Women, Education and Equality in Hermsprong

Self-Portrait Hesitating Between the Arts of Music and Painting (1794), by Angelica Kauffman. Via Wikimedia Commons. Even highly educated women faced limited choices: accomplishment, vocation or a life constrained by expectation.

In the previous post in this series, we looked at Maria Fluart and the way Robert Bage uses wit and humour to expose the assumptions governing women’s behaviour. But Hermsprong is concerned not only with how women behave. It is also concerned with why they are expected to behave that way in the first place. That question inevitably leads to education.

By the 1790s, arguments about the education of women had become increasingly difficult to avoid. The issue was no longer simply whether women should be “accomplished”, but whether they should be treated as fully rational beings at all. The distinction mattered.

For most middle- and upper-class women in late eighteenth-century Britain, education was designed not to prepare them for intellectual independence or professional life, but for marriage. Girls might be educated at home by governesses, tutors or relatives, or sent to boarding schools and academies that focused heavily on what were known as “accomplishments”: music, drawing, dancing, French, polite conversation and manners. These schools were not necessarily trivial, nor were all governesses intellectually limited. Some women received substantial educations, particularly in dissenting or unusually progressive households. But the broader purpose of female education remained constrained. Women were to be pleasing, socially competent and morally respectable. Serious intellectual ambition could easily be regarded as unfeminine, unattractive or even threatening.

The contrast with male education was stark. A gentleman might proceed from grammar school to university, professional training, politics, commerce or the clergy. His education was assumed to prepare him for participation in public life. A woman’s education, by contrast, often prepared her to withdraw from it.

Marriage reinforced this expectation. For many women, particularly within the middle classes, paid professional work after marriage was viewed as undesirable or improper. Indeed, the assumption that marriage marked the end of a woman’s independent career or training persisted remarkably far into modern history. It remained common well into the twentieth century for women in teaching, clerical work and parts of the civil service to resign as soon as they married. In some professions, this expectation survived within living memory.

The argument, in other words, did not end with the turn of the nineteenth century. Even now, debates continue over domestic labour, childcare, career progression and the unequal expectations placed upon women within family life. The language has changed, but the underlying question remains recognisable: to what extent are women permitted to exist as fully autonomous individuals, rather than as figures organised around the needs of others?

Hermsprong enters this debate subtly but unmistakably. Bage does not write a manifesto. Instead, he stages the consequences of unequal assumptions in everyday life. Women throughout the novel are expected to be rational yet obedient, intelligent yet accommodating, morally responsible yet denied genuine authority over their own futures.

As we discuss in the Introduction to this edition, women in Hermsprong repeatedly bear the heaviest burden of social contradiction. They are praised in theory while constrained in practice. Marriage in particular becomes a mechanism through which power disguises itself as affection, duty or protection. What makes the novel striking is that Bage refuses to present these arrangements as natural. Hermsprong himself consistently treats women as intellectually equal to men. Importantly, he does so without theatrical declarations. His attitude is presented less as radical ideology than as common sense. Again and again, he assumes women are capable of judgement, reasoning and independence; it is this assumption, more than any overt speechifying, that unsettles the society around him.

Maria Fluart embodies the implications of that belief. Her wit, confidence and independence are not portrayed as abnormalities to be corrected, but as expressions of a fully developed mind. The novel does not punish her intelligence. Nor does it suggest that female autonomy inevitably leads to social disorder, as many conservative commentators feared. This was precisely the anxiety underlying much opposition to women’s education at the time. Critics worried that educated women would become unfeminine, argumentative, sexually independent or hostile to marriage itself. Such fears intensified after the French Revolution, when demands for political and social reform became associated in many minds with instability and disorder. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) was admired by some readers and treated with near panic by others.

Bage clearly understood these tensions. Yet Hermsprong avoids reducing them to abstract political dispute. Instead, it asks a simpler and more dangerous question: what if women are exactly as rational as men, and have simply been denied the conditions in which that rationality can flourish? Once posed seriously, the implications become difficult to contain.

That is why the novel still feels unexpectedly modern. Not because it anticipates every aspect of later feminism, but because it recognises how deeply power can embed itself within ordinary assumptions about education, marriage and domestic life.

The world Maria Fluart inhabits is distant from ours, yet not entirely unfamiliar. Women today enter professions, universities and public life in ways that would have been unimaginable to most readers in 1796. Yet arguments about ambition, motherhood, childcare, emotional labour and the balance between professional and domestic identity continue to shape public debate. The structures have changed. The negotiation has not disappeared.

What Hermsprong recognises, and what gives the novel its continuing power, is that inequality is rarely sustained by force alone. More often, it is sustained by habit, expectation and the quiet assumption that certain roles are simply natural. Bage exposes those assumptions by making them visible. And once visible, they become harder to defend.

Volume I of Hermsprong is published on 12 May.

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