Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene Part 11

[Footnote 17: A study of Children's Reading Tastes. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1899, vol. 6, pp. 523-535.]

[Footnote 18: Perhaps the best and most notable school reader is Das Deutsche Lesebuch, begun nearly fifty years ago by Hopf and Paulsiek, and lately supplemented by a corps of writers headed by Dobeln, all in ten volumes of over 3,500 pages and containing nearly six times as much matter as the largest American series. Many men for years went over the history of German literature, from the Eddas and Nibelungenlied down, including a few living writers, carefully selecting saga, legends, Marchen, fables, proverbs, hymns, a few prayers, Bible tales, conundrums, jests, and humorous tales, with many digests, epitomes and condensation of great standards, quotations, epic, lyric, dramatic poetry, adventure, exploration, biography, with sketches of the life of each writer quoted, with a large final volume on the history of German literature. All this, it is explained, is "stataric" or required to be read between Octava[A] and Obersecunda. It is no aimless anthology or chrestomathy like Chambers's Encyclopedia, but it is perhaps the best product of prolonged concerted study to select from a vast field the best to feed each nascent stage of later childhood and early youth, and to secure the maximum of pleasure and profit. The ethical end is dominant throughout this pedagogic canon.]

[Footnote A: The Prussian gymnasium, whose course is cla.s.sical and fits for the University, has nine cla.s.ses in three divisions of three cla.s.ses each. The lower cla.s.ses are Octava, Septa, s.e.xta, Quinta, and Quarta; the middle cla.s.ses, Untertertia, Obertertia, and Untersecunda; the higher cla.s.ses, Obersecunda, Unterprima, and Oberprima. Pupils must be at least nine years of age and have done three years preparatory work before entrance.]

[Footnote 19: The Historic Sense among Children. In her Studies in Historical Method. D. C. Heath and Co., Boston, 1896, p. 57.]

[Footnote 20: Special Study on Children's Sense of Historical Time.

Mrs. Barnes's Studies in Historical Method, D.C. Heath and Co., Boston, 1896, p. 94.]

[Footnote 21: L'Etude experimentale de l'intelligence. Schleicher Freres, Paris, 1903.]

[Footnote 22: The Growth of Memory in School Children. American Journal of Psychology, April, 1892, vol. 9, pp. 362-380.]

[Footnote 23: Contribution to the Psychology and Pedagogy of Feeble-minded Children. By G.E. Johnson. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1895, vol. 3, p. 270.]

[Footnote 24: A Test of Memory in School Children. Pedagogical Seminary, October, 1898, vol. 4, pp. 61-78.]

[Footnote 25: Zeitschrift fur padagogische Psychologie, Pathologie und Hygiene. February, 1900. Jahrgang II, Heft 1, pp. 21-30.]

[Footnote 26: See Scripture: Scientific Child Study. Transactions of the Illinois Society for Child Study, May, 1895, vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 32-37.]

[Footnote 27: Experimentelle Untersuchungen uber die Gedachtnissentwickelung bei Schulkindern. Zeits. f. Psychologie, u.

Physiologie der Sinnes-organe, November, 1900. Bd. 24. Heft 5, pp.

321-351.]

[Footnote 28: See Note 4, p. 270.]

[Footnote 29: Memory: An Inductive Study. By F.W. Colegrove. Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1900, p. 229. See also Individual Memories.

American Journal of Psychology, January, 1899, vol. 10, pp 228-255.]

CHAPTER XI

THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS

Equal opportunities of higher education now open-Brings new dangers to women-Ineradicable s.e.x differences begin at p.u.b.erty, when the s.e.xes should and do diverge-Different interests-s.e.x tension-Girls more mature than boys at the same age-Radical psychic and physiological differences between the s.e.xes-The bachelor women-Needed reconstruction-Food-Sleep-Regimen-Manners-Religion-Regularity-The topics for a girls' curriculum-The eternal womanly.

The long battle of woman and her friends for equal educational and other opportunities is essentially won all along the line. Her academic achievements have forced conservative minds to admit that her intellect is not inferior to that of man. The old cloistral seclusion and exclusion is forever gone and new ideals are arising. It has been a n.o.ble movement and is a necessary first stage of woman's emanc.i.p.ation. The caricatured maidens "as beautiful as an angel but as silly as a goose" who come from the kitchen to the husband's study to ask how much is two times two, and are told it is four for a man and three for a woman, and go back with a happy "Thank you, my dear"; those who love to be called baby, and appeal to instincts half parental in their lovers and husbands; those who find all the sphere they desire in a doll's house, like Nora's, and are content to be men's pets; whose ideal is the clinging vine, and who take no interest in the field where their husbands struggle, will perhaps soon survive only as a diminishing remainder. Marriages do still occur where woman's ignorance and helplessness seem to be the chief charm to men, and may be happy, but such cases are no farther from the present ideal and tendency on the one hand than on the other are those which consist in intellectual partnerships, in which there is no segregation of interests but which are devoted throughout to joint work or enjoyment.

