of a governess, Part 1
Oct. 16th, 2010 09:31 am
Here you will find various quotes about the life of women - ladies, who were sometimes made to, for one reason or other, take upon them the job of a governess, a profession that mainly educated young women. Due to the lack of education of their teachers, and sometimes due even to the requirements that it should be so, these women were not taught on par with men, the form of education also considered the cheapest for the employers and often not a job where a woman could further her career, nor long lasting. The titles here are used to describe in some shape or form, what the quote speaks of and hopefully will be of help. :) Enjoy!
This book covers examples from life of the different women that took a job as a governess through history and their general role in society. It also describes the lives of many others, with a glimpse to the social life and understanding of what such a job would mean for a woman, how it was understood and even which authors wrote about these women - ladies who taught and earned their living.
Title: Other People's Daughters, The life and times of the governess
Author: Ruth Brandon
Year published: 2008
Because you are born with the skill, you should not complain about salary
(p 20) But even if she (governess) was unhappy with the salary offered, the aura of respectability that was her most essential qualification forbade her to argue about money. The special class of posts reserved for respectable women unable to find a man to look after them - traditional female occupations such as the care of the elderly, the nurture of children, dressmaking and millinery - were the kinds of things that women were in any case born to do. To demand pay for them was already a kind of imposition; to haggle about that pay was almost blasphemous.
The fate of women, as governess, who could expect to find a lacking in job opportunities after 40 years old:
(p 21) of a poor lady, daughter of a country rector, who was found (after having been missed for several days, but not sought for) lying dead, scarcely clothed, on the bare flor of a room in a miserable lodging - house in Drury Lane. I went to the house and found it a filthy coffee-house, frequented by unwashed customers. [...]She told me (the mistress) that her unhappy lodger was a woman of 40 or 50, perfectly sober and well conducted in every way. She had been a governess in very good families, but had remained unemployed till her clothes grew shabby. She walked all day long over London for many weeks, seeking any kind of work or means of support, and selling by degrees everything she possessed for food. At last she returned to her wretched room in that house into which it was a pain for any lady to enter,- and having begged a last cup of tea from her landlady, telling her she could not pay for it, she locked her door, and was heard of no more.
Do not learn, else you will be unfit (Weeton worked between 1810-1813)
(p 23) Nelly Weeton was actively prevented from pursuing the education she craved, because it was thought to make her unfit for the female future that inexorably awaited her.
Governess once a luxury
(p 26) Private governesses in the eighteenth century were a luxury of the extremely well-to-do.
If the man remarries, the governess may encounter opposition from the new woman (1796)
(p 33) [...] When Lady Ilchester decreed that Miss Porter would no longer - as had always previously been the case - have her own parlour in which to receive friends when the family moved to London for the season. These London stays afforded her a rare chance to re-enter her own life, seeing old friends, making new ones, and enjoying dinners and theatregoing. But Lady Ilchester's spiteful prohibition meant that from now on, although she might still go out, she could no longer receive.
It was a direct insult, and a challenge. Miss Porter could either swallow her pride, while knowing that the situation could only deteriorate, or take the hint and stalk off.
[...] She was saved in the nick of time by a recently widowed friend from her Great Yarmouth childhood, Mrs Upcher, who wrote offering her 100 pounds a year 'to live with her as her sister and friend as long as she lives'.
The teachers must teach, but must know little
(p 39) Miss Porter's breath of culture (she spoke fluent French, was a good musician, and read widely in English, French and Italian) was doubtless based upon many childhood hours spent in the library her father, as a vicar, would surely have possessed. That, however, had been during the 1750s and 1760s; twenty years later, when Nelly Weeton was growing up, such freedom was already actively discouraged. A climate of feminine dependence and subordination was arising that demanded a narrowing of young women's mental horizons - and this could not happen unless the teachers were themselves similarly restricted.
Mary Wollstonecraft and her adventurous life (late 18th century)
(p 41) She is known both for her feminist manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in 1792, and for the extraordinary drama of her life, in which she achieved independence as a writer and journalist, travelled to France to witness the revolution, bore an illegitimate daughter to the American adventurer Gilbert Implay, tried to kill heself when Implay deserted her, and finally found happiness with the radical philosopher William Godwin, only to die in 1797 after giving birth to their daughter Mary Godwin, the future author of Frankenstein.
[...] Mary's parents taught her, by example, that the most mediocre and contemptible of men were able to maintain even the most talented women in a state of near-subjection.
Her views on education, where boys and girls were educated separately and with different goals in mind
(p 42)[...] The solution that Mary proposed in the Vindication was universal state-funded co-education. It was implemented in revolutionary France; might it perhaps be adopted in Britain too? For a brief instant, it seemed possible.
Attempts at earning money for a woman
1. Governess
2. Schoolkeeping
3. lady's companion
4. Writer (Mary's success)
5. Dressmaking
6. Millinery
(p 47) Women did run businesses: selling books; importing and retailing chinaware, silks and tea; making stays, caps, gloves and wigs, but these were mostly inherited. [...] Women rarely started a business themselves.
