We cannot expect to find any coherent or uniform action on the part of parents.  But there have been at different historical periods different general tendencies in the attitude of parents towards their children.  Thus if we go back four or five centuries in English social history we seem to find a general attitude which scarcely corresponds exactly to either of Ellen Key’s two groups.  It seems usually to have been compounded of severity and independence; children were first strictly compelled to go their parents’ way and then thrust off to their own way.  There seems a certain hardness in this method, yet it is doubtful whether it can fairly be regarded as more unreasonable than either of the two modern methods deplored by Ellen Key.  On the contrary it had points for admiration.  It was primarily a discipline, but it was regarded, as any fortifying discipline should be regarded, as a preparation for freedom, and it is precisely there that the more timid and clinging modern way seems to fail.

We clearly see the old method at work in the chief source of knowledge concerning old English domestic life, the Paston Letters.  Here we find that at an early age the sons of knights and gentlemen were sent to serve in the houses of other gentlemen:  it was here that their education really took place, an education not in book knowledge, but in knowledge of life.  Such education was considered so necessary for a youth that a father who kept his sons at home was regarded as negligent of his duty to his family.  A knowledge of the world was a necessary part, indeed the chief part, of a youth’s training for life.  The remarkable thing is that this applied also to a large extent to the daughters.  They realised in those days, what is only beginning to be realised in ours,[1] that, after all, women live in the world just as much, though differently, as men live in the world, and that it is quite as necessary for the girl as for the boy to be trained to the meaning of life.  Margaret Paston, towards the end of the fifteenth century, sent her daughter Ann to live in the house of a gentleman who, a little later, found that he could not keep her as he was purposing to decrease the size of his household.  The mother writes to her son:  “I shall be fain to send for her and with me she shall but lose her time, and without she be the better occupied she shall oftentimes move me and put me to great unquietness.  Remember what labour I had with your sister, therefore do your best to help her forth”; as a result it was planned to send her to a relative’s house in London.

[1] This was illustrated in England when women first began to serve on juries.  The pretext was frequently brought forward that there are certain kinds of cases and of evidence that do not concern women or that women ought not to hear.  The pretext would have been more plausible if it had also been argued that there are certain kinds of cases and of evidence that men ought not to hear.  As a matter of fact, whatever frontier there may be in these matters is not of a sexual kind.  Everything that concerns men ultimately concerns women, and everything that concerns women ultimately concerns men.  Neither women nor men are entitled to claim dispensation.