A typical contemporary writer[1] thinks the question whether a girl shall receive a college education is very like the same question for boys. Even if the four K's, Kirche, Kinder, Kuchen, and Kleider (which may be translated by the four C's, Church, Children, Cooking, and Clothes), are her vocation, college may help her. The best training for a young woman is not the old college course that has proven unfit for young men. Most college men look forward to a professional training as few women do. The latter have often greater sympathy, readiness of memory, patience with technic, skill in literature and language, but lack originality, are not attracted by unsolved problems, are less motor-minded; but their training is just as serious and important as that of men. The best results are where the s.e.xes are brought closer together, because their separation generally emphasizes for girls the technical training for the profession of womanhood. With girls, literature and language take precedence over science; expression stands higher than action; the scholarship may be superior, but is not effective; the educated woman "is likely to master technic rather than art; method, rather than substance. She may know a good deal, but she can do nothing." In most separate colleges for women, old traditions are more prevalent than in colleges for men. In the annex system, she does not get the best of the inst.i.tution. By the coeducation method, "young men are more earnest, better in manners and morals, and in all ways more civilized than under monastic conditions. The women do more work in a more natural way, with better perspective and with saner incentives than when isolated from the influence of the society of men. There is less silliness and folly where a man is not a novelty. In coeducational inst.i.tutions of high standards, frivolous conduct or scandals of any form are rarely known. The responsibility for decorum is thrown from the school to the woman, and the woman rises to the responsibility." The character of college work has not been lowered but raised by coeducation, despite the fact that most of the new, small, weak colleges are coeducational. Social strain, Jordan thinks, is easily regulated, and the dormitory system is on the whole best, because the college atmosphere is highly prized. The reasons for the present reaction against coeducation are ascribed partly to the dislike of the idle boy to have girls excel him and see his failures, or because rowdyish tendencies are checked by the presence of women. Some think that girls do not help athletics; that men count for most because they are more apt to be heard from later; but the most serious new argument is the fear that woman's standards and amateurishness will take the place of specialization. Women take up higher education because they like it; men because their careers depend upon it. Hence their studies are more objective and face the world as it is. In college the women do as well as men, but not in the university. The half-educated woman as a social factor has produced many soft lecture courses and cheap books. This is an argument for the higher education of the s.e.x. Finally, Jordan insists that coeducation leads to marriage, and he believes that its best basis is common interest and intellectual friendship.

From the available data it seems, however, that the more scholastic the education of women, the fewer children and the harder, more dangerous, and more dreaded is parturition, and the less the ability to nurse children. Not intelligence, but education by present man-made ways, is inversely as fecundity. The sooner and the more clearly this is recognized as a universal rule, not, of course, without many notable and much vaunted exceptions, the better for our civilization. For one, I plead with no whit less earnestness and conviction than any of the feminists, and indeed with more fervor because on nearly all their grounds and also on others, for the higher education of women, and would welcome them to every opportunity available to men if they can not do better; but I would open to their election another education, which every competent judge would p.r.o.nounce more favorable to motherhood, under the influence of female princ.i.p.als who do not publicly say that it is "not desirable" that women students should study motherhood, because they do not know whether they will marry; who encourage them to elect "no special subjects because they are women," and who think infant psychology "foolish."

Various interesting experiments in coeducation are now being made in England.[2] Some are whole-hearted and encourage the girls to do almost everything that the boys do in both study and play. There are girl prefects; cricket teams are formed sometimes of both s.e.xes, but often the s.e.xes matched against each other; one play-yard, a dual staff of teachers, and friendships between the boys and girls are not tabooed, etc. In other schools the s.e.xes meet perhaps in recitation only, have separate rooms for study, entrances, play-grounds, and their relations are otherwise restricted. The opinion of English writers generally favors coeducation up to about the beginning of the teens, and from there on views are more divided. It is admitted that, if there is a very great preponderance of either s.e.x over the other, the latter is likely to lose its characteristic qualities, and something of this occurs where the average age of one s.e.x is distinctly greater than that of the other. On the other hand, several urge that, where age and numbers are equal, each s.e.x is more inclined to develop the best qualities peculiar to itself in the presence of the other.

Some girls are no doubt far fitter for boys' studies and men's careers than others. Coeducation, too, generally means far more a.s.similation of girls' to boys' ways and work than conversely. Many people believe that girls either gain or are more affected by coeducation, especially in the upper grades, than boys. It is interesting, however, to observe the differences that still persist. Certain games, like football and boxing, girls can not play; they do not fight; they are not flogged or caned as English boys are when their bad marks foot up beyond a certain aggregate; girls are more p.r.o.ne to cliques; their punishments must be in appeals to school sentiment, to which they are exceedingly sensitive; it is hard for them to bear defeat in games with the same dignity and unruffled temper as boys; it is harder for them to accept the school standards of honor that condemn the tell-tale as a sneak, although they soon learn this. They may be a little in danger of being roughened by boyish ways and especially by the crude and unique language, almost a dialect in itself, prevalent among schoolboys. Girls are far more p.r.o.ne to overdo; boys are persistingly lazy and idle. Girls are content to sit and have the subject-matter pumped into them by recitations, etc., and to merely accept, while boys are more inspired by being told to do things and make tests and experiments. In this, girls are often quite at sea. One writer speaks of a certain feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that singing cla.s.ses the voices of each s.e.x are better in quality for the presence of the other. In many topics of all kinds boys and girls are interested in different aspects of the same theme, and therefore the work is broadened. In manual training, girls excel in all artistic work; boys, in carpentry. Girls can be made not only less noxiously sentimental and impulsive, but their conduct tends to become more thoughtful; they can be made to feel responsibility for bestowing their praise aright and thus influencing the tone of the school. Calamitous as it world be for the education of boys beyond a certain age to be entrusted entirely or chiefly to women, it would be less so for that of girls to be given entirely to men. Perhaps the great women teachers, whose life and work have made them a power with girls comparable to that of Arnold and Thring with boys, are dying out. Very likely economic motives are too dominant for this problem to be settled on its merits only. Finally, several writers mention the increased healthfulness of moral tone. The vices that infest boys' schools, which Arnold thought a quant.i.ty constantly changing with every cla.s.s, are diminished. Healthful thoughts of s.e.x, less subterranean and base imaginings on the one hand, and less gushy sentimentality on the other, are favored. For either s.e.x to be a copy of the other is to be weakened, and each comes normally to respect more and to prefer its own s.e.x.

Not to pursue this subject further here, it is probable that many of the causes for the facts set forth are very different and some of them almost diametrically opposite in the two s.e.xes. Hard as it is per se, it is after all a comparatively easy matter to educate boys. They are less peculiarly responsive in mental tone to the physical and psychic environment, tend more strongly and early to special interests, and react more vigorously against the obnoxious elements of their surroundings. This is truest of the higher education, and more so in proportion as the tendencies of the age are toward special and vocational training. Woman, as we saw, in every fiber of her soul and body is a more generic creature than man, nearer to the race, and demands more and more with advancing age an education that is essentially liberal and humanistic. This is progressively hard when the s.e.xes differentiate in the higher grades. Moreover, nature decrees that with advancing civilization the s.e.xes shall not approximate, but differentiate, and we shall probably be obliged to carry s.e.x distinctions, at least of method, into many if not most of the topics of the higher education. Now that woman has by general consent attained the right to the best that man has, she must seek a training that fits her own nature as well or better. So long as she strives to be manlike she will be inferior and a pinchbeck imitation, but she must develop a new sphere that shall be like the rich field of the cloth of gold for the best instincts of her nature.