Earlier as opposed to the industrial revolution
(p 44) In the earlier world that Mary instinctively inhabited, all siblings could count on receiving some part of any famil money, and an unmarried sister, if left otherwise unprovided for, would find a home with one of them. Even if (as often happened) she was treated as an unpaid drudge, she would be guaranteed board and lodging, and would remain part of the family. However, in the coming world of the industrial revolution it was more important to keep fortunes than families intact. In this new world-view, daughters were not equal family members , but burdens to be shifted as soon as possible to some other man's account.
(p 45) any family money belonged as of right to her brothers. [...] Fifty years earlier society would have looked askance on such behaviour, but now it went unnoticed. Men were allowed to act in this way, and so they did.
Who does the child belong to?
(p 50) Eliza was compelled to leave not just her husband but her baby. Children, like everything else in marriage, belonged by law to the man; if Eliza had taken the child, she would have been not merely a runaway wife (which was quite bad enough as far as society was concerned) but a felon.
School quality vary
(p 52) Among the very best must have been the one run by Erasmus Darwin's illegitimate daughters, Mary and Susan Parker, whom he had prepared as teachers and set up in a boarding school of their own. The Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, which he wrote for them, was published in 1797.
Education in the school, as proposed by Erasmus Darwin
(p 52) His recommendations ranged from 'Taste' - Addison's Spectator papers, and Hogarth's analysis of beauty - through 'Heathen Mythology' and 'Polite Literature' [...] to Botany, Chemistry and Mineralogy, all using the latest texts, to which he added sports (he regretted that skating, swimming, acrobatics and tightrope walking were 'not allowed by fashion' but nevertheless recommended 'theatrical marching, dancing and singing'), as well as ball, shuttlecock and swinging. In his capacity as a medical man, he offered strictures on care of the shape, deportment (he advised lyding down horizontally for an hour in the middle of the day) and the correction of lisping and stammering. This regime was supported by a diet of full-cream milk, meat, puddings and fruit pies, with short intervals between meals and not too much slimming; a programme that, if properly adhered to, would have turned out some formidably learned and healthy young ladies.
The punishment of young ladies
(p 53) A Mrs Cooper, who taught there in the 1790s, wrote disapprovingly of the distorted moral values Mrs Devis enforced: 'To become amiable elegent and accomplished, punishments are set before them for the most insignificant of faults, and they undergo the same penance for mislaying their gloves or dirtying their frocks, as for telling untruths, or being guilty of deceit, and they are to be incited to diligence by working on their vanity and self love.'
This book covers examples from life of the different women that took a job as a governess through history and their general role in society. It also describes the lives of many others, with a glimpse to the social life and understanding of what such a job would mean for a woman, how it was understood and even which authors wrote about these women - ladies who taught and earned their living.
Title: Other People's Daughters, The life and times of the governess
Author: Ruth Brandon
Year published: 2008
Because you are born with the skill, you should not complain about salary
(p 20) But even if she (governess) was unhappy with the salary offered, the aura of respectability that was her most essential qualification forbade her to argue about money. The special class of posts reserved for respectable women unable to find a man to look after them - traditional female occupations such as the care of the elderly, the nurture of children, dressmaking and millinery - were the kinds of things that women were in any case born to do. To demand pay for them was already a kind of imposition; to haggle about that pay was almost blasphemous.
The fate of women, as governess, who could expect to find a lacking in job opportunities after 40 years old:
(p 21) of a poor lady, daughter of a country rector, who was found (after having been missed for several days, but not sought for) lying dead, scarcely clothed, on the bare flor of a room in a miserable lodging - house in Drury Lane. I went to the house and found it a filthy coffee-house, frequented by unwashed customers. [...]She told me (the mistress) that her unhappy lodger was a woman of 40 or 50, perfectly sober and well conducted in every way. She had been a governess in very good families, but had remained unemployed till her clothes grew shabby. She walked all day long over London for many weeks, seeking any kind of work or means of support, and selling by degrees everything she possessed for food. At last she returned to her wretched room in that house into which it was a pain for any lady to enter,- and having begged a last cup of tea from her landlady, telling her she could not pay for it, she locked her door, and was heard of no more.
Do not learn, else you will be unfit (Weeton worked between 1810-1813)
(p 23) Nelly Weeton was actively prevented from pursuing the education she craved, because it was thought to make her unfit for the female future that inexorably awaited her.
Governess once a luxury
(p 26) Private governesses in the eighteenth century were a luxury of the extremely well-to-do.
