Of the Education of Ladies

Summary

Headnote

Probably composed before 1730; posthumously published; copy text 1765a (see Textual Account).

This posthumously published fragment, apparently intended as preamble to an unwritten account of female education, is particularly hard to date. Davis, noting its apparent address to an English audience, placed it before Swift's final return to Ireland in 1727, but there is also evidence that might connect it with the Intelligencer, the periodical on which Swift collaborated with Sheridan in 1728–9 (see Textual Account).

For Swift's thinking on the subject, cf. Gulliver's description of the Lilliputian ‘Female Nurseries’, where ‘the young Girls of Quality are educated much like the Males’, since ‘their Maxim is, that among People of Quality, a Wife should be always a reasonable and agreeable Companion, because she cannot always be young’. Also relevant is the Houyhnhnm master's response to Gulliver's account of female education in England:

my Master thought it monstrous in us to give the Females a different Kind of Education from the Males, except in some Articles of Domestick Management; whereby, as he truly observed, one Half of our Natives were good for nothing but bringing Children into theWorld: And to trust the Care of their Children to such useless Animals, he said was yet a greater Instance of Brutality.

OF THE EDUCATION OF LADIES .

There is a subject of controversy which I have frequently met with, in mixt and select companies of both sexes, and sometimes only of men; whether it be prudent to chuse a wife, who hath good natural sense, some taste of wit and humour, sufficiently versed in her own natural language, able to read and to relish history, books of travels, moral or entertaining discourses, and be a tolerable judge of the beauties in poetry.

This question is generally determined in the negative by the women themselves, but almost universally by the men.

We must observe, that, in this debate, those whom we call men and women of fashion are only to be understood, not merchants, tradesmen, or others of such occupations, who are not supposed to have shared in a liberal education. I except likewise all ministers of state, during their power, lawyers and physicians in great practice, persons in such employments as take up the greater part of the day, and perhaps some other conditions of life which I cannot call to mind.