Divergence is most marked and sudden in the p.u.b.escent period-in the early teens. At this age, by almost world-wide consent, boys and girls separate for a time, and lead their lives during this most critical period more or less apart, at least for a few years, until the ferment of mind and body which results in maturity of functions then born and culminating in nubility, has done its work. The family and the home abundantly recognize this tendency. At twelve or fourteen, brothers and sisters develop a life more independent of each other than before. Their home occupations differ as do their plays, games, tastes. History, anthropology, and sociology, a well as home life, abundantly ill.u.s.trate this. This is normal and biological. What our schools and other inst.i.tutions should do, is not to obliterate these differences but to make boys more manly and girls more womanly. We should respect the law of s.e.xual differences, and not forget that motherhood is a very different thing from fatherhood. Neither s.e.x should copy nor set patterns to the other, but all parts should be played harmoniously and clearly in the great s.e.x symphony.

I have here less to say against coeducation in college, still less in university grades after the maturity which comes at eighteen or twenty has been achieved; but it is high time to ask ourselves whether the theory and practise of identical coeducation, especially in the high school, which has lately been carried to a greater extreme in this country than the rest of the world recognizes, has not brought certain grave dangers, and whether it does not interfere with the natural differentiations seen everywhere else. I recognize, of course, the great argument of economy. Indeed, we should save money and effort could we unite churches of not too diverse creeds. We could thus give better preaching, music, improve the edifice, etc. I am by no means ready to advocate the radical abolition of coeducation, but we can already sum up in a rough, brief way our account of profit and loss with it. On the one hand, no doubt each s.e.x develops some of its own best qualities best in the presence of the other, but the question still remains, how much, when, and in what way, identical coeducation secures this end?

As has been said, girls and boys are often interested in different aspects of the same topic, and this may have a tendency to broaden the view-point of both and bring it into sympathy with that of the other, but the question still remains whether one be not too much attracted to the sphere of the other, especially girls to that of boys. No doubt some girls become a little less gushy, their conduct more thoughtful, and their sense of responsibility greater; for one of woman's great functions, which is that of bestowing praise aright, is increased. There is also much evidence that certain boys' vices are mitigated; they are made more urbane and their thoughts of s.e.x made more healthful. In some respects boys are stimulated to good scholarship by girls, who in many schools and topics excel them. We should ask, however, What is nature's way at this stage of life? Whether boys, in order to be well virified later, ought not to be so boisterous and even rough as to be at times unfit companions for girls; or whether, on the other hand, girls to be best matured ought not to have their sentimental periods of instability, especially when we venture to raise the question, whether for a girl in the early teens, when her health for her whole life depends upon normalizing the lunar month, there is not something unhygienic, unnatural, not to say a little monstrous, in school a.s.sociations with boys when she must suppress and conceal her feelings and instinctive promptings at those times which suggest withdrawing, to let nature do its beautiful work of inflorescence. It is a sacred time of reverent exemption from the hard struggle of existence in the world and from mental effort in the school. Medical specialists, many of the best of whom now insist that through this period she should be, as it were, "turned out to gra.s.s," or should lie fallow, so far as intellectual efforts go, one-fourth the time, no doubt often go too far, but their unanimous voice should not entirely be disregarded.

It is not this, however, that I have chiefly in mind here, but the effects of too familiar relations and, especially, of the identical work, treatment, and environment of the modern school.

We have now at least eight good and independent statistical studies which show that the ideals of boys from ten years on are almost always those of their own s.e.x, while girls' ideals are increasingly of the opposite s.e.x, or those of men. That the ideals of p.u.b.escent girls are not found in the great and n.o.ble women of the world or in their literature, but more and more in men, suggests a divorce between the ideals adopted and the line of life best suited to the interests of the race. We are not furnished in our public schools with adequate womanly ideals in history or literature. The new love of freedom which women have lately felt inclines girls to abandon the home for the office. "It surely can hardly be called an ideal education for women that permits eighteen out of one hundred college girls to state boldly that they would rather be men than women." More than one-half of the schoolgirls in these censuses choose male ideals, as if those of femininity are disintegrating. A recent writer,[3] in view of this fact, states that "unless there is a change of trend, we shall soon have a female s.e.x without a female character." In the progressive numerical feminization of our schools most teachers, perhaps naturally and necessarily, have more or less masculine ideals, and this does not encourage the development of those that const.i.tute the glory of womanhood. "At every age from eight to sixteen, girls named from three to twenty more ideals than boys." "These facts indicate a condition of diffused interests and lack of clear-cut purposes and a need of integration."

When we turn to boys the case is different. In most public high schools girls preponderate, especially in the upper cla.s.ses, and in many of them the boys that remain are practically in a girls' school, sometimes taught chiefly, if not solely, by women teachers at an age when strong men should be in control more than at any other period of life. Boys need a different discipline and moral regimen and atmosphere. They also need a different method of work. Girls excel them in learning and memorization, accepting studies upon suggestion or authority, but are often quite at sea when set to make tests and experiments that give individuality and a chance for self-expression, which is one of the best things in boyhood. Girls preponderate in our overgrown high school Latin and algebra, because custom and tradition and, perhaps, advice incline them to it. They preponderate in English and history cla.s.ses more often, let us hope, from inner inclination. The boy sooner grows restless in a curriculum where form takes precedence over content. He revolts at much method with meager matter. He craves utility, and when all these instincts are denied, without knowing what is the matter, he drops out of school, when with robust tone and with a truly boy life, such as prevails at Harrow, Eton, and Rugby, he would have fought it through and have done well. This feminization of the school spirit, discipline, and personnel is bad for boys. Of course, on the whole, perhaps, they are made more gentlemanly, more at ease, their manners improved, and all this to a woman teacher seems excellent, but something is the matter with the boy in early teens who can be truly called "a perfect gentleman." That should come later, when the brute and animal element have had opportunity to work themselves off in a healthful normal way. They still have football to themselves, and are the majority perhaps in chemistry, and sometimes in physics, but there is danger of a settled eviration. The segregation, which even some of our schools are now attempting, is always in some degree necessary for full and complete development. Just as the boys' language is apt to creep into that of the girl, so girls' interests, ways, standards and tastes, which are crude at this age, sometimes attract boys out of their orbit. While some differences are emphasized by contact, others are compromised. Boys tend to grow content with mechanical, memorized work and, excelling on the lines of girls' qualities, fail to develop those of their own. There is a little charm and bloom rubbed off the ideal of girlhood by close contact, and boyhood seems less ideal to girls at close range. In place of the mystic attraction of the other s.e.x that has inspired so much that is best in the world, familiar comradeship brings a little disenchantment. The impulse to be at one's best in the presence of the other s.e.x prows lax and s.e.x tension remits, and each comes to feel itself seen through, so that there is less motive to indulge in the ideal conduct which such motives inspire, because the call for it is incessant. This disillusioning weakens the motivation to marriage sometimes on both sides, when girls grow careless in their dress and too negligent in their manners, one of the best schools of woman's morals; and when boys lose all restraints which the presence of girls usually enforces, there is a subtle deterioration. Thus, I believe, although of course it is impossible to prove, that this is one of the factors of a decreasing percentage of marriage among educated young men and women.

