Education for girls

Today is International Day of the Girl.
It's also, I gather, the Day of the Tree and in the US National Coming-out Day. These Days proliferate to such a degree that's is hard to keep up but International Day of the Girl is of such profound importance that I wanted to mark it.

The aim of this day is to raise awareness to the fact that millions of girls around the world are denied the access to education. As many as one in three are prevented from attending school by poverty, discrimination and violence. According to UN Women, half of all sexual assaults globally are committed against girls under 16 and they are a major cause of girls dropping out of school. Lack of education further isolates, disempowers  and renders women socially and economically vulnerable. Their communities suffer from the lack of female leadership and role models in public life.
"If you educate a man, you educate one person. If you educate a woman, you educate and liberate a whole nation." Malcolm X

The Day is particularly significant just now, coming as it does days after the shooting of Malala Yousafzai, a 14 year old activist in Pakistan. She has been campaigning for the rights of girls since she wrote a diary for the BBC at the age of 11 when the Taliban in the Swat valley  decreed that girls and women must stay at home and, to enforce their edict, they destroyed a large number of schools. Yousafzai's bravery in speaking out has drawn attention to herself and it was no great surprise that the Taliban claimed responsibility for shooting her in the head as she left school on Tuesday: she was judged to be secular and disobedient. She was also attracting  attention globally and was planning to start her own political party - which is to say she was a potential leader who was setting an example to other girls.  "If you educate a man, you educate one person. If you educate a woman, you educate and liberate a whole nation." Malcolm X

You can read about Malala here and here or simply google for much more.The good news is that she was flown to hospital to have the bullet removed from her head and the signs are good for her recovery. She has drawn  a lot of press attention - what will that mean for her future? She is still only 14.

I wondered how to mark International Day of the Girl with a blip. I have no daughters or grand-daughters and my house is devoid of things girly. In town I took photos of knitting patterns for girls' clothes in one shop, and of a pink velvet jewellery box in another.  Then I remembered that I had what I needed at home  in this reproduction of an 18th century painting of two pupils of the Smolny Institute for Girls in Russia.

The school was founded in St Peterburg by Catherine the Great of Russia in 1764, in imitation of a similar academy in France. Originally called the Society for the Upbringing of Noble Girls, it was aimed to educate girls who had hitherto been coached at home for the life of a leisured aristocratic wife. Under the influence of the French Enlightment, Catherine's school took pupils from the age of 5 to 18 and there were to be no visits home: they were deemed corrupting. Parents had to surrender their daughters for 12 years. The curriculum focused on the fine arts and included included reading, writing, foreign languages, physics, chemistry, geography, mathematics, history, Orthodoxy, needlepoint, and home economics. Later a slightly reduced programme was offered to daughters of merchants and soldiers. There was of course no access to the school for the daughters of lower ranks, and women from the masses were probably considered ineducable so this was a highly selective institution for already privileged girls. Its graduates were known for their manners and talents and were considered highly desirable brides. Some became teachers at the school, and a few were promoted to ladies-in-waiting at court - hardly the stuff of feminism but at least it offered the sort of learning that hitherto was only available to boys.

Why I have this reproduction is also of interest. Catherine held public exams and performances of plays at Smolny, and took her favorite pupils on promenades in the Summer Gardens. Portraits of these favorites were commissioned from the Ukrainian portrait painter Dmitri Levitsky and this is one, the original dated 1773. It shows two teenage girls named Yekaterina Khrushchova and Princess Yekaterina Khovanskaya performing a scene from the pastoral opera "Le caprice amoureux, ou Ninette a la cour." Khrushchova, left, dressed as a man, plays the role of shepherd and, on a personal note, she is an ancestor of mine, or at least located somewhere on the family tree. Her facial features, especially her nose and chin, are very characteristic and there is definitely something of my father about her expression.
That she is playing the male role especially appeals to me.