The Education of American Girls
by Anna C. Brackett · English · Gutenberg #23312 · 682,136 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Education of American Girls
Author: Anna C. Brackett
Release date: November 3, 2007 [eBook #23312]
Language: English
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THE
EDUCATION
OF
AMERICAN GIRLS.
CONSIDERED IN A SERIES OF
ESSAYS.
EDITED BY
ANNA C. BRACKETT.
"The time has arrived, when like huntsmen, we should surround the
cover, and look sharp that justice does not slip away and pass
out of sight and get lost; for there can be no doubt that we are
in the right direction. Only try and get a sight of her, and if
you come within view first, let me know."--PLATO REP. BOOK IV.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK:
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS,
FOURTH AVENUE AND TWENTY-THIRD STREET.
1874.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by G. P.
PUTNAM'S SONS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at
Washington, D. C.
LANGE, LITTLE & CO., PRINTERS, ELECTROTYPERS AND STEREOTYPERS, 108 TO
114 WOOSTER STREET, N. Y.
TO THE
SCHOOL-GIRLS AND COLLEGE-GIRLS
OF
AMERICA,
BECAUSE WE BELIEVE THAT THEIR IDEALS ARE HIGH AND THAT
THEY HAVE STRENGTH TO MAKE THEM REAL,
This Book is Dedicated
BY THE
WOMEN WHO, IN THE INTERVALS SNATCHED FROM DAILY LABOR,
HAVE WRITTEN IT FOR THEIR SAKES.
PREFACE.
The Table of Contents sufficiently indicates the purpose and aim of this
book. The essays are the thoughts of American women, of wide and varied
experience, both professional and otherwise; no one writer being
responsible for the work of another. The connecting link is the common
interest. Some of the names need no introduction. The author of Essay
IV. has had an unusually long and varied experience in the education and
care of Western girls, in schools and colleges. The author of the essay
on English Girls is a graduate of Antioch, has taught for many years in
different sections of this country, and has had unusual opportunities,
for several years, of observing English methods and results.
The essays on the first four institutions, whose names they bear, come
with the official sanction of the presiding officers of those
institutions, who vouch for the correctness of the statements. Of these,
VII. is by a member of the present Senior Class of the University, who
has instituted very exact personal inquiries among the women-students.
The author of VIII. is the librarian of Mt. Holyoke Seminary. The writer
of the report from Oberlin is a graduate--a teacher of wide experience,
and has been for three or four years the Principal of the Ladies'
Department of the college. The resident physician at Vassar is too well
known as such, to need any introduction.
There are many other institutions whose statistics would be equally
valuable, such, for instance, as the Northwestern University of
Illinois, which has not only opened its doors to girl-students, but has
placed women on the Board of Trustees, and in the Faculty.
From Antioch, which we desired to have fully represented, we have been
disappointed in obtaining statistics, which may, however, hereafter be
embodied in a second edition. In place thereof, we give the brief
statement of facts found under the name of the institution, supplied by
a friend.
With reference to my own part of the volume, if the words on "Physical
Education" far outnumber those on the "Culture of the Intellect," and
the "Culture of the Will," it can only be said that the American nation
are far more liable to overlook the former than the latter two, and that
the number of pages covered is by no means to be taken as an index of
the relative importance of the divisions in themselves. Of the
imperfection of all three, no one can be more conscious than their
author. The subject is too large for any such partial treatment.
To friends, medical, clerical, and unprofessional, who have kindly
given me the benefit of their criticism on different parts of the
introductory essay, my thanks are due. Especially do I recognize my
obligation to Dr. W. Gill Wylie, of this city, whose line of study and
practice has made his criticism of great value.
I cannot refrain from adding that I am fully aware of the one-sided
nature of the training acquired in the profession of teaching.
Civilization, implying, as it does, division of labor, necessarily
renders all persons more or less one-sided. In the teaching profession,
the voluntary holding of the mind for many hours of each day in the
position required for the work of educating uneducated minds, the
constant effort to state facts clearly, distinctly, and freed from
unnecessary details, almost universally induce a straightforwardness of
speech, which savors, to others who are not immature, of brusqueness and
positiveness, if it may not deserve the harsher names of asperity and
arrogance. It is not these in essence, though it appear to be so, and
thus teachers often give offense and excite opposition when these
results are farthest from their intention. In the case of these essays,
this professional tendency may also have been aggravated by the
circumstances under which they have been written, the only hours
available for the purpose having been the last three evening hours of
days whose freshness was claimed by actual teaching, and the morning
hours of a short vacation.
I do not offer these explanations as an apology, simply as an
explanation. No apology has the power to make good a failure in
courtesy. If passages failing in this be discovered, it will be cause
for gratitude and not for offense if they are pointed out.
The spirit which has prompted the severe labor has been that which seeks
for the Truth, and endeavors to express it, in hopes that more perfect
statements may be elicited.
With these words, I submit the result to the intelligent women of
America, asking only that the screen of the honest purpose may be
interposed between the reader and any glaring faults of manner or
expression.
ANNA C. BRACKETT.
117 East 36th street, New York City,
January, 1874.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I. Education of American Girls _Anna C. Brackett._ 11
II. A Mother's Thought _Edna D. Cheney._ 117
III. The Other Side _Caroline H. Dall._ 147
IV. Effects of Mental Growth _Lucinda H. Stone._ 173
V. Girls and Women in England and America. _Mary E. Beedy._ 211
VI. Mental Action and Physical Health. _Mary Putnam Jacobi, M.D._ 255
VII. Michigan University _Sarah Dix Hamlin._ 307
VIII. Mount Holyoke Seminary _Mary O. Nutting._ 318
IX. Oberlin College _Adelia A. F. Johnston._ 329
X. Vassar College. _Alida C. Avery, M.D._ 346
XI. Antioch College " " 362
XII. Letter from a German Woman _Mrs. Ogden N. Rood._ 363
XIII. Review of "Sex in Education." _Editor._ 368
XIV. Appendix. 392
"Die Weltgeschichte ist der Fortschritt in das Bewusstseyn der
Freiheit."--HEGEL.
THE EDUCATION
OF
AMERICAN GIRLS.
"Who educates a woman, educates a race."
THE
EDUCATION OF AMERICAN
GIRLS.