At eighteen or twenty the girl normally reaches a stage of first maturity when her ideas of life are amazingly keen and true; when, if her body is developed, she can endure a great deal; when she is nearest, perhaps, the ideal of feminine beauty and perfection. Of this we saw ill.u.s.trations in Chapter VIII. In our environment, however, there is a little danger that this age once well past there will slowly arise a slight sense of aimlessness or la.s.situde, unrest, uneasiness, as if one were almost unconsciously feeling along the wall for a door to which the key was not at hand. Thus some lose their bloom and, yielding to the great danger of young womanhood, slowly lapse to a anxious state of expectancy, or desire something not within their reach, and so the diathesis of restlessness slowly supervenes. The best thing about college life for girls is, perhaps, that it postpones this incipient disappointment; but it is a little pathetic to me to read, as I have lately done, the cla.s.s letters of hundreds of girl graduates, out of college one, two, or three years, turning a little to art, music, travel, teaching, charity work, one after the other, or trying to find something to which they can devote themselves, some cause, movement, occupation, where their capacity for altruism and self-sacrifice can find a field. The tension is almost imperceptible, perhaps quite unconscious. It is everywhere overborne by a keen interest in life, by a desire to know the world at first hand, while susceptibilities are at their height. The apple of intelligence has been plucked at perhaps a little too great cost of health. The purely mental has not been quite sufficiently kept back. The girl wishes to know a good deal more of the world and perfect her own personality, and would not marry, although every cell of her body and every unconscious impulse points to just that end. Soon, it may be in five or ten years or more, the complexion of ill health is in these notes, or else life has been adjusted to independence and self-support. Many of these bachelor women are magnificent in mind and body, but they lack wifehood and yet more-motherhood.

In fine, we should use these facts as a stimulus to ask more searchingly the question whether the present system of higher education for both s.e.xes is not lacking in some very essential elements, and if so what these are. Indeed, considering the facts that in our social system man makes the advances and that woman is by nature more p.r.o.ne than man to domesticity and parenthood, it is not impossible that men's colleges do more to unfit for these than do those for women. One cause may be moral. Ethics used to be taught as a practical power for life and reenforced by religious motives. Now it is theoretical and speculative and too often led captive by metaphysical and epistemological speculations. Sometimes girls work or worry more over studies and ideals than is good for their const.i.tution, and boys grow idle and indifferent, and this proverbially tends to bad habits. Perhaps fitting for college has been too hard at the critical age of about eighteen, and requirements of honest, persevering work during college years too little enforced, or grown irksome by physiological reaction of la.s.situde from the strain of fitting and entering. Again, girls mature earlier than boys; and the latter who have been educated with them tend to certain elements of maturity and completeness too early in life, and their growth period is shortened or its momentum lessened by an atmosphere of femininity. Something is clearly wrong, and more so here than we have at present any reason to think is the case among the academic male or female youth of other lands. To see and admit that there is an evil very real, deep, exceedingly difficult and complex in its causes, but grave and demanding a careful reconsideration of current educational ideas and practises, is the first step; and this every thoughtful and well-informed mind, I believe, must now take.

It is utterly impossible without injury to hold girls to the same standards of conduct, regularity, severe moral accountability, and strenuous mental work that boys need. The privileges and immunities of her s.e.x are inveterate, and with these the American girl in the middle teens fairly tingles with a new-born consciousness. Already she occasionally a.s.serts herself in the public high school against a male teacher or princ.i.p.al who seeks to enforce discipline by methods boys respect, in a way that suggests that the time is at hand when popularity with her s.e.x will be as necessary in a successful teacher as it is in the pulpit. In these interesting oases where girl sentiment has made itself felt in school it has generally carried parents, committeemen, the press, and public sentiment before it, and has already made a precious little list of martyrs whom, were I an educational pope, I would promptly canonize. The progressive feminization of secondary education works its subtle demoralization on the male teachers who remain. Public sentiment would sustain them in many parental exactions with boys which it disallows in mixed cla.s.ses. It is hard, too, for male princ.i.p.als of schools with only female teachers not to suffer some deterioration in the moral tone of their virility and to lose in the power to cope successfully with men. Not only is this often confessed and deplored, but the incessant compromises the best male teachers of mixed cla.s.ses must make with their pedagogic convictions in both teaching and discipline make the profession less attractive to manly men of large caliber and of sound fiber. Again, the recent rapid increase of girls, the percentage of which to population in high schools has in many communities doubled in but little more than a decade, almost necessarily involves a decline in the average quality of girls, perhaps as much greater for them as compared with boys as their increase has been greater. When but few were found in these inst.i.tutions they were usually picked girls with superior tastes and ability, but now the average girl of the rank and file is, despite advanced standard, of admission, of an order natively lower. From this deterioration both boys and teachers suffer, even though the greatest good for the greatest number may be enhanced. Once more, it is generally admitted that girls in good boarding-schools, where evenings, food, and regimen are controlled, are in better health than day pupils with social, church, and domestic duties and perhaps worries to which boys are less subject. This is the nascent stage of periodicity to the slow normalization of which, during these few critical years, everything that interferes should yield. Some kind of tacit recognition of this is indispensable, but in mixed cla.s.ses every form of such concession is baffling and demoralizing to boys.

