Text of Remarks:
Sr. Camilla Burns, SND
September 11, 2004
It is a distinct honor to be with you today to celebrate not only
our past but our future. To celebrate not just our achievements
but that we are engaged in that most precious profession, what Julie
Billiart called “the most important work that can be done
on earth.” She further states about education, “You
would have to be God himself to understand its greatness.”
Her views were always wide. “Au large!” she urged constantly.
“Do not whittle down the grandeur of the children’s
Christian vocation! We cannot have anything petty or superficial
in our work!” In the folds of this breadth of vision, I stand
today in this institution that has inherited the mantle of this
greatness.
I begin with some statistics from The Penguin Atlas of Women in
the World to remind ourselves that the needs that brought about
the establishment of Trinity College are still pressing in the world.
“Nearly a billion people in the world are illiterate, about
two-thirds of whom are women. Generalized illiteracy is mostly a
function of poverty and limited education opportunity. Higher rates
of illiteracy for women, however, also suggest entrenched gender
discrimination.”
On a more positive note, “More girls are in primary school
than ever before, and more of them are staying longer. In many parts
of the world, boy and girl primary school enrolments are now equal
or almost equal. This significant advance in girls’ education
is the result of concerted international and national efforts to
remove restrictive legislation, to enforce equally any existing
mandatory-schooling legislation, and to educate parents about the
importance of educating girls.
However it is still the case that proportionally fewer girls are
enrolled in school than boys, and they are removed from school at
an earlier age. Girls are still held back by presumptions that educating
them will be a “waste,” that they should be primarily
in the home not in the workplace, and that girls are less capable
than boys.”
Statistics in higher education speak more directly to the present
situation in the United States. “Worldwide, more and more
women are going on to higher education, although in most countries
it is still a preserve of the elite. In many industrialized countries,
women now present a slight majority of all university students.
Ironically, as this trend has been identified it has immediately
been labeled as worrisome: social analysts are starting to warn
against the ‘feminization of education’ and the apparent
alienation of men from schooling.”
As indicated in the above statistics, the topic of today’s
Symposium: Educating Women and Girls Worldwide: The Global Challenge
and Legacy of St. Julie Billiart is much more than an exercise in
examining the history of Trinity College. As fascinating as the
story is in itself, my thesis is that it is salutary to reclaim
some of that vision and spirit for the future where the need is
still so great. My presentation will trace some of the roots that
have given Trinity a unique place in the history of the
education of women. The Founding Mothers and their descendants have
left a remarkable heritage.
The story begins in 1794 in Amiens, France when an effect of the
French Revolution brought about an unlikely meeting of two women
from France, Julie Billiart and Françoise Blin de Bourdon.
At the time of the meeting, Julie Billiart was 43 years old and
Françoise was 38. Julie was born in the small village of
Cuvilly in the Picardy Region of Northern France to a family belonging
to the artisan and small-business class. Her father made a livelihood
by running a small shop and working a plot of land. Julie attended
the village school where her uncle, M. Thibault Guilbert was the
schoolmaster.
Julie’s experience of education reflected a trend toward
the education of the masses. This movement reflecting “the
native genius of the French people, was a popular form of schooling
envisaged as early as 1576 when the Etats de Blois levied a tax
on ecclesiastical revenues for the maintenance of a schoolmaster
in every town and village to instruct children in Christian doctrine,
the necessary branches of learning, and good manners.” Until
the Revolution of 1789, it provided for such education as there
was for the lower classes. Although slight by modern standards,
Julie learned to read, write, count and sew. She knew her catechism,
loved singing and was skilled in fine embroidery. In her efforts
to remedy the abysmal lack of education brought about by the Revolution,
she instinctively relied on her experience of the pattern of popular
education of the village school. The earliest Notre Dame establishments
had much in common with the popular classes.
In contrast to Julie, Françoise Blin de Bourdon was born
into an aristocratic family and was raised by her grandparents at
their estate in Gezaincourt. Françoise received the education
developed for the elite training of the higher ranks of society.
This training was “a formal and academic type of training,
socially exclusive, and directed towards the culture of the court,
the university and the higher level of public life.” Françoise
received her early education at the Benedictine Abbey at Coullens
under the direction of Abbess Anne Le Boucher d’Orsay de Marolees,
“an outstandingly able woman with definite views on the education
of girls and Françoise as a child had to ‘form her
judgment and strengthen her will’ by means of religious instruction,
reading, penmanship, the use of globes, painting, embroidery and
playing the harpsichord….It made her a cultured woman and
an educator…” Her education at the royal abbey was complemented
by the Ursuline school at Amiens where the primary commitment was
a more formal education which excelled in teaching and organization.
“Françoise saw how careful arrangements, clear teaching
and a personal interest in each pupil could help the more unpromising
scholars. She noticed the role of the mistress general and seems
to have remembered in particular the influence of her own mistress
of division. The idea of the dixainières who captained their
own small teams appealed to her as also did the whole impression
of a boarding school limited in numbers and thorough in its academic
work but run on family lines.”
These two trends in education developed independently, separated
by social distinction but after the French Revolution, it became
possible for the first time to combine them. Julie and Françoise
began to blend their educational experiences when they taught catechism
to the children of Amiens and later in the small village of Bettencourt
where they “instructed the women in religion, reading and
writing, some arithmetic, and needlework.”
In 1804, they made a formal commitment to join forces and invite
other women to “devote themselves to the education of orphans
and especially to the formation of teachers, who were to go wherever
they were needed… to instruct the poor…” Their
collaboration in education was more than a melding of their educational
backgrounds. They each brought a personality to the endeavor which
gave a unique spirit to the enterprise.
Julie was a born leader with unbounded energy which gave her courage
to embrace large undertakings with a deep inner peace. Sr. Mary
Linscott describes her well:
Her temperament made relations with her easy. All her correspondence
gives the lie to the tranquilly smiling portrait that satisfied
the piety of the nineteenth century. She must have been quick,
lively and vivacious, her Gallic pungency never far from the surface,
brisk in manner and ready of wit. On a journey it was hard to
keep up with her and she used to laugh about the pas de géant
that outdistanced Sisters much younger than herself. She would
lend a hand with anything, from joining in to help with the wash
as soon as she arrived at Ghent to taking over as class at St.
Hubert. She would do the early morning marketing herself, enjoying
the preliminary skirmish with the stall-holder to fix a price
and not at all put out when the piglets she bought once followed
her back to church. All the evidence indicates that there was
a buoyancy and sense of humour in Mère Julie that made
her thoroughly good to live with and a fire about her that kindled
enthusiasm. Her charm was infections. “She made us so happy
at Namur,” wrote one of the first sisters. “She was
so lively and yet so interested in each one.” “I remember
her kindness and her laughter…she was gay (joyous, my translation)
and liked to see us gay (joyous) too, so she used to make us laugh.”
Apparently she was everywhere at once. “You never knew where
you might meet Mère Julie. She would come into class when
she was least expected…always brisk and always smiling and
you felt better, somehow, for having seen her.” Her comments
were graphic and her vital interest covered everything from the
way the Sisters read and wrote and spelt to the way that the butter
was salted or to the “great beam and thirteen bars”
that she put on the main school gate at Namur when the Cossacks
were in the town after Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow.
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