The preceding conversation is a well known passage from Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice."“It is amazing to me,” said Bingley, “how young ladies have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are.”
“All young ladies accomplished! My dear Charles, what do you mean?”
“Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time without being informed that she was very accomplished.”
“Your list of the common extent of accomplishments,” said Darcy, “has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse, or covering a screen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing more than half a dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished.”
“Nor I, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley.
“Then,” observed Elizabeth, “you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an accomplished woman.”
“Yes, I do comprehend a great deal in it.”
“Oh! certainly,” cried his faithful assistant, “no one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, all the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.”
“All this she must possess,” added Darcy, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”
“I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.”"
It always seemed to me from my reading, that in those days it was the general goal of all young ladies to become accomplished women, or rather, to make as good a match as possible, and in order to accomplish that, they sought to be accomplished.
Such being my supposition, I began to wonder what had happened to that goal. You don't really hear women described as accomplished much any more, or at least not in that sense, and so far as I can tell, finishing schools are practically obsolete. There doesn't seem to be any particular standard that women are expected to meet these days.
I wanted to know if the idea of an accomplished woman was replaced, or simply dropped.
So I asked people what they considered the traits of an accomplished person/woman to be. Unfortunately, I did not go about it in the most scientific manner and was not very consistent in my questions. For example, I did not always just say 'accomplished', but also sometimes used the word 'educated', as I suspected that might have been the term that replaced it. As a result, my answers may be a little different than they might have been if the survey had been done professionally, but it served my purpose.
Most people appeared never to have considered the idea and did not have an immediate answer. When they had thought about it, the majority gravitated wholly to the term 'educated' and found the answer fairly straightforward.
I also wanted to contrast the standard now with it's 19th century counterpart, but I found that such information was not nearly so easy to find as I expected. Outside of Jane Austen's works, I have yet to find a description of an accomplished young lady. I am sure there are more out there somewhere, and I just need to find them.
Since this is a much bigger task than I anticipated, and since I am getting stuck, I have decided to break it up into smaller posts. If anyone has anything to add or any further remarks, I would be happy to receive them!