The women who really achieve the higher culture should make it their "cause" or "mission" to work out the new humanistic or liberal education which the old college claimed to stand for and which now needs radical reconstruction to meet the demands of modern life. In science they should aim to restore the humanistic elements of its history, biography, its popular features at their best, and its applications in all the more non-technical fields, as described in Chapter XII, and feel responsibility not to let the moral, religious, and poetic aspects of nature be lost in utilities. Woman should be true to her generic nature and take her stand against all premature specialization, and when the Zeitgeist [Spirit of the Times] insists on specialized training for occupative pursuits without waiting for broad foundations to be laid, she should resist all these influences that make for psychological precocity. Das Ewig-Weibliche [The eternal womanly] is no iridescent fiction but a very definable reality, and means perennial youth. It means that woman at her best never outgrows adolescence as man does, but lingers in, magnifies and glorifies this culminating stage of life with its all-sided interests, its convertibility of emotions, its enthusiasm, and zest for all that is good, beautiful, true, and heroic. This const.i.tutes her freshness and charm, even in age, and makes her by nature more humanistic than man, more sympathetic and appreciative. It is not chiefly the 70,000 superfluous Ma.s.sachusetts women of the last census, but representatives of every cla.s.s and age in the 4,000 women's clubs of this country that now find some leisure for general culture in all fields, and in which most of them no doubt surpa.s.s their husbands. Those who still say that men do not like women to be their mental superiors and that no man was ever won by the attraction of intellect, on the one hand, and those who urge that women really want husbands to be their intellectual superiors, both misapprehend. The male in all the orders of life is the agent of variation and tends by nature to expertness and specialisation, without which his individuality is incomplete. In his chosen line he would lead and be authoritative, and he rarely seeks partnership in it in marriage. This is no subjection, but woman instinctively respects and even reveres, and perhaps educated woman coming to demand, it in the man of her whole-hearted choice. This granted, man was never more plastic to woman's great work of creating in him all the wide range of secondary s.e.x qualities which const.i.tute his essential manhood. In all this, the pedagogic fathers we teach in the history of education are most of them about as luminous and obsolete as is patristics for the religious teacher, or as methods of other countries are coming to be in solving our own peculiar pedagogic problems. The relation of the academically trained s.e.xes is faintly typified by that of the ideal college to the ideal university, professional or technical school. This is the harmony of counterparts and const.i.tutes the best basis of psychic amphimixis. For the reinstallation of the humanistic college, the time has come when cultivated woman ought to come forward and render vital aid. If she does so and helps to evolve a high school and an A.B. course that is truly liberal, it will not only fit her nature and needs far better than anything now existing, but young men at the humanistic stage of their own education will seek to profit by it, and she will thus repay her debt to man in the past by aiding him to de-universitize the college and to rescue secondary education from its gravest dangers.

But even should all this be done, coeducation would by means be thus justified. If adolescent boys normally pa.s.s through a generalized or even feminized stage of psychic development in which they are peculiarly plastic to the guidance of older women who have such rare insight into their nature, such infinite sympathy and patience with all the symptoms of their storm and stress metamorphosis, when they seek everything by turns and nothing long, and if young men will forever afterward understand woman's nature better for living out more fully this stage of their lives and will fail to do so if it is abridged or dwarfed, it by no means follows that intimate daily and cla.s.s-room a.s.sociation with girls of their own age is necessary or best. The danger of this is that the boy's instinct to a.s.sert his own manhood will thus be made premature and excessive, that he will react against general culture, in the capacity for which girls, who are older than boys at the same age, naturally excel them. Companionship and comparisons incline him to take premature refuge in some one talent that emphasizes his psycho-s.e.xual difference too soon. Again, he is farther from nubile maturity than the girl cla.s.smate of his own age, and coeducation and marriage between them are p.r.o.ne to violate the important physiological law of disparity that requires the husband to be some years the wife's senior, both in their own interests, as maturity begins to decline to age, and in those of their offspring. Thus the young man with his years of restraint and probation ahead, and his inflammable desires, is best removed from the half-conscious cerebrations about wedlock, inevitably more insistent with constant girl companionship. If he resists this during all the years of his apprenticeship, he grows more immune and inhibitive of it when its proper hour arrives, and perhaps becomes in soul a bachelor before his time. In this side of his nature he is forever incommensurate with and unintelligible to woman, be she even teacher, sister, or mother. Better some risk of gross thoughts and even acts, to which phylogeny and recapitulation so strongly incline him, than this subtle eviration. But if the boy is unduly repelled from the sphere of girls' interests, the girl is in some danger of being unduly drawn to his, and, as we saw above, of forgetting some of the ideals of her own s.e.x. Riper in mind and body than her male cla.s.smate, and often excelling him in the capacity of acquisition, nearer the age of her full maturity than he to his, he seems a little too crude and callow to fulfil the ideals of manhood normal to her age which point to older and riper men. In all that makes s.e.xual attraction best, a cla.s.smate of her own age is too undeveloped, and so she often suffers mute disenchantment, and even if engagement be dreamed of, it would be, on her part, with unconscious reservations if not with some conscious renunciation of ideals. Thus the boy is correct in feeling himself understood and seen through by his girl cla.s.smates to a degree that is sometimes quite distasteful to him, while the girl finds herself misunderstood by and disappointed in men. Boys arrive at the humanistic stage of culture later than girls and pa.s.s it sooner; and to find them already there and with their greater apt.i.tude excelling him, is not an inviting situation, and so he is tempted to abridge or cut it out and to hasten on and be mature and professional before his time, for thus he gravitates toward his normal relation to her s.e.x of expert mastership on some bread- or fame-winning line. Of course, these influences are not patent, demonstrable by experiment, or measurable by statistics; but I have come to believe that, like many other facts and laws, they have a reality and a dominance that is all-pervasive and inescapable, and that they will ultimately prevail over economic motives and traditions.