If the man remarries, the governess may encounter opposition from the new woman (1796)
(p 33) [...] When Lady Ilchester decreed that Miss Porter would no longer - as had always previously been the case - have her own parlour in which to receive friends when the family moved to London for the season. These London stays afforded her a rare chance to re-enter her own life, seeing old friends, making new ones, and enjoying dinners and theatregoing. But Lady Ilchester's spiteful prohibition meant that from now on, although she might still go out, she could no longer receive.
It was a direct insult, and a challenge. Miss Porter could either swallow her pride, while knowing that the situation could only deteriorate, or take the hint and stalk off.
[...] She was saved in the nick of time by a recently widowed friend from her Great Yarmouth childhood, Mrs Upcher, who wrote offering her 100 pounds a year 'to live with her as her sister and friend as long as she lives'.
The teachers must teach, but must know little
(p 39) Miss Porter's breath of culture (she spoke fluent French, was a good musician, and read widely in English, French and Italian) was doubtless based upon many childhood hours spent in the library her father, as a vicar, would surely have possessed. That, however, had been during the 1750s and 1760s; twenty years later, when Nelly Weeton was growing up, such freedom was already actively discouraged. A climate of feminine dependence and subordination was arising that demanded a narrowing of young women's mental horizons - and this could not happen unless the teachers were themselves similarly restricted.
Mary Wollstonecraft and her adventurous life (late 18th century)
(p 41) She is known both for her feminist manifesto A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in 1792, and for the extraordinary drama of her life, in which she achieved independence as a writer and journalist, travelled to France to witness the revolution, bore an illegitimate daughter to the American adventurer Gilbert Implay, tried to kill heself when Implay deserted her, and finally found happiness with the radical philosopher William Godwin, only to die in 1797 after giving birth to their daughter Mary Godwin, the future author of Frankenstein.
[...] Mary's parents taught her, by example, that the most mediocre and contemptible of men were able to maintain even the most talented women in a state of near-subjection.
Her views on education, where boys and girls were educated separately and with different goals in mind
(p 42)[...] The solution that Mary proposed in the Vindication was universal state-funded co-education. It was implemented in revolutionary France; might it perhaps be adopted in Britain too? For a brief instant, it seemed possible.
Attempts at earning money for a woman
1. Governess
2. Schoolkeeping
3. lady's companion
4. Writer (Mary's success)
5. Dressmaking
6. Millinery
(p 47) Women did run businesses: selling books; importing and retailing chinaware, silks and tea; making stays, caps, gloves and wigs, but these were mostly inherited. [...] Women rarely started a business themselves.
Earlier as opposed to the industrial revolution
(p 44) In the earlier world that Mary instinctively inhabited, all siblings could count on receiving some part of any famil money, and an unmarried sister, if left otherwise unprovided for, would find a home with one of them. Even if (as often happened) she was treated as an unpaid drudge, she would be guaranteed board and lodging, and would remain part of the family. However, in the coming world of the industrial revolution it was more important to keep fortunes than families intact. In this new world-view, daughters were not equal family members , but burdens to be shifted as soon as possible to some other man's account.
(p 45) any family money belonged as of right to her brothers. [...] Fifty years earlier society would have looked askance on such behaviour, but now it went unnoticed. Men were allowed to act in this way, and so they did.
Who does the child belong to?
(p 50) Eliza was compelled to leave not just her husband but her baby. Children, like everything else in marriage, belonged by law to the man; if Eliza had taken the child, she would have been not merely a runaway wife (which was quite bad enough as far as society was concerned) but a felon.
School quality vary
(p 52) Among the very best must have been the one run by Erasmus Darwin's illegitimate daughters, Mary and Susan Parker, whom he had prepared as teachers and set up in a boarding school of their own. The Plan for the Conduct of Female Education, which he wrote for them, was published in 1797.
Education in the school, as proposed by Erasmus Darwin
(p 52) His recommendations ranged from 'Taste' - Addison's Spectator papers, and Hogarth's analysis of beauty - through 'Heathen Mythology' and 'Polite Literature' [...] to Botany, Chemistry and Mineralogy, all using the latest texts, to which he added sports (he regretted that skating, swimming, acrobatics and tightrope walking were 'not allowed by fashion' but nevertheless recommended 'theatrical marching, dancing and singing'), as well as ball, shuttlecock and swinging. In his capacity as a medical man, he offered strictures on care of the shape, deportment (he advised lyding down horizontally for an hour in the middle of the day) and the correction of lisping and stammering. This regime was supported by a diet of full-cream milk, meat, puddings and fruit pies, with short intervals between meals and not too much slimming; a programme that, if properly adhered to, would have turned out some formidably learned and healthy young ladies.
The punishment of young ladies
(p 53) A Mrs Cooper, who taught there in the 1790s, wrote disapprovingly of the distorted moral values Mrs Devis enforced: 'To become amiable elegent and accomplished, punishments are set before them for the most insignificant of faults, and they undergo the same penance for mislaying their gloves or dirtying their frocks, as for telling untruths, or being guilty of deceit, and they are to be incited to diligence by working on their vanity and self love.'
