The Education of Daughters in the Modern Period

The contemporary world tends to take for granted many realities that people of the past could never have imagined. From the abolition of slavery to women's suffrage. The evolution of daughters' education is especially noteworthy. Until not long ago, the distinction between the education of a son and a daughter was considered decisive; anecdotally, similar thoughts can still be found in different parts of the Western world.

It might seem that the significant progress of educational parity between sons and daughters is something very recent, attributed to the contemporary age, but this could not be further from the truth. While it is true that in the past daughters—and women, of course—lived repressed by today's standards, one cannot underestimate the profound effect brought about by the melodies of ideas that resonated into the contemporary era. In this text, the teaching methods for daughters employed during the Early Modern period will be presented, implicitly exposing the great social evolution that has taken place in this area.

Thus, the Venetian Lodovico Dolce, in L'Istituzione delle donne, 1545, proudly sets out the ideal way to raise a daughter. For him, a woman of goodness will be temperate, modest, loving, and will diligently attend to her duty. During childhood, girls' first games were to be only with other women, since interaction with boys at an early age constituted a risk. At the same time, they had to become familiar with household chores, since a woman's goal was to eventually govern her home and, therefore, early exposure to the utensils was important.

Every maiden was expected to feel fear and shame, for both constituted the foundations of virtue. For this, immediate scolding by parents or guardians was essential, and they were to use threats skillfully, ensuring that daughters feared what to say and speak. All of this shaped women who tended to be discreet and quiet, rarely seen in public. The latter point was a fundamental aspect of the education of daughters, which is also explored by other moralists of the Early Modern period, among whom we can highlight the Alicante priest Pedro Juan Berenguer and the French priest Noël Antoine Pluche, who gave rise to Universal Explanation of the Mysteries, 1608 and Spectacle of Nature, 1732, respectively.

Within the aforementioned works, we can highlight that there were very subtle differences from the teaching method of Dolce. The three authors urged that women should never leave the house, not even for religious events, without being accompanied by their mother or some woman of merit or trust, as there was a risk due to the presence of men. It is clear that the risk was losing one's virginity in any encounter, which was venerated by the trio of authors as every woman's greatest treasure. Losing it before marriage was to bring shame upon the entire family, therefore, it was logical that maidens lived in such a secluded state.

Virginity was so delicate that Dolce gave an extension to the definition, where he stipulated that virginity went beyond the act: a woman who has a corrupted heart is not a virgin, even if she has not had sex. From all of the above, it can be deduced why it was also not recommended for women to be very ostentatious in their way of dressing or wearing makeup, and why it was forbidden for women to socialize with other men from childhood. The maiden then had to be focused solely on her domestic tasks, including manual labor and the worship of God. However, the tasks did not only consist of household chores; the three authors urged that women should learn to read from an early age, something totally progressive.

Dolce, Berenguer, and Pluche maintained that the first books to be read should be religious, and later, at a more advanced age, they dared to recommend reading certain philosophers such as Plato or Cicero and poets such as Virgil or Dante. Pluche even suggested that girls should also learn to write and even to count. The above was an important step that reflects the turn of the century towards the 18th century.

It is perhaps very easy to judge the teaching doctrines of the past without a critical analysis of the time in which they were written. Despite the radical lessons that are unacceptable today, we can highlight that the insistence on teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic meant a crucial step forward for women's education. These thoughts were seeds that bore fruit in a world where men and women are, to a large extent, educated in the same way in the Western world. We are talking about a period of three centuries - a historically insignificant amount of time - in which a remarkable advancement in thought took place. The authors' reflections are not just a matter of the past; their echoes have reached the present day and are a reminder of how much progress has been made, but also of the need to always be willing to admit that there is still a long way to go.