There seems to be at present no subject more capable of exciting and
holding attention among thoughtful people in America, than the question
of the Education of Girls. We may answer it as we will, we may refuse to
answer it, but it will not be postponed, and it will be heard; and until
it is answered on more rational grounds than that of previous custom, or
of preconceived opinion, it may be expected to present itself at every
turn, to crop out of every stratum of civilized thought. Nor is woman to
blame if the question of her education occupies so much attention. The
demands made are not hers--the continual agitation is not primarily of
her creating. It is simply the tendency of the age, of which it is only
the index. It would be as much out of place to blame the weights of a
clock for the moving of the hands, while, acted upon by an unseen, but
constant force, they descend slowly but steadily towards the earth.
That this is true, is attested by the widely-spread discussion and the
contemporaneous attempts at reform in widely-separated countries. While
the women in America are striving for a more complete development of
their powers, the English women are, in their own way, and quite
independently, forcing their right at least to be examined if not to be
taught, and the Russian women are asserting that the one object toward
which they will bend all their efforts of reform is "the securing of a
solid education from the foundation up." When the water in the Scotch
lakes rises and falls, as the quay in Lisbon sinks, we know that the
cause of both must lie far below, and be independent of either locality.
The agitation of itself is wearisome, but its existence proves that it
must be quieted, and it can be so quieted only by a rational solution,
for every irrational decision, being from its nature self-contradictory,
has for its chief mission to destroy itself. As long as it continues, we
may be sure that the true solution has not been attained, and for our
hope we may remember that we
"have seen all winter long the thorn
First show itself intractable and fierce,
And after, bear the rose upon its top."
We, however, are chiefly concerned with the education of our own girls,
of girls in America. Born and bred in a continent separated by miles of
ocean from the traditions of Europe, they may not unnaturally be
expected to be of a peculiar type. They live under peculiar conditions
of descent, of climate, of government, and are hence very different from
their European sisters. No testimony is more concurrent than that of
observant foreigners on this point. More nervous, more sensitive, more
rapidly developed in thinking power, they scarcely need to be stimulated
so much as restrained; while, born of mixed races, and reared in this
grand meeting-ground of all nations, they gain at home, in some degree,
that breadth which can be attained in other countries only by travel.
Our girls are more frank in their manners, but we nowhere find girls so
capable of teaching intrusion and impertinence their proper places, and
they combine the French nerve and force with the Teutonic simplicity and
truthfulness. Less accustomed to leading-strings, they walk more firmly
on their own feet, and, breathing in the universal spirit of free
inquiry, they are less in danger of becoming unreasonable and
capricious.
Such is the material, physical and mental, which we have to fashion into
womanhood by means of education. But is it not manifest in the outset,
that no system based on European life can be adequate to the solution of
such a problem? Our American girls, if treated as it is perfectly
correct to treat French or German girls, are thwarted and perverted into
something which has all the faults of the German and French girl,
without her excellencies. Our girls will not blindly obey what seem to
them arbitrary rules, and we can rule them only by winning their
conviction. In other words, they will rule themselves, and it therefore
behooves us to see that they are so educated that they shall do this
wisely. They are not continually under the eye of a guardian. They are
left to themselves to a degree which would be deemed in other countries
impracticable and dangerous. We cannot follow them everywhere, and
therefore, more than in any other country must we educate them, so that
they will follow and rule themselves. But no platform of premise and
conclusion, however logical and exact, is broad enough to place under an
uneducated mind. Nothing deserving the name of conviction can have a
place in such. Prejudices, notions, prescriptive rules, may exist there,
but these are not sufficient as guides of conduct.
Education, of course, signifies, as a glance at the etymology of the
word shows us, a development--an unfolding of innate capacities. In its
process it is the gradual transition from a state of entire dependence,
as at birth, to a state of independence, as in adult life. Being a
general term, it includes all the faculties of the human being, those of
his mortal, and of his immortal part. It is a training, as well of the
continually changing body, which he only borrows for temporary use from
material nature, and whose final separation is its destruction, as of
the changeless essence in which consists his identity, and which, from
its very nature, is necessarily immortal. The education of a girl is
properly said to be finished when the pupil has attained a completely
fashioned will, which will know how to control and direct her among the
exigencies of life, mental power to judge and care for herself in every
way, and a perfectly developed body. However true it may be, that life
itself, by means of daily exigencies, will shape the Will into habits,
will develop to some extent the intelligence, and that the forces of
nature will fashion the body into maturity; we apply the term Education
only to the voluntary training of one human being who is undeveloped, by
another who is developed, and it is in this sense alone that the process
can concern us. For convenience, then, the subject will be considered
under three main heads, corresponding to the triple statement made
above.
Especially is it desirable to place all that one may have to say of the
education of girls in America on some proved, rational basis, for in no
country is the work of education carried on in so purely empirical a
way. We are deeply impressed with its necessity; we are eager in our
efforts, but we are always in the condition of one "whom too great
eagerness bewilders." We are ready to drift in any direction on the
subject. We adopt every new idea that presents itself. We recognize our
errors in one direction, and in our efforts to prevent those we fall
into quite as dangerous ones on the other side. More than in any other
country, then, it were well for us to follow in the paths already laid
out by the thinkers of Germany. I shall, therefore, make no apology for
using as guide the main divisions of the great philosophers of that
nation, who alone, in modern times, have made for Education a place
among the sciences. Truth is of no country, but belongs to whoever can
comprehend it.
Nor do I apologize for speaking of what may be called small things nor
for dealing with minor details. "When the fame of Heraclitus was
celebrated throughout Greece, there were certain persons that had a
curiosity to see so great a man. They came, and as it happened, found
him warming himself in a kitchen. The meanness of the place occasioned
them to stop, upon which the philosopher thus accosted them: 'Enter,'
said he, 'boldly, for here too there are gods!'" Following so ancient
and wise an authority, I also say to myself in speaking of these things
which seem small and mean: Enter boldly, for here too there are gods;
nay, perchance we shall thereby enter the very temple of the goddess
Hygeia herself.
PHYSICAL EDUCATION,
OR,
THE CULTURE OF THE BODY.
"Hæc ante exitium primis dant signa diebus."--Virgil.
"Now my belief is--and this is a matter upon which I should like
to have your opinion, but my own belief is--not that the good
body improves the soul, but that the good soul improves the body.