To be a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. The madonna conception expresses man's highest comprehension of woman's real nature. s.e.xual relations are brief, but love and care of offspring are long. The elimination of maternity is one of the great calamities, if not diseases, of our age. Marholm[4] points out at length how art again to-day gives woman a waspish waist with no abdomen, as if to carefully score away every trace of her mission; usually with no child in her arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated perhaps to entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading the artist who depicts her to a fashion-plate painter, perhaps with suggestions of the arts of toilet, cosmetics, and coquetry, as if to promote decadent reaction to decadent stimuli. As in the Munchausen tale, the wolf slowly ate the running nag from behind until he found himself in the harness, so in the disoriented woman the mistress, virtuous and otherwise, is slowly supplanting the mother. Please she must, even though she can not admire, and can so easily despise men who can not lead her, although she become thereby lax and vapid.

The more exhausted men become, whether by overwork, unnatural city life, alcohol, recrudescent polygamic inclinations, exclusive devotion to greed and pelf; whether they become weak, stooping, blear-eyed, bald-headed, bow-legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coa.r.s.e, barbaric, and b.e.s.t.i.a.l, the more they lose the power to lead woman or to arouse her nature, which is essentially pa.s.sive. Thus her perversions are his fault. Man, before he lost the soil and piety, was not only her protector and provider, but her priest. He not only supported and defended, but inspired the souls of women, so admirably calculated to receive and elaborate suggestions, but not to originate them. In their inmost souls even young girls often experience disenchantment, find men little and no heroes, and so cease to revere and begin to think stupidly of them as they think coa.r.s.ely of her. Sometimes the girlish conceptions of men are too romantic and exalted; often the intimacy of school and college wear off a charm, while man must not forget that to-day he too often fails to realize the just and legitimate expectations and ideals of women. If women confide themselves, body and soul, less to him than he desires, it is not she, but he, who is often chiefly to blame. Indeed, in some psychic respects, it seems as if in human society the processes of subordinating the male to the female, carried so far in some of the animal species, had already begun. If he is not worshiped as formerly, it is because he is less worshipful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to excite and retain the great love of true, not to say great, women. Where marriage and maternity are of less supreme interest to an increasing number of women, there are various results, the chief of which are as follows:

1. Women grow dollish; sink more or less consciously to man's level; gratify his desires and even his selfish caprices, but exact in return luxury and display, growing vain as he grows sordid; thus, while submitting, conquering, and tyrannizing over him, content with present worldly pleasure, unmindful of the past, the future, or the above. This may react to inters.e.xual antagonism until man comes to hate woman as a witch, or, as in the days of celibacy, consider s.e.x a wile of the devil. Along these lines even the stage is beginning to represent the tragedies of life.

2. The disappointed woman in whom something is dying comes to a.s.sert her own ego and more or less consciously to make it an end, aiming to possess and realize herself fully rather than to transmit. Despairing of herself as a woman, she a.s.serts her lower rights in the place of her one great right to be loved. The desire for love may be trans.m.u.ted into the desire for knowledge, or outward achievement become a subst.i.tute for inner content. Failing to respect herself as a productive organism, she gives vent to personal solutions; seeks independence; comes to know very plainly what she wants; perhaps becomes intellectually emanc.i.p.ated, and subst.i.tutes science for religion, or the doctor for the priest, with the all-sided impressionability characteristic of her s.e.x which, when cultivated, is so like an awakened child. She perhaps even affects mannish ways, unconsciously copying from those not most manly, or comes to feel that she has been robbed of something; competes with men, but sometimes where they are most sordid, brutish, and strongest; always expecting, but never finding, she turns successively to art, science, literature, and reforms; craves especially work that she can not do; and seeks stimuli for feelings which have never found their legitimate expression.

3. Another type, truer to woman's nature, subordinates self; goes beyond personal happiness; adopts the motto of self-immolation; enters a life of service, denial, and perhaps mortification, like the Countess Schimmelmann; and perhaps becomes a devotee, a saint, and, if need be, a martyr, but all with modesty, humility, and with a shrinking from publicity.

In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good environment of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the above-mentioned peculiar stage of first maturity, when they see the world at first hand, when the senses are at their very best, their susceptibilities and their insights the keenest, tension at its highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. Some such-Stella Klive, Mary MacLane, Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff-have been veritable epics upon woman's nature; have revealed the characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in which everything is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least unity, aim, or purpose. By and by perhaps they will see in all their sc.r.a.ppy past, if not order and coherence, a justification, and then alone will they realize that life is governed by motives deeper than those which are conscious or even personal. This is the age when, if ever, no girl should be compelled. It is the experiences of this age, never entirely obliterated in women, that enable them to take adolescent boys seriously, as men can rarely do, in whom these experiences are more limited in range though no less intense. It is this stage in woman which is most unintelligible to man and even unrealized to herself. It is the echoes from it that make vast numbers of mothers pursue the various branches of culture, often half secretly, to maintain their position with their college sons and daughters, with their husbands, or with society.

But in a very few years, I believe even in the early twenties with American girls, along with rapidly in creasing development of capacity there is also observable the beginnings of loss and deterioration. Unless marriage comes there is la.s.situde, subtle symptoms of invalidism, the germs of a rather aimless dissatisfaction with life, a little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain forms of self-pampering, the resolution to be happy, though at too great cost; and thus the clear air of morning begins to haze over and unconsciously she begins to grope. By thirty, she is perhaps goaded into more or less sourness; has developed more petty self-indulgences; has come to feel a right to happiness almost as pa.s.sionately as the men of the French Revolution and as the women in their late movement for enfranchis.e.m.e.nt felt for liberty. Very likely she has turned to other women and entered into innocent Platonic pairing-off relations with some one. There is a little more affectation, playing a role, and interest in dress and appearance is either less or more specialized and definite. Perhaps she has already begun to be a seeker who will perhaps find, lose, and seek again. Her temper is modified; there is a slight stagnation of soul; a craving for work or travel; a love of children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or else aversion to them; an a.n.a.lysis of psychic processes until they are weakened and insight becomes too clear; sense of responsibility without an object; a slight general malaise and a sense that society is a false "margarine" affair; revolt against those that insist that in her child the real value of a woman is revealed. There are alternations between excessive self-respect which demands something almost like adoration of the other s.e.x and self-distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the s.e.xes generally.

