THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS
Equal opportunities of higher education now open—Brings new dangers to women—Ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the sexes should and do diverge—Different interests—Sex tension—Girls more mature than boys at the same age—Radical psychic and physiological differences between the sexes—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 noble movement and is a necessary first stage of woman’s emancipation. 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 sexes 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 institution. 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 institutions 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 sex. 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 pronounce more favorable to motherhood, under the influence of female principals 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 sexes, but often the sexes 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 sexes 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 sex over the other, the latter is likely to lose its characteristic qualities, and something of this occurs where the average age of one sex is distinctly greater than that of the other. On the other hand, several urge that, where age and numbers are equal, each sex 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 assimilation 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 prone 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 prone 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 classes the voices of each sex 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 quantity constantly changing with every class, are diminished. Healthful thoughts of sex, less subterranean and base imaginings on the one hand, and less gushy sentimentality on the other, are favored. For either sex to be a copy of the other is to be weakened, and each comes normally to respect more and to prefer its own sex.
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 sexes. 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 sexes differentiate in the higher grades. Moreover, nature decrees that with advancing civilization the sexes shall not approximate, but differentiate, and we shall probably be obliged to carry sex 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 pubescent 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 illustrate this. This is normal and biological. What our schools and other institutions should do, is not to obliterate these differences but to make boys more manly and girls more womanly. We should respect the law of sexual differences, and not forget that motherhood is a very different thing from fatherhood. Neither sex should copy nor set patterns to the other, but all parts should be played harmoniously and clearly in the great sex 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 sex 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 sex 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 associations 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 grass,” 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 sex, while girls’ ideals are increasingly of the opposite sex, or those of men. That the ideals of pubescent girls are not found in the great and noble 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 sex 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 constitute 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 classes, 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 classes 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 sex 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 sex prows lax and sex 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 illustrations 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 lassitude, 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 class 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 sexes 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 prone 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 reënforced 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 constitution, 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 lassitude 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 sex are inveterate, and with these the American girl in the middle teens fairly tingles with a new-born consciousness. Already she occasionally asserts herself in the public high school against a male teacher or principal who seeks to enforce discipline by methods boys respect, in a way that suggests that the time is at hand when popularity with her sex 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 classes. It is hard, too, for male principals 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 classes 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 institutions 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 classes 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 constitutes 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 Massachusetts women of the last census, but representatives of every class 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 surpass 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 sex qualities which constitute 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 sexes is faintly typified by that of the ideal college to the ideal university, professional or technical school. This is the harmony of counterparts and constitutes 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 pass 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 class-room association with girls of their own age is necessary or best. The danger of this is that the boy’s instinct to assert 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-sexual difference too soon. Again, he is farther from nubile maturity than the girl classmate of his own age, and coeducation and marriage between them are prone 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 sex. Riper in mind and body than her male classmate, 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 sexual attraction best, a classmate 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 classmates 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 pass it sooner; and to find them already there and with their greater aptitude 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 sex 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. Sexual 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, coarse, barbaric, and bestial, the more they lose the power to lead woman or to arouse her nature, which is essentially passive. 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 coarsely 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 intersexual antagonism until man comes to hate woman as a witch, or, as in the days of celibacy, consider sex 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 assert 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 asserts her lower rights in the place of her one great right to be loved. The desire for love may be transmuted into the desire for knowledge, or outward achievement become a substitute 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 emancipated, and substitutes science for religion, or the doctor for the priest, with the all-sided impressionability characteristic of her sex 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 scrappy 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 lassitude, 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 passionately as the men of the French Revolution and as the women in their late movement for enfranchisement 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 rôle, 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 analysis 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 sex and self-distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the sexes generally.
A new danger, the greatest in the history of her sex, 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 institutions 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 sex. It is the easiest, and therefore the most common, view typically expressed by the female head of a very successful institution,[5] who was “early convinced in my teaching experience that the methods for mental development for boys and girls applied equally without regard to sex, 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 sex 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 assume 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 attitude toward others who wished to do so. No one that I know of connected with any of these institutions, 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 sexes and those in authority are either conservative by constitution 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 sex 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 assumption, 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 institutions 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 class in the past. Some of them have illustrated 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 class of superfluous women, and others illustrate the noblest 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 illustration 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 noble 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 sex, 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 noble function. Already it has produced minds of the greatest acumen 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 noble function to lead their sex 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 naïveté 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 sex 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 sex 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 sex 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, assuming 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 sexes 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 sex should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Staël, the Misses Cobb, Martineau, Fuller, Bronté, 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 class 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 noble 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 surreptitious 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 assume 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 sex 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 intersexual competition 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 principal,[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 institution 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 space for golf and tennis, with large covered but unheated space 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 goddess 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 appetite 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.
Exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special reform. Swedish gymnastics should be abandoned or reduced to a minimum of best points, because it is too severe and, in forbidding music, lays too little stress upon the rhythm element. Out-of-door walks and games should have precedence over all else. The principle sometimes advocated, that methods of physical training should apply to both boys and girls without regard to sex, and with all the ordinary appliances found in the men’s gymnasia introduced, should be reversed and every possible adjustment made to sex. Free plays and games should always have precedence over indoor or uniform commando exercises. Boating and basket-ball should be allowed, but with the competition element sedulously reduced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the most prominent of indoor exercises. The dance cadences the soul; the stately minuet gives poise; the figure dances train the mind; and pantomime and dramatic features should be introduced and even specialties, if there are strong individual predispositions. The history of the dance, which has often been a mode of worship, a school of morals, and which is the root of the best that is in the drama, the best of all exercises and that could be again the heart of our whole educational system, should be exploited, and the dancing school and class rescued from its present degradation. No girl is educated who can not dance, although she need not know the ballroom in its modern form.[10]
Manners, a word too often relegated to the past as savoring of the primness of the ancient dame school or female seminary, are really minor or sometimes major morals. They can express everything in the whole range of the impulsive or emotional life. Now that we understand the primacy of movement over feeling, we can appreciate what a school of bearing and repose in daily converse with others means. I would revive some of the ancient casuistry of details, but less the rules of the drawing-room, call and party, although these should not be neglected, than the deeper expressions of true ladyhood seen in an exquisite, tender and unselfish regard for the feelings of others. Women’s ideal of compelling every one whom they meet to like them is a noble one, and the control of every automatism is not only a part of good breeding, but nervous health.
Regularity should be another all-pervading norm. In the main, even though he may have “played his sex symphony too harshly,” E.H. Clark was right. Periodicity, perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos, celebrates its highest triumphs in woman’s life. For years everything must give way to its thorough and settled establishment. In the monthly Sabbaths of rest, the ideal school should revert to the meaning of the word leisure. The paradise of stated rest should be revisited, idleness be actively cultivated; reverie, in which the soul, which needs these seasons of withdrawal for its own development, expatiates over the whole life of the race, should be provided for and encouraged in every legitimate way, for, in rest, the whole momentum of heredity is felt in ways most favorable to full and complete development. Then woman should realize that to be is greater than to do; should step reverently aside from her daily routine and let Lord Nature work. In this time of sensitiveness and perturbation, when anemia and chlorosis are so peculiarly immanent to her sex, remission of toil should not only be permitted, but required; and yet the greatest individual liberty should be allowed to adjust itself to the vast diversities of individual constitutional needs. (See Chapter VII on this point.) The cottage home, which should take the place of the dormitory, should always have special interest and attractions for these seasons.
There should always be some personal instruction at these seasons during earlier adolescent years. I have glanced over nearly a score of books and pamphlets that are especially written for girls; while all are well meant and far better than the ordinary modes by which girls acquire knowledge of their own nature if left to themselves, they are, like books for boys, far too prolix, and most are too scientific and plain and direct. Moreover, no two girls need just the same instruction, and to leave it to reading is too indirect and causes the mind to dwell on it for too long periods. Best of all is individual instruction at the time, concise, practical, and never, especially in the early years, without a certain mystic and religious tone which should pervade all and make everything sacred. This should not be given by male physicians—and indeed most female doctors would make it too professional, and the maiden teacher must forever lack reverence for it—but it should come from one whose soul and body are full of wifehood and motherhood and who is old enough to know and is not without the necessary technical knowledge.
Another principle should be to broaden by retarding; to keep the purely mental back and by every method to bring the intuitions to the front; appeals to tact and taste should be incessant; a purely intellectual man is no doubt biologically a deformity, but a purely intellectual woman is far more so. Bookishness is probably a bad sign in a girl; it suggests artificiality, pedantry, the lugging of dead knowledge. Mere learning is not the ideal, and prodigies of scholarship are always morbid. The rule should be to keep nothing that is not to become practical; to open no brain tracts which are not to be highways for the daily traffic of thought and conduct; not to overburden the soul with the impedimenta of libraries and records of what is afar off in time or zest, and always to follow truly the guidance of normal and spontaneous interests wisely interpreted.
Religion will always bold as prominent a place in woman’s life as politics does in man’s, and adolescence is still more its seedtime with girls than with boys. Its roots are the sentiment of awe and reverence, and it is the great agent in the world for transforming life from its earlier selfish to its only really mature form of altruism. The tales of the heroes of virtue, duty, devotion, and self-sacrifice from the Old Testament come naturally first; then perhaps the prophets paraphrased as in the pedagogic triumph of Kent and Saunders’s little series; and when adolescence is at its height then the chief stress of religious instruction should be laid upon Jesus’s life and work. He should be taught first humanly, and only later when the limitations of manhood seem exhausted should His Deity be adduced as welcome surplusage. The supernatural is a reflex of the heart; each sustains and neither can exist without the other. If the transcendent and supernal had no objective existence, we should have to invent and teach it or dwarf the life of feeling and sentiment. Whatever else religion is, therefore, it is the supremest poetry of the soul, reflecting like nothing else all that is deepest, most generic and racial in it. Theology should be reduced to a minimum, but nothing denied where wanted. Paul and his works and ways should be for the most part deferred until after eighteen. The juvenile well as the cyclone revivalist should be very carefully excluded; and yet in every springtime, when nature is recreated, service and teaching should gently encourage the revival and even the regeneration of all the religious instincts. The mission recruiter should be allowed to do his work outside these halls, and everything in the way of infection and all that brings religion into conflict with good taste and good sense should be excluded, while esthetics should supplement, reënforce, and go hand in hand with piety. Religion is in its infancy; and woman, who has sustained it in the past, must be the chief agent in its further and higher development. Orthodoxies and all narrowness should forever give place to cordial hospitality toward every serious view, which should be met by the method of greater sympathy rather than by that of criticism.
Nature in her many phases should, of course, make up a large part of the entire curriculum, but here again the methods of the sexes should differ somewhat after puberty. The poetic and mythic factors and some glimpses of the history of science should be given more prominence; the field naturalist rather than the laboratory man of technic should be the ideal especially at first; nature should be taught as God’s first revelation, as an Old Testament related to the Bible as a primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and more special one. Reverence and love should be the motive powers, and no aspect should be studied without beginning and culminating in interests akin to devotion. Mathematics should be taught only in its rudiments, and those with special talents or tastes for it should go to agamic schools. Chemistry, too, although not excluded, should have a subordinate place. The average girl has little love of sozzling and mussing with the elements, and cooking involves problems in organic chemistry too complex to be understood very profoundly, but the rudiments of household chemistry should be taught. Physics, too, should be kept to elementary stages. Meteorology should have a larger, and geology and astronomy increasingly larger places, and are especially valuable because, and largely in proportion as, they are taught out of doors, but the general principles and the untechnical and practical aspects should be kept in the foreground. With botany more serious work should be done. Plant-lore and the poetic aspect, as in astronomy, should have attention throughout, while Latin nomenclature and microscopic technic should come late if at all, and vulgar names should have precedence over Latin terminology. Flowers, gardening, and excursions should never be wanting. Economic and even medical aspects should appear, and prominent and early should come the whole matter of self cross-fertilization and that by insects. The moral value of this subject will never be fully understood till we have what might almost be called a woman’s botany, constructed on lines different from any of the text-books I have glanced at. Here much knowledge interesting in itself can be early taught, which will spring up into a world of serviceable insights as adolescence develops and the great law of sex unfolds.
Zoology should always be taught with plenty of pets, menagerie resources, and with aquaria, aviaries, apiaries, formicaries, etc., as adjuncts. It should start in the environment like everything else. Bird and animal lore, books, and pictures should abound in the early stages, and the very prolific chapter of instincts should have ample illustration, while the morphological nomenclature and details of structure should be less essential. Woman has domesticated nearly all the animals, and is so superior to man in insight into their modes of life and psychoses that many of them are almost exemplifications of moral qualities to her even more than to man. The peacock is an embodied expression of pride; the pig, of filth; the fox, of cunning; the serpent, of subtle danger; the eagle, of sublimity; the goose, of stupidity; and so on through all the range of human qualities, as we have seen. At bottom, however, the study of animal life is coming to be more and more a problem of heredity, and its problems should have dominant position and to them the other matter should grade up.
This shades over into and prepares for the study of the primitive man and child so closely related to each other. The myth, custom, belief, domestic practises of savages, vegetative and animal traits in infancy and childhood, the development of which is a priceless boon for the higher education of women, open of themselves a great field of human interest where she needs to know the great results, the striking details, the salient illustrations, the basal principles rather than to be entangled in the details of anthropometry, craniometry, philology, etc.
All this lays the basis for a larger study of modern man—history, with the biographical element very prominent throughout, with plenty of stories of heroes of virtue, acts of valor, tales of saintly lives and the personal element more prominent, and specialization in the study of dynasties, wars, authorities, and controversies relegated to a very subordinate place. Sociology, undeveloped, rudimentary, and in some places suspected as it is, should have in the curriculum of her higher education a place above political economy. The stories of the great reforms, and accounts of the constitution of society, of the home, church, state, and school, and philanthropies and ideals, should to the fore.
Art in all its forms should be opened at least in a propædeutic way and individual tastes amply and judiciously fed, but there should be no special training in music without some taste and gift, and the aim should be to develop critical and discriminative appreciation and the good taste that sees the vast superiority of all that is good and classic over what is cheap and fustian.
In literature, myth, poetry, and drama should perhaps lead, and the knowledge of the great authors in the vernacular be fostered. Greek, Hebrew, and perhaps Latin languages should be entirely excluded, not but that they are of great value and have their place, but because a smattering knowledge is bought at too high a price of ignorance of more valuable things. German, French, and Italian should be allowed and provided for by native teachers and by conversational methods if desired, and in their proper season.
In the studies of the soul of man, generally called the philosophic branches, metaphysics and epistemology should have the smallest, and logic the next least place. Psychology should be taught on the genetic basis of animals and children, and one of its tap-roots should be developed from the love of infancy and youth, than which nothing in all the world is more worthy. If a woman Descartes ever arises, she will put life before theory, and her watchword will be not cogito, ergo sum, [I think, therefore I am] but sum, ergo cogito [I am, therefore I think]. The psychology of sentiments and feelings and intuitions will take precedence of that of pure intellect; ethics will be taught on the basis of the whole series of practical duties and problems, and the theories of the ultimate nature of right or the constitution of conscience will have small place.
Domesticity will be taught by example in some ideal home building by a kind of laboratory method. A nursery with all carefully selected appliances and adjuncts, a dining-room, a kitchen, bedroom, closets, cellars, outhouses, building, its material, the grounds, lawn, shrubbery, hothouse, library, and all the other adjuncts of the hearth will be both exemplified and taught. A general course in pedagogy, especially its history and ideals, another in child study, and finally a course in maternity the last year taught broadly, and not without practical details of nursing, should be comprehensive and culminating. In its largest sense maternity might be the heart of all the higher training of young women.
Applied knowledge will thus be brought to a focus in a department of teaching as one of the specialties of motherhood and not as a vocation apart. The training should aim to develop power of maternity in soul as well as in body, so that home influence may extend on and up through the plastic years of pubescence, and future generations shall not rebel against these influences until they have wrought their perfect work.
The methods throughout should be objective, with copious illustrations by way of object-lessons, apparatus, charts, pictures, diagrams, and lectures, far less book work and recitation, only a limited amount of room study, the function of examination reduced to a minimum, and everything as suggestive and germinal as possible. Hints that are not followed up; information not elaborated into a thin pedagogic sillabub or froth; seed that is sown on the waters with no thought of reaping; faith in a God who does not pay at the end of each week, month, or year, but who always pays abundantly some time; training which does not develop hypertrophied memory-pouches that carry, or creative powers that discover and produce—these are lines on which such an institution should develop. Specialization has its place, but it always hurts a woman’s soul more than a man’s, should always come later, and if there is special capacity it should be trained elsewhere. Unconscious education is a power of which we have yet to learn the full ranges.
In most groups in this series of ideal departments there should be at least one healthful, wise, large-souled, honorable, married and attractive man, and, if possible, several of them. His very presence in an institution for young women gives poise, polarizes the soul, and gives wholesome but long-circuited tension at root no doubt sexual, but all unconsciously so. This mentor should not be more father than brother, though he should combine the best of each, but should add another element. He need not be a doctor, a clergyman, or even a great scholar, but should be accessible for confidential conferences even though intimate. He should know the soul of the adolescent girl and how to prescribe; he should be wise and fruitful in advice, but especially should be to all a source of contagion and inspiration for poise and courage even though religious or medical problems be involved. But even if he lack all these latter qualities, though he so poised that impulsive girls can turn their hearts inside out in his presence and perhaps even weep on his shoulder, the presence of such a being, though a complete realization of this ideal could be only remotely approximated, would be the center of an atmosphere most wholesomely tonic.
In these all too meager outlines I have sketched a humanistic and liberal education and have refrained from all details and special curriculization. Many of the above features I believe would be as helpful for boys as for girls, but woman has here an opportunity to resume her exalted and supreme position, to be the first in this higher field, to lead man and pay her debt to his educational institutions, by resuming her crown. The ideal institutions, however, for the two will always be radically and probably always increasingly divergent.
