Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/93

 Not half a century ago the education of girls in this country was little less than a disgrace. A century ago education for girls was scarcely thought to be necessary. It is quite true that there were educated women even in those horrible days of the Stuart régime. There have always been, even in the blackest periods of history, numbers of women as highly educated as, and sometimes better educated than the men of their time. The women of rank of pre-Reformation days were by no means second to the men in the number and excellence of their accomplishments. The Reformation itself owed almost as much to the sympathetic help of cultured women as to that of the men—to such women as Margaret of Navarre and Jeanne d' Albert. Lady Jane Grey was only sixteen years of age when she perished on the scaffold, the victim of family ambition. She spoke fluently in several tongues, and was able to argue with the gray-bearded theologians of her time on their own subjects and in language more in harmony with their years than her own. Women who could command private tuition through their private means, or whose enlightened parents or guardians provided them with the opportunity, took rank with the men of their times as learned and accomplished people.

But, compared with the whole number of