A new danger, the greatest in the history of her s.e.x, now impends, viz., arrest, complacency, and a sense of finality in the most perilous first stage of higher education for girls, when, after all, little has actually yet been won save only the right and opportunity to begin reconstructions, so that now, for the first time in history, methods and matter could be radically transformed to fit the nature and needs of girls. Now most female faculties, trustees, and students are content to ape the newest departures in some one or more male inst.i.tutions as far as their means or obvious limitations make possible with a servility which is often abject and with rarely ever a thought of any adjustment, save the most superficial, to s.e.x. It is the easiest, and therefore the most common, view typically expressed by the female head of a very successful inst.i.tution,[5] who was "early convinced in my teaching experience that the methods for mental development for boys and girls applied equally without regard to s.e.x, and I have carried the same thought when I began to develop the physical, and filled my gymnasium with the ordinary appliances used in men's gymnasia." There is no s.e.x in mind or in science, it is said, but it might as well be urged that there is no age, and hence that all methods adapted to teaching at different stages of development may be ignored. That woman can do many things as well as man does not prove that she ought to do the same things, or that man-made ways are the best for her. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer[6] was right in saying that woman's education has all the perplexities of that of man, and many more, still more difficult and intricate, of its own.

Hence, we must conclude that, while women's colleges have to a great extent solved the problem of special technical training, they have done as yet very little to solve the larger one of the proper education of woman. To a.s.sume that the latter question is settled, as is so often done, is disastrous. I have forced myself to go through many elaborate reports of meetings where female education was discussed by those supposed to be competent; but as a rule, not without rare, striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with the same sterile and complacent artificiality that was so long the curse of woman's life. I deem it almost reprehensible that, save a few general statistics, the women's colleges have not only made no study themselves of the larger problems that impend, but have often maintained a repellent att.i.tude toward others who wished to do so. No one that I know of connected with any of these inst.i.tutions, where the richest material is going to waste, is making any serious and competent research on lines calculated to bring out the psycho-physiological differences between the s.e.xes and those in authority are either conservative by const.i.tution or else intimidated because public opinion is still liable to panics if discussion here becomes scientific and fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and the old habit of ignoring everything that pertains to s.e.x in countenance.

Again, while I sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every opportunity which she can fill, and yield to none in appreciation of her ability, I insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college is that it is based upon the a.s.sumption, implied and often expressed, if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be trained to independence and self-support, and that matrimony and motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even urge, is thus best provided for. If these colleges are, as the above statistics indicate, chiefly devoted to the training of those who do not marry, or if they are to educate for celibacy, this is right. These inst.i.tutions may perhaps come to be training stations of a new-old type, the agamic or even agenic woman, be she nut, maid-old or young-nun, school-teacher, or bachelor woman. I recognize the very great debt the world owes to members of this very diverse cla.s.s in the past. Some of them have ill.u.s.trated the very highest ideals of self-sacrifice, service, and devotion in giving to mankind what was meant for husband and children. Some of them belong to the cla.s.s of superfluous women, and others ill.u.s.trate the n.o.blest type of altruism and have impoverished the heredity of the world to its loss, as did the monks, who Leslie Stephens thinks contributed to bring about the Dark Ages, because they were the best and most highly selected men of their age and, by withdrawing from the function of heredity and leaving no posterity, caused Europe to degenerate. Modern ideas and training are now doing this, whether for racial weal or woe, can not yet be determined, for many whom nature designed for model mothers.

The bachelor woman is an interesting ill.u.s.tration of Spencer's law of the inverse relation of individuation and genesis. The completely developed individual is always a terminal representative in her line of descent. She has taken up and utilized in her own life all that was meant for her descendants, and has so overdrawn her account with heredity that, like every perfectly and completely developed individual, she is also completely sterile. This is the very apotheosis of selfishness from the standpoint of every biological ethics. While the complete man can do and sometimes does this, woman has a far greater and very peculiar power of overdrawing her reserves. First she loses mammary functions, so that should she undertake maternity its functions are incompletely performed because she can not nurse, and this implies defective motherhood and leaves love of the child itself defective and maimed, for the mother who has never nursed can not love or be loved aright by her child. It crops out again in the abnormal or especially incomplete development of her offspring, in the critical years of adolescence, although they may have been healthful before, and a less degree of it perhaps is seen in the diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one-child system. These women are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of the men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr, the university student, in Hauptmann's "Lonely Lives," who alienated the young husband from his n.o.ble wife; they enjoy all the keen pleasures of intellectual activity; their very look, step, and bearing is free; their mentality makes them good fellows and companionable in all the broad intellectual spheres; to converse with them is as charming and attractive for the best men as was Socrates's discourse with the accomplished hetaerae; they are at home with the racquet and on the golf links; they are splendid friends; their minds, in all their widening areas of contact, are as attractive as their bodies; and the world owes much and is likely to owe far more to high Platonic friendships of this kind. These women are often in every way magnificent, only they are not mothers, and sometimes have very little wifehood in them, and to attempt to marry them to develop these functions is one of the unique and too frequent tragedies of modern life and literature. Some, though by no means all, of them are functionally castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of child-bearing, and perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor the limitations of married life; they are incensed whenever attention is called to the functions peculiar to their s.e.x, and the careful consideration of problems of the monthly rest are thought "not fit for cultivated women."

The slow evolution of this type is probably inevitable as civilization advances, and their training is a n.o.ble function. Already it has produced minds of the greatest ac.u.men who have made very valuable contributions to science, and far more is to be expected of them in the future. Indeed, it may be their n.o.ble function to lead their s.e.x out into the higher, larger life, and the deeper sense of its true position and function, for which I plead. Hitherto woman has not been able to solve her own problems. While she has been more religious than man, there have been few great women preachers; while she has excelled in teaching young children, there have been few Pestalozzis, or even Froebels; while her invalidism is a complex problem, she has turned to man in her diseases. This is due to the very intuitiveness and navete of her nature. But now that her world is so rapidly widening, she is in danger of losing her cue. She must be studied objectively and laboriously as we study children, and partly by men, because their s.e.x must of necessity always remain objective and incommensurate with regard to woman, and therefore more or less theoretical. Again, in these days of intense new interest in feelings, emotions, and sentiments, when many a psychologist now envies and, like Schleiermacher, devoutly wishes he could become a woman, he can never really understand das Ewig-Weibliche, [The eternal womanly] one of the two supreme oracles of guidance in life, because he is a man; and here the cultivated woman must explore the nature of her s.e.x as man can not, and become its mouthpiece. In many of the new fields opening in biology since Darwin, in embryology, botany, the study of children, animals, savages (witness Miss Fletcher), sociological investigation, to say nothing of all the vast body of work that requires painstaking detail, perseverance, and conscience, woman has superior ability, or her very s.e.x gives her peculiar advantages where she is to lead and achieve great things in enlarging the kingdom of man. Perhaps, too, the present training of women may in the end develop those who shall one day attain a true self-knowledge and lead n the next step of devising a scheme that shall fit woman's nature and needs.

For the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first of all distinctly and ostensively invert the present maxim, and educate primarily and chiefly for motherhood, a.s.suming that, if that does not come, single life can best take care of itself, because it is less intricate and lower and its needs far more easily met. While girls may be trained with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of adolescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy between the s.e.xes in high school, if not in college, tends to rub of the bloom and delicacy which can develop in each, and girls suffer in this respect, let us repeat, far more than boys. The familiar comradeship that ignores s.e.x should be left to the agenic cla.s.s. To the care of their inst.i.tutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Stael, the Misses Cobb, Martineau, Fuller, Bronte, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs. Browning; and while accepting and profiting by what they have done, and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and achievements, prospective mothers must not be allowed to forget a still larger cla.s.s of ideal women, both in history and literature, from the Holy Mother to Beatrice Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who have inspired men to great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of n.o.ble mothers.

We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she can, from surrept.i.tious or worthy sources, what she most of all needs to know; must recognize that our present civilization is hard on woman and that she is not yet adjusted to her social environment; that as she was of old accused of having given man the apple of knowledge of good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less serious indictment of having given her the apple of intellectualism and encouraged her to a.s.sume his standards at the expense of health. We must recognize that riches are probably harder on her, on the whole, than poverty, and that poor parents should not labor too hard to exempt her from its wholesome discipline. The expectancy of change so stamped upon her s.e.x by heredity as she advances into maturity must not be perverted into uneasiness or her soul sown with the tares of ambition or fired by inters.e.xual compet.i.tion and driven on, to quote Dr. R.T. Edes, "by a tireless sort of energy which is a compound of conscience, ambition, and desire to please, plus a peculiar female obstinacy." If she is bright, she must not be overworked in the school factory, studying in a way which parodies Hood's "Song of the Shirt"; and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by preceptresses like a eminent lady princ.i.p.al,[7] who thought girls' weakness is usually imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for suggesting illness and for intimating that men will have to choose between a healthy animal and an educated invalid for a wife.

Without specifying here details or curricula, the ideals that should be striven toward in the intermediate and collegiate education of adolescent girls with the proper presupposition of motherhood, and which are already just as practicable as Abbotsholme[8] or L'Ecole des Roches,[9] may be rudely indicated somewhat as follows.

First, the ideal inst.i.tution for the training of girls from twelve or thirteen on into the twenties, when the period most favorable to motherhood begins, should be in the country in the midst of hills, the climbing of which is the best stimulus for heart and lungs, and tends to mental elevation and breadth of view. There should be water for boating, bathing, and skating, aquaria and aquatic life; gardens both for kitchen vegetables and horticulture; forests for their seclusion and religious awe; good roads, walks, and paths that tempt to walking and wheeling: playgrounds and s.p.a.ce for golf and tennis, with large covered but unheated s.p.a.ce favorable for recreations in weather really too bad for out-of-door life and for those indisposed; and plenty of nooks that permit each to be alone with nature, for this develops inwardness, poise, and character, yet not too great remoteness from the city for a wise utilization of its advantages at intervals. All that can be called environment is even more important for girls than boys, significant as it is for the latter.

The first aim, which should dominate every item, pedagogic method and matter, should be health-a momentous word that looms up beside holiness, to which it is etymologically akin. The new hygiene of the last few years should be supreme and make these academic areas soared to the cult of the G.o.ddess Hygeia. Only those who realize what advances have been made in health culture and know something of its vast new literature can realize all that this means. The health of woman is, as we have seen, if possible even more important for the welfare of the race than that of man; and the influence of her body upon her mind is, in a sense, greater, so that its needs should be supreme and primary. Foods should favor the completest digestion, so that metabolism be on the highest plane. The dietary should be abundant, plain, and varied, and cooked with all the refinements possible in the modern cooking-school, which should be one of its departments, with limited use of rich foods or desserts and stimulating drinks, but with wholesome proximity to dairy and farm. Nutrition is the first law of health and happiness, the prime condition and creator of euphoria; and the appet.i.te should be, as it always is if unperverted, like a kind of somatic conscience steadfastly pointing toward the true pole of needs.

Sleep should be regular, with a fixed retiring hour and curfew, on plain beds in rooms of scrupulous neatness reserved chiefly for it with every precaution for quiet, and, if possible, with windows more or less open the year round, and, like other rooms, never overheated. Bathing in moderation, and especially dress and toilet should be almost raised to fine arts and objects of constant suggestion. Each student should have three rooms, for bath, sleep, and study, respectively, and be responsible for their care, with every encouragement for expressing individual tastes; but will, an all-dominant idea of simplicity, convenience, refinement, and elegance, without luxury. Girls need to go away from home a good part of every year to escape the indiscretion and often the coddling of parents and to learn self-reliance; and a family dormitory system, with but few, twelve to twenty, in each building, to escape nervous wear and distraction, to secure intimacy and acquaintance with one or more matrons or teachers and to ensure the most pedagogic dietetics, is suggested.