As a psychologist, penetrated with the growing sense of the predominance of the heart over the mere intellect, I believe myself not alone in desiring to make a tender declaration of being more and more passionately in love with woman as I conceive she came from the hand of God. I keenly envy my Catholic friends their Maryolatry. Who ever asked if the Holy Mother, whom the wise men adored, knew the astronomy of the Chaldees or had studied Egyptian or Babylonian, or even whether she knew how to read or write her own tongue, and who has ever thought of caring? We can not conceive that she bemoaned any limitations of her sex, but she has been an object of adoration all these centuries because she glorified womanhood by being more generic, nearer the race, and richer in love, pity, unselfish devotion and intuition than man. The glorified madonna ideal shows us how much more whole and holy it is to be a woman than to be artist, orator, professor, or expert, and suggests to our own sex that to be a man is larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, general, president, or millionaire.
But with all this love and hunger in my heart, I can not help sharing in the growing fear that modern woman, at least in more ways and places than one, is in danger of declining from her orbit; that she is coming to lack just confidence and pride in her sex as such, and is just now in danger of lapsing to mannish ways, methods, and ideals, until her original divinity may become obscured. But, if our worship at her shrine is with a love and adoration a little qualified and unsteady, we have a fixed and abiding faith without which we should have no resource against pessimism for the future of our race, that she will ere long evolve a sphere of life and even education which fits her needs as well as, if not better than those of man fit his.
Meanwhile, if the eternally womanly seems somewhat less divine, we can turn with unabated faith to the eternally childish, the best of which in each are so closely related. The oracles of infancy and childhood will never fail. Distracted as we are in the maze of new sciences, skills, ideals, knowledges that we can not fully coördinate by our logic or curriculize by our pedagogy; confused between the claims of old and new methods; needing desperately, for survival as a nation and a race, some clue to thrid the mazes of the manifold modern cultures, we have now at least one source to which we can turn—we have found the only magnet in all the universe that points steadfastly to the undiscovered pole of human destiny. We know what can and will ultimately coördinate in the generic, which is larger than the logical order, all that is worth knowing, teaching, or doing by the best methods, that will save us from misfits and the waste ineffable of premature and belated knowledge, and that is in the interests and line of normal development in the child in our midst that must henceforth ever lead us which epitomizes in its development all the stages, human and prehuman; that is the proper object of all that strange new love of everything that is naive, spontaneous, and unsophisticated in human nature. The heart and soul of growing childhood is the criterion by which we judge the larger heart and soul of mature womanhood; and these are ultimately the only guide into the heart of the new education which is to be, when the school becomes what Melanchthon said it must be—a true workshop of the Holy Ghost—and what the new psychology, when it rises to the heights of prophecy, foresees as the true paradise of restored intuitive human nature.
[Footnote 1: David Starr Jordan: The Higher Education of Women.
Popular Science Monthly, December, 1902, vol. 62, pp. 97-107. See also
my article on this subject in Munsey’s Magazine, February, 1906, and
President Jordan’s reply in the March number, 1906.]
[Footnote 2: Coeducation. A series of essays by various authors, edited by Alice Woods, with an introduction by M.E. Sadler. Longmans, Green and Co., London 1903, p. 148 et seq.]
[Footnote 3: The Evolution of Ideals. W.G. Chambers, Pedagogical
Seminary, March, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 101-143. Also, B.E. Warner: The
Young Woman in Modern Life. Dodd, Mead & Co., New York, 1903, p. 218.]
[Footnote 4: The Psychology of Woman. Translated by G.A. Etchison.
Richards, London, 1899.]
[Footnote 5: Physical Development of Women and Children. By Miss M.E.
Allen. American Association for Physical Education., April, 1890.]
[Footnote 6: A Review of the Higher Education of Women. Forum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp 25-40. See also G. von Bunge: Die zunehmende Unfähigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu stillen. München Reinhardt, 1903, 3d ed. Also President Harper’s Decennial Report, pp. xciv-cxi.]
[Footnote 7: Physical Hindrances to Teaching Girls, by Charlotte W.
Porter. Forum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp. 41-49.]
[Footnote 8: Abbotsholme, 1889-1899: or Ten Years’ Work in an
Educational Laboratory, by Cecil Reddie, G. Allen London, 1900.]
[Footnote 9: See L’Ecole des Roches, a school of the Twentieth Century, by T.R. Croswell. Pedagogical Seminary, December, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 479-491.]
[Footnote 10: See Chapter VI.]
Extract from Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene, by G. Stanley Hall
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