What do you say?"--PLATO, REP. BOOK III.
If we could literally translate the German word _Fertigkeiten_ into
Readinesses, and use it as a good English word, we should then have a
term under which to group many arts of which a fully educated woman
should have some knowledge--I mean cooking, sewing, sweeping, dusting,
etc. When a woman is mistress of these, she is called _capable_, that
good old word, heard oftener in New England than elsewhere, which
carries with it a sweet savor of comfort and rest. Some knowledge of
these should undoubtedly constitute a part of the education of our
girls; but the "how much" is a quantity which varies very materially as
the years go by. For instance, the art of knitting stockings was
considered in the days of our grandmothers one to which much time must
be devoted, and those of us who were born in New England doubtless well
recollect the time when, to the music of the tall old kitchen clock, we
slowly, laboriously and yet triumphantly, "bound off" our first heel, or
"narrowed off" our first toe.
But weaving machines can do this work now with far greater precision;
and while stockings are so good and so cheap, is it worth while for our
girls to spend long hours in the slow process of looping stitches into
each other? Would not the same time be better spent in the open air and
the sunshine, than in-doors, with cramped fingers and bent back over the
knitting-needles?
Of Sewing, nearly the same might be said, since the invention of
machines for the purpose. Sewing is a fine art, and those of us who can
boast of being neat seamstresses do confess to a certain degree of pride
in the boast. But the satisfaction arises from the well-doing, and not
from the fact that it is Sewing well done; for anything well and
thoroughly done, even if it be only boot-blacking on a street corner, or
throwing paper torpedoes in a theatre orchestra to imitate the crack of
a whip in the "Postilion Galop," gives to its doer the same sense of
self-satisfaction. It would be folly now, as it may have been in old
times, for our girls to spend their hours and try their eyes over
back-stitching for collars, etc., when any one out of a hundred cheap
machines can do it not only in less time but far better, and the money
which could be saved in many ways, by wisdom in housekeeping and caring
for the health of children, would buy a machine for every family. This
matter of stitching being done for us, then, we may say that the other
varieties of sewing required are very few: "sewing over-and-over," or
"top-stitching" as the Irish call it, hemming, button sewing,
button-hole making, and gathering. Indeed, hemming, including felling,
might be also omitted, as, with a very few exceptions, hems and fells
are also handed over to the rapid machine; and "over-casting" is but a
variety of "top-stitching." There are then only four things which a
girl really needs to be taught to do, so far as the mere manual facility
goes--"to sew over-and-over;" to put on a button; to gather, including
"stroking" or "laying," and to make a button-hole. Does it not seem as
if an intelligent girl of fourteen or fifteen could be taught these in
twelve lessons of one hour each? Only practice can give rapidity and
perfection; but at the age mentioned, the girl's hand has been pretty
thoroughly educated to obey her will, and but very little time is needed
to turn the acquired control into this peculiar activity, while, with
the untrained muscles of the little child, much more time is required
and much fretfulness engendered, born of the confined position and the
almost insuperable difficulty of the achievement.
Above the mere manual labor, however, there comes another work which
always has to be done for the child, and is therefore of no educational
value for her: I mean the "fitting" and "basting." They cannot be
intrusted to the child, for the simple reason that they involve not
merely manual dexterity, but also an exercise of the judgment, which in
the child has not yet become sufficiently developed. But when the girl
has lived fourteen years, we will say, and has been trained in other
ways into habits of neatness and order, she has also acquired judgment
enough for the purpose, and needs only a few words of direction. The
sewing of bands to gathers, the covering of cord, the cording of neck or
belt, the arrangement of two edges for felling, the putting on of
bindings, belong, so to speak, to the syntax of the art of sewing, and
come under this division, which must, perforce, be left till maturer
years than those of childhood. There is still a sphere above this, the
three corresponding exactly to apprenticeship, journeymanship and
mastership, in learning a trade. The third and last sphere is that of
"cutting," and this demands simply and only, judgment and caution. There
are a few general statements which must be given, as, for instance, "the
right way of the cloth," in which the parts of the garment should be
cut, etc.; but these being once learned--and a lesson of one hour would
be a large allowance for this purpose--the good cutter is the one who
has the most exact eye for measurement--trained already in school by
drawing, writing, etc.--the best power of calculation--trained by
arithmetic, algebra, etc.--and the best observation and
judgment--trained by every study she has pursued under a good teacher.
As to sewing, considered as a physical exercise, it may almost be
pronounced bad in its very nature; considered as a mental exercise, in
its higher spheres, it is excellent, because it calls for the activity
of thought; but after the cutting and fitting are done, it is
undoubtedly bad, leaving the mind free to wander wherever it will. The
constant, mechanical drawing through of the needle, like the listening
to a very dull address, seems to induce a kind of morbid intellectual
acuteness, or nervousness. If the inner thought is entirely serene and
happy, this may do no harm; but if it is not, if there is any internal
annoyance or grief, the mind turns it over and over, till, like a
snow-ball, it grows to a mountainous mass, and too heavy to be borne
with patience. I think many women will testify, from a woman's
experience, that there are times when an afternoon spent in sewing gives
some idea of incipient insanity. This lengthy discussion of the woman's
art of sewing can only be excused on the ground that it touches the
question of physical and mental health. As a means of support, the
needle can hardly be spoken of now.
As to Cooking, the same in substance might be said. It is perhaps a
little more mechanical in its nature, though of that I am not positive;
but if a girl is educated into a full development of what is known as
common sense, she can turn that common sense in this direction as well
as in any other, if the necessity arises. The parts of cooking which
call for judgment--such, for instance, as whether cake is stiff enough
or not, whether the oven is hot enough, safely to intrust the mixture to
its care, whether the bread is sufficiently risen--require the same kind
of trained senses as that by which the workman in the manufacture of
steel decides as to the precise color and shade at which he must
withdraw it for use. To quote from an English woman:[1] "Cookery is not
a branch of general education for women or for men, but for technical
instruction for those who are to follow the profession of cookery; and
those who attempt to make it a branch of study for women generally, will
be but helping to waste time and money, and adding to that sort of
amateur tinkering in domestic work which is one of the principal causes
of the inefficiency of our domestic servants * * * The intellectual and
moral habits necessary to form a good cook and housekeeper are
thoughtfulness, method, delicacy and accuracy of perception, good
judgment, and the power of readily adapting means to ends, which, with
Americans, is termed 'faculty,' and with Englishmen bears the homelier
name of 'handiness.' Morally, they are conscientiousness, command of
temper, industry and perseverance; and these are the very qualities a
good school education must develop and cultivate. The object of such an
education is not to put into the pupils so much History, Geography,
French or Science, but, through these studies, to draw out their
intelligence, train them to observe facts correctly, and draw accurate
inferences from their observation, which constitutes good judgment, and
teach them to think, and to apply thought easily to new forms of
knowledge. Morally, the discipline of a good school tends directly to
form the habits I mentioned above. The pupils are trained to steady
industry and perseverance, to scorn dishonest work, and to control
temper. The girls who leave school so trained, though they may know
nothing of cooking or housekeeping, will become infinitely better cooks
and housekeepers, as soon as they have a motive for doing so, than the
uneducated woman, who has learned only the technical rules of her
craft."
Every girl ought certainly also to know how to drive a nail, to put in
and take out a screw, and to do various other things of the same kind,
as well as to sweep and to dust; but of all these "readinesses," if I
may be permitted the word, the same thing may be said. I have spoken of
them under Physical education, as their most appropriate place.
Passing now to the more definite consideration of Physical education, it
will be convenient to consider this division of the subject under three
heads, as I have to speak of
1. Repair,
2. Exercise,
3. Sexual Education.
REPAIR.
All parts of the body are, of course, as long as life exists, in a state
of continual wear, old cells being constantly broken down, and new ones
substituted in their places. When the Apostle exclaimed, "I die daily,"
he uttered an important physiological as well as a spiritual truth;
though, if he had said, "I die every instant," he would have expressed
it more exactly. It is only by continual death that we live at all. But
continual death calls for continual creation, the continual destruction
for continual repair, and this is rendered possible by means of food and
sleep. Clothing, too, properly belongs under this division; for, were it
not for this, the heat of the body would often be carried off faster
than it could be generated, and the destructive process would outstrip
the reconstructive. Moreover, the clothing too frequently interferes
with the normal functions of the most important repairing organs, and
its consideration, therefore, must constitute the third branch of our
inquiry. The division _Repair_, then, will embrace a consideration of
a. Food,
b. Sleep,
c. Clothing.
_Food._--The kind and quantity of food must obviously vary with age,
temperament, and the season. But three general rules may be laid down as
of prime importance: the meals should be regular in their occurrence;
they should be sufficiently near together to prevent great hunger, and
absolutely nothing should be taken between them. An exception may,
however, be safely made to this last rule, with regard to young
children, in this wise, making a rule which I have known as established
in families. "If the children are hungry enough to eat dry bread, they
can have as much as they want at any time; if they are not, they are far
better off without anything." These are the plainest rules of
Physiology, and yet how few of the girls around us are made to follow
them! Nothing is more sure to produce a disordered digestion, than the
habit of irregular eating or drinking. If possible, the growing girl
should have her dinner in the middle of the day. The exigencies of city
life make this arrangement in some cases inconvenient, and yet
inconvenience is less often than is popularly supposed synonymous with
impracticability. If this cannot be done, and luncheons must be carried
to school, the filling of the lunch-basket should never be left, except
under exact directions, to the kind-hearted servant, or to the girl
herself; and she should under no circumstances be allowed to buy her
luncheon each day of the baker, or the confectioner, a usual practice
twenty years ago of the girls in Boston private schools.
There are children and young girls who are said to have cravings for
certain kinds of food, not particularly nutritious, but in ninety-nine
per cent of these cases the cause of the morbid appetite can be found in
the want of proper direction in childhood. The fact is, that _the
formation of a healthy appetite is properly a subject of education_. The
physical taste of the little girl needs rational direction as well as
her mental taste, though mothers too often do not recognize the fact. It
would seem almost like an insult to the intelligence of my readers, to
say, that warm bread of whatever kind, pastry, confectionery, nuts, and
raisins, should form no part of a girl's diet; did we not every day, not
only in restaurants and hotels, but at private tables, see our girls fed
upon these articles.
The German child, in the steady German climate, may drink perhaps with
impunity, beer, wine, tea and coffee; but to our American girls, with
their nervous systems stung into undue activity by the extremes of our
climate, and the often unavoidable conditions of American society, these
should all be unknown drinks. The time will come soon enough, when the
demands of adult life will create a necessity for these indispensable
accompaniments of civilization; but before the time when the girl enters
upon the active duties of a woman, they only stimulate to debilitate.
It cannot be too often repeated, that the appetite and the taste for
certain kinds of food are, to a greater degree than is usually
acknowledged, merely the results of education; and the mother who sees
her daughter pale and sickly, and falling gradually under the dominion
of dyspepsia, in any of its multitudinous forms or results, and who
seeks the physician's aid, has too often only her own neglect to blame,
when the medicines fail to cure. From the food is manufactured the
blood; from the blood all parts of the living tissue of every organ; not
only bone and muscle cells, but nerve cells are built up from it, and if
the blood be not of the best quality, either from the fact that the food
was not of proper material or properly digested, not only the digestive
organs, but the whole system, will be weak. Moreover, those organs which
await for their perfect development a later time than the others will be
most apt to suffer from the result of long-established habits, and it is
as true of the human body as of a chain, that no matter where the strain
comes, it will break at its weakest part. The truth of what is here
stated may be illustrated by the teeth, which are formed at different
periods of life. Many have a perfect set of what are known as first
teeth; but in too many children in our American homes, the second teeth
make their first appearance in a state of incipient decay, while it has
become almost proverbial, that the wisdom teeth are of no use, except to
the dentist. Mothers have only to consult easily procured books to learn
the kinds of food most easily digestible, and most nourishing. That they
do not do so, results from the seeming general belief, that this matter
of eating will take care of itself, and that it does not come within the
province of education. The whole matter lies in the hands of women. The
physician can do but little, because he can know but little. It is the
intelligent women of America who must realize the evil, and must right
the wrong, if we would see our girls what we most earnestly desire them
to be--perfectly healthy and well developed.
Again, the cure of many diseases, especially those which are prevalent
in the summer months, belongs more to the women of the household than to
the physician. They alone can check the evil at its commencement. Every
educated woman ought to know, for instance, that cracked wheat and
hominy, oat-meal, corn-bread, and Graham bread, should not, as a general
rule, be made the staple of diet in case of what is popularly known as
"summer complaint"; and yet, how few girls seem to have any idea, when
they are thus sick, that it is a matter of the least consequence what
they eat, or that they ought not to make their breakfast of Boston brown
bread; and by how few of our girls is it considered a matter of any
moment that the opposite trouble exists for days. Ought they not to be
educated to know that they can devise no surer way of poisoning the
whole system, and then of straining all the contiguous organs, than by
wilful neglect in this direction? When some facts are obvious, and some
are latent, the blame, if trouble exists, is not unnaturally laid on the
visible facts. It is evident to the physician that the girl has attended
school. It is not so evident that, since her earliest childhood, she has
been fed on improper food, at irregular hours, and that the processes by
which the poisonous dead matter is removed from the system, have been
irregularly carried on. His questions put on these topics are put in a
general way, and answered in the same, with, perhaps, a worse than
foolish mock-modesty to prompt the reply. He does the best that he can,
but he cannot help stumbling, if he is required to walk in the dark.
This false shame of which I speak, on this matter, seems to be a folly
peculiarly American, and I am quite sure that it is not so common now as
it was twenty years ago, though there are still many American women who
would choose to run the risk of making themselves sick rather than to
tread the folly out under a pure womanly scorn. This is also a matter
which belongs to education.
One great trouble with our American girls, and one which can be remedied
by us, though we cannot remedy the climate, is not that their brains are
overworked, but that their bodies generally, including brain, are
underfed. I do not mean that they do not eat enough in bulk, though that
is often the case, but that they do not take in enough of the chemical
elements which they must have to build up the system. Their food is not
sufficiently nutritious, and the energy of the digestive organs is
wasted in working upon material which, if it does not irritate and
inflame, is at least of no economic value, and is simply rejected by the
system; or, worse still, in default of better, it is absorbed, and the
whole blood becomes poisoned. Sometimes our girls do not eat often
enough. For instance, a girl who, after tea, has been obliged to employ
her brain in unusually hard work, might probably be helped by eating
some nourishing food before sleep. If she do not, the result will not
infrequently be that she will awake tired and languid; she will sit idly
at the breakfast table, play with her knife and fork, and feel only
disgust at the food provided. She may soon suffer from, if she does not
complain of, back-ache and other attendant troubles, the simple result
of weakness. It is only Micawber's old statement over again: "Annual
income, twenty pounds, annual expenditure, twenty pounds, ought, and
six; result--Misery."
After a long course of this kind, the physician is summoned, and the
girl is forbidden to study. But it seldom occurs to any one that if
5 - 8 = -3, the two may be made equal just as easily by adding the three
to the five as by subtracting it from the eight, _i.e._, although we, as
a nation, are supposed to be, at least, more conversant with arithmetic
than with any branch of school study, though we do know that 8 > 5, we
do not see that 5 + 3 = 8, and so we try to cancel the offending -3 by
diminishing the 8. But would not the other process be quite as rational?
Physical life is only a simple balance of forces, the expenditure and
nourishment corresponding exactly to demand and supply in the Science of
Political Economy.[2] They tend continually to level themselves. Have we
not the right to decide in which way the leveling shall be
effected--the equation be formed? This is a simple solution of the
difficulty. I suggest that this experiment be tried: let the girl study
her extra time in the evening, if she desires, only being cautious that
she do not infringe upon her sleep hours; then give her a supper of
bread and butter and cold meat, and send her to bed. If her digestive
organs are in good state, she will very possibly sleep a sound and
dreamless sleep, and rise refreshed in the morning, with a good appetite
for her breakfast. By this simple hygienic remedy, aching backs may not
only be prevented, they may be gradually cured. I am stating actual
facts. If the evening be spent in conversation, or mere lounging over
books, the supper will not be needed, and will prove, if taken, only a
burden; but if, as has already been said, it be spent in actual
brain-work, the tremendous and unusual strain on the whole nervous
system, occasioned by the destruction of nerve-cells, must be made good,
or those organs most intimately connected with the nervous system and
the sources of life, will be sure to suffer. It must, however, be
repeated here, if we would secure the good results desired, that the
supper must be of _nourishing_, not of stimulating food.
Even the destruction, through exercise, of the inferior muscle-cells
demands food before sleeping. It is no merely fashionable custom which
calls the dancers at an evening entertainment to the loaded
supper-table, as those of my readers who have attended the so-called
cold-water Sociables will bear me witness. It may be seriously
questioned whether the regulation which forbade any refreshment except
cold water was not, like many other unthinking, economical plans, really
no economy at all. Instead of one pantry's furnishing food to the
famished dancers, this was furnished for each one at home, from her own
mother's private stores, and as the members of the Sociables met at each
other's houses in order, the total result of expenditure to each family,
at the close of the winter, was probably the same as it would have been,
had each family furnished, on one evening, a moderate entertainment of
the same sort to the bankrupt systems. Fashion is often wiser than we
think her, especially when at parties for the "German" she prescribes a
cup of beef-tea as the regulation refreshment.
A long, rapid walk in the evening, as we all know, will produce the same
effect. We return, and remark that we are hungry, merely meaning that we
have received polite official notice that our physical bank account has
been overdrawn. If we do not pay any attention to this notification, we
shall surely in time be passed from adversary to judge, and from judge
to officer, and finally be cast literally into a prison from which,
unlike some of our city prisons, we shall not escape till we have paid
the uttermost farthing. Then we shall be likely to receive from the
kindly friend whom we summon to visit us, wise and good advice, on the
extravagance of spending so much. But might not the advice be possibly
quite as useful if delivered in this wise: "Why don't you earn more, and
make larger deposits." The force of weakness compels us to stop spending
our muscle cells; the kind friend, as far as is possible, puts a stop to
the expenditure of nerve cells, and draws on the funds derived from the
Cinchona forests of South America and the iron mountains of Missouri, to
make new deposits on our account; and when the matter is thus doubly
settled for us by nature and science, we go on our way rejoicing, only
to repeat the same insane folly. But it is not good for one's credit to
overdraw too frequently her bank account; and there may come a time when
suspension means bankruptcy, and when all the kindness and skill of all
our friends can be no longer of any avail. Is it not our own fault, and
shall we not so educate our girls that they shall not fall into it,
since they comprehend its unreason?
We are undoubtedly creatures of habit; but we oftener apply the word to
our mental and moral than to our physical nature, and wrongly. When
regular and constant demands are made upon any organ of the body, the
body, as it were, falls into the habit of laying in enough force in that
particular department for that particular purpose, as the scientific
steward at Vassar lays in for each day so many pounds of beef or mutton,
because he can rely with certainty on its consumption. If in any case
the demand is, for any reason, slackened, there is a surplus of energy
which must find a vent, or render its possessor very uncomfortable. Need
mothers be reminded of how very troublesome the little girl becomes in a
short school vacation, or during the first days of a long one? Or need
teachers be told that it is only a loss of time in the end, to assign at
the commencement of the September term lessons of the same length as
those which were learned with no difficulty in June? There is a decided
inertia in the bodily functions, and time is required for a sudden
change. Inconvenience in such a case will be sure to arise, unless the
surplus force be instantly directed into other and unobjectionable
channels.
If the reverse takes place, and the demand be suddenly increased, the
result is weakness, debility, and finally disease; though precisely the
same amount of work might have been done, not only with safety but with
positive advantage, provided the increase of the demand had been
gradual.
Is there any country in the world equal to America in the irregularity
and spasmodic nature of the demands which society makes upon its women?
Are there any girls in the world so ready to rush headlong into all
kinds of exercise, mental or physical, which may be recommended to them,
as our American girls? It is a pity that, to balance our greater amount
of fiery energy in the matter of education, we have not a sounder
philosophy.
Once more, physical life is only a balance of forces, as spiritual life
is a series of choices, and the question is not simply how much
intellectual or brain work we are doing. This question cannot justly be
considered apart from the other inquiry, of how much appropriate
material we are supplying for the use of the brain. We cannot judge
whether the amount of force expended be healthful or unhealthful till we
know how much force has been and can be generated. There is undoubtedly
a limit to this last factor in our problem, but if we do not exceed this
limit in our expenditure, it seems unquestionable, that the more brain
work we do, the better will it be for the entire system, and the
stronger will be our health, this being only our power actively to
resist the destructive forces of nature.
The nervous system, at the head of which stands the brain, is
undoubtedly the regent of the monarchy of the body, whose sovereign is
the thinking spirit; and all the organs in a well-regulated body should
be worked in the interest of the organ of thought, as servants for a
wise and watchful master. It seems sometimes as if we were in danger of
forgetting that though "the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need
of thee, nor again, the head to the feet, I have no need of you," there
will come a time when the thinking spirit, grown to full stature, shall
say to all of them, "I have no need any longer of any of you."
The consideration of the subject of Ventilation properly comes under
this division, for pure air is as much food for the body, as meat or
bread. This whole matter, however, seems to be practically not well
understood, if we may judge from the results so far, and no extended
discussion of the means will be in place there. It is sufficient simply
to indicate its immense importance. But that bad air is likely to be a
more active cause of disease in America than elsewhere seems true, for
in no other country are furnaces and closed fire-places in so general
use. Moreover, the women and girls who spend most of their lives in the
house, will be expected to show the evil effects more than the men and
boys, who do not. The practical suggestions on this point are apparent
to every one.
One more thing which the body, to be healthy, demands for food is
Sun-light, that invaluable medicine for all forms of nervous disease,
which Americans, more than any other people, curtain carefully out for
fear of fading carpets and furniture. But what are French moquettes,
brocade, or satin, compared with rosy cheeks, clear complexions, and
steady nerves? If we would only draw up the shades, open the shutters,
and loop the heavy curtains out of the way, or, better still, take them
down altogether, might we not look for a marked improvement in systems
affected by nervous diseases? This want of sun-light may be expected
also, of course, most to affect those who remain within doors, and who,
even in walking, shade themselves with veils and sun-shades from the
life-giving rays of the sun.
_Sleep._--To many of the organs of the body there have been allotted
seasons of comparative quiet and repose, even during the day. If the
rules for food be observed, the stomach, for instance, has, as stomach,
its vacations from labor, by means of which it is enabled to prepare
for, and perform, its regularly recurring work with vigor. Even with
organs where this is not the case, the action is slackened very
materially at times, as in the case of the heart and lungs during sleep.
They must continue to work, though more slowly, and the part of the
nervous system which carries on their involuntary and mechanical action,
has also then a partial relief. But the only rest for the thinking brain
is to be found in normal sleep. From the instant when, in the morning,
we become conscious of the external world, to the instant late at night,
or, it may be, early in the morning, when we pass through the gates of
sleep, out from companionship, into an utter solitude, it never rests
from its work. Whether, by volition, we summon all our intellectual
power to the closest attention, and turn, as it were, the whole energy
of our being into one thought-channel, till the organs of sense become
simply outside appendages which disturb the internal self with no
imported knowledge, or whether, lying idly, as we say, on the sofa, we
let our thoughts wander as they will, thought still goes on. Coming and
going more rapidly than the shortest pendulum can swing, inter-weaving
more subtly than the threads of the most complicated lace under the
fingers of the skillful worker; "trains of thought" pass and repass
through our minds, following, as we mechanically express it, the Laws
of Association. Only in losing consciousness, do we cease to destroy the
brain cells; it is only in sleep that the brain can rest.
But it must be remembered that the matter which is thus destroyed, is,
as Maudsley[3] so finely shows, the very finest result of the creative
life-process, the most precious essence. It is like the oil of roses, to
produce one drop of which, unnumbered roses must be crushed. The force
required to produce a nerve cell is said to be immeasurably greater than
that demanded for a cell of muscle, of bone, or of cartilage. In the
nerve cells, lies not only the directive force of the whole complicated
machinery, but the material with which the creative intelligence must
work. Let us also remember that our waking hours far outnumber those
spent in sleep, and we shall begin to realize the immense importance of
sleep, even to the fully developed organism. But when we add to the mere
labor of repairing the daily waste, the task of construction, which has
to be performed during the years of growth, we shall only deepen the
impression. I believe that every school-girl under eighteen years of
age, and many over that age, should have at least nine hours of
uninterrupted sleep in pure air, and the younger ones need even more.
Much, at least doubtful, advice, has been given on the subject of early
rising. That the system which has, perhaps, taken no food since six in
the evening, should be ready for any amount of labor in the morning
before breakfast, does not seem a rational conclusion, and I believe
that many nervous diseases must be charged to the idea, that there is
virtue in early rising, this implying, generally, either work before
breakfast, or, at best, a shortening of the hours of sleep. It should,
however, be remembered that in some cases, the greater amount of
sun-light obtained by rising with the sun, may, and probably does,
compensate for lack of other food. But when early rising means, as it
often does, rising long before the day begins, this cannot be said, and
sooner or later, the over demand upon the system will make itself felt
when it is too late to remedy the evil.
The habit of _regular_ sleep is also one which should be formed by
education. The child who is accustomed to go to bed at a regular hour,
will also generally form the habit of falling asleep regularly.
If parties for children and young people could be made fashionable under
the name of _matinées_, they might not have bad results; but as they are
at present carried on, they are an unmitigated evil, and one that is
sapping to a fearful degree the nervous force of our girls. What mother
would give her little girl a cup of arsenic, no matter how tearfully or
earnestly she might plead? The very idea of education lies in the
directing of the capricious and irrational instincts, the blind and
ignorant forces, into their proper channels, by the rational and
enlightened will of the educator. But if, instead of this, the unformed
will is made the guide, the very reverse of education is taking place.
It makes no difference to the physical forces, however, whether the
hours lost from sleep be lost at a party or at a lecture, a sermon, or
tableaux for the benefit of foreign missions. Nature makes no
distinctions of motive. "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," is
her motto. If one opposes himself to her laws, the offender, not she,
goes down; and as Sancho Panza very wisely remarks, "Whether the stone
hit the jug, or the jug the stone, it is bad for the jug."
It is remarked by all foreigners, that in America the children rule the
house. This is simply saying that we are, as a general rule, an
uneducated people; which is undoubtedly true. When we learn the immense
importance of sleep to the health of our girls, and when we know that
our rational convictions should lead them, and not their irrational
desires, us, we shall hear less about their breaking down in health as
they grow toward maturity. We shall see fewer pale faces and angular
forms; though they will probably never, while they live in this climate,
acquire the ruddy glow of the Englishwoman or the German, or the rounded
outlines of the nations of Southern Europe.
_Clothing._--With the external form of the dress as to cut, trimming, or
color, this essay has nothing to do. Unless a dress be cut so low in the
neck that it becomes an unhealthful exposure after taking off warmer
clothing, it in no wise concerns this branch of the subject. I wish to
speak only of the underclothing habitually worn by our girls, and its
mode of adjustment; these being, as I believe, the causes of much
exhaustion and disease.
If technical terms, uncomprehended by any class of readers, be used, it
is simply for the sake of brevity; and because, as Kant says,
"completeness must not be sacrificed to popularity," the attainment of
which would be "a didactic triumph, attained only by omitting everything
complicated, and saying only what exists already in the consciousness of
every one."
The two rules for clothing evidently are given when we say, first, that
it should be sufficiently warm to prevent the heat generated by the body
from being too rapidly lost; and second, that it should be sufficiently
loose to allow unimpeded muscular action, whether voluntary or
involuntary. But it is very rare to find either of these rules observed
by girls, and it is also rare to find mothers who are aware that their
daughters are daily violating them.
First, as to the warmth: Every girl who is to be reared in this climate
of extremes and sudden changes should wear shirt and drawers of wool
next her body, and woolen stockings, during at least eight months of the
year.[4] The merino underclothing, so generally worn, is preferable to
cotton or linen, but all-wool flannel is far better; and if trouble is
anticipated from shrinking and fulling, the use of red flannel will
prevent this entirely. I am not speaking of becomingness and grace; I am
speaking of health and conservation of force. Each organism can generate
but a certain amount of vital force, and if a large proportion of this
has to be expended in keeping up the even temperature of the body, a
smaller part than otherwise will go to the carrying on of the other
functions. But relieve the system from the continual drafts made upon
it, resulting from insufficient clothing, and it will be able to assume
duties to which before it found itself inadequate. Some exceptions must
be made to this statement in the case of those to whose skins flannel
proves an irritant--but they are comparatively few; and even in these
cases the flannel could be worn outside, if not inside, of the cotton
or linen underclothing. The mother who will see to it that from her
earliest years the girl is protected, over all parts of her body, by
flannel underclothing, may simply prevent evils which, afterwards, she
and the most skilful physician combined will find themselves unable to
overcome. But the facts are, that, from the earliest days of life, when
the dimpled neck and arms must be admired by visitors, through the days
of childhood, when, dressed during the coldest weather of winter in
linen and white cambric or piqué, with her body unprotected from the
chill, the little girl is led slowly and properly up Fifth Avenue, to
the nights when, heated by dancing, she exposes bare neck, shoulders and
arms to draughts of cool air, she is, as a general rule, never warmly
enough dressed for our climate. I repeat, then, that for proper
protection a girl should always be, during at least eight months of our
year, clothed, body, arms, legs, and feet, in wool; and pass to the
second thought on the subject--_i.e._, clothing with regard to the
mechanical effects of pressure.
We have been continually told that our girls ought not to wear corsets.
It has been well said by some woman, that if a man could succeed in
fashioning a woman exactly as, according to his theories, she ought to
be fashioned, he would not admire her after the work was done; and
though the remark was made only with regard to intellectual education,
it can be well applied to this subject of corsets. If now, at this
present moment, all women were to satisfy this demand, and leave off
their corsets, the very men who entreated them to do so, would at once
entreat them to resume them. The truth is, that it is not the corsets in
themselves that are injurious; they become so only when they are so
tightly drawn that they prevent free inspiration, or when, by their
great pressure, they force the yielding ribs from their normal curve,
compress the lungs, and displace the organs of the abdomen, crowding
them into the pelvis, and thus displacing or bending out of shape the
organs therein contained. Let the girls keep on their corsets, but
instead of the unyielding cotton, linen, or silk braid, let these be
laced by round silk elastic cord. They will then give support where it
is needed, and yet will yield freely to the expansion of the chest,
returning again as the air is expelled, and so preventing discomfort.
This is a very simple expedient, and yet perfectly successful, and the
girl who has tried it for three days will discard the inelastic braid
forever. I say elastic cord, and not ribbon, because the elastic ribbon
is too strong, and does not sufficiently yield.
Girls do not know that they dress too tightly. They will repel
indignantly the idea that they "lace;" and yet, if they be asked to take
a full inhalation, it becomes perfectly evident that the outside
resistance is a very positive element. To prove this, it is only
necessary for them to put on their corsets laced as above described, and
then try to button the dress. It will, in nine hundred and ninety-nine
cases out of a thousand, be found, I think, that the dress, which before
came together without the slightest difficulty, will no longer meet.
There is necessary no other proof that an unnatural pressure has been
habitually used, although, from the very fact that it has been so long
habitual, the girls are entirely unconscious of it. The Chinese women, I
suppose, are not conscious of their compressed feet, and the two cases
are exactly parallel. No dressmaker knows the meaning of the words
"loosely fitting." She is not to be blamed. She looks at her work with
an artistic eye, as a Parisian glove-fitter looks at his, and wrinkles
are the one thing which she spends her life in striving to avoid; and,
as a general thing, she is not a student of Wordsworth to the extent of
assuming as her motto,
"Nor shall she fail to see,
Even in the motions of the storm,
Grace that shall mould the maiden's form
By silent sympathy."
It is not enough to say to the dressmaker, "Make it perfectly easy and
comfortable," and then trust to her judgment that it will be all right.
The only test for a girl's clothing, as to tightness, should be, "Can
you take a good, full breath, and not feel your clothes?" If so, they
are loose enough; if not, let them out, and keep on letting them out
till you can. Nor is there the slightest need that this kind of dressing
involve "dowdiness," or "slouchiness," a characteristic abhorrent to
every true woman. Every woman expresses her character in her dress; and
where "slouchiness" exists, it means something more than comfortable
dressing. It means a lack of neatness and order, a want in the ideas of
suitability. It is sure to manifest itself in other ways, and will not
be prevented by dresses never so tightly fitting.
The next thing to be considered is the place of proper support for the
voluminous clothing below the waist. This gives a certain definite
weight in pounds and ounces larger than is generally supposed, and as a
result of the law of gravitation, it would all fall if the tendency were
not counteracted by a corresponding pressure. This pressure is almost
universally being sustained by our girls at the hips, and it comes just
where the trunk has no longer, except in the spinal column, any bony
support, depending alone on the yielding muscles.
It is idle to assert that the corsets support the dependent weight. In
the old times, when corsets had shoulder-straps, this assertion might
have had a shadow of truth, but now, when they never have them, their
weight must simply be added to the total amount of weight of skirts, to
find the number of pounds of downward pressure. They serve only as a
kind of fender to prevent the tightly tied skirts from cutting into the
muscle, and therefore, conducing to prevent discomfort, only serve to
delude the girl into the belief that they hold up her skirts. This
weight, evidently, should be borne by the shoulders, where the
firmly-jointed skeleton, upheld from below, offers a firm and safe
support. But give a girl shoulder-straps, and she finds the pressure
over so small an area on the shoulders unbearable, and besides, the
process of dressing becomes then a matter of almost as much complication
as the harnessing of a horse, when some inexperienced person has done
the unharnessing. Suspenders, though answering the purpose perfectly for
men, will not answer for women, and even when made especially for them,
are found inconvenient. The girl should wear, over her corsets, an
under-waist, fitted precisely like the waist-lining of a dress as to
seams and "biases," or "darts." It should be made of strong shirting,
neatly corded at neck and "arm-seyes," and finished around the waist by
a binding of the width of an ordinary belt, set up over the waist so as
to have three thicknesses of cloth for buttons. To these buttons, four
or more in number, the skirts should be hung. The weight comes then on
the shoulders, and is evenly distributed there, so that it is not felt.
This statement, of course, implies, that the waists are sufficiently
large. Moreover, which is only an incidental matter, the waist answers
as a corset-cover, and as a dress-protector at the same time, and in the
winter, when dresses cannot be washed, it becomes a matter of necessity
to have something to answer the latter purpose. In the summer, when low
linings are desirable, these waists can, of course, be made low in the
neck. The shoulder-support then becomes narrower, but on the other hand,
the weight of the clothing to be supported is very much less than in the
winter, so that no inconvenience will be found. These waists themselves
can then, if desired, take the place of linings for thin summer dresses,
and if this be done, another incidental advantage will be the greater
ease and nicety with which muslins and calicoes can be "done up." It
should be borne in mind, that within twenty years the weight of the
dress-skirt has been also laid upon the hips. Before that time, our
dress-waists and skirts were made in one. Of late years they have almost
never been so made; that is to say, the shoulders have had, so to speak,
absolutely nothing to do, and the hips and waist, everything. In any
case, skirts should be furnished with buttons, not strings. It is too
easy to draw a string a little tighter than it should be drawn.
Another fashion which our girls have adopted of late years, should be
spoken of. As if they had gone to work to discover the only way in which
pressure could be increased, they have discarded the old fashion of
gartering the stockings, and have buttoned these up by bands of strong
elastic ribbon, to a band placed around the waist. This arrangement, it
seems to me, exhausts all the possibilities of dragging pressure around
the waist, and in this view, it may be looked upon as a negatively
encouraging feature. They have, certainly, in respect to the support of
clothing, done their very worst. They are trying to the full their
powers of endurance, and any change must be for the better.
I was not to speak of external dress, but the skirt of the outside
dress, by the present fashion, must be taken into consideration; and of
its probable weight any skilful person, who has any idea of the weight
of bugles and dry-goods, may make an estimate for himself, though his
estimate will probably fall far short of the truth.[5]
If our girls are to walk the same streets with their brothers, is there
any reason why the soles of their shoes should not be of equal
thickness? And yet no man would think of wearing, at any time, except
for house slippers, soles as thin as those which many of our girls
habitually wear. Boston is much more satisfactory than New York in this
particular, if the contents of the merchant's shelves are a safe index
of the desires of his customers. This is a matter which has been often
spoken of, and yet one which mothers and daughters seem practically to
ignore. Girls should be educated to wear clothing suitable to the time
and place, and then their "habituated instincts" will lead them to
demand and wear shoes of proper thickness.
Enough. It cannot be too often repeated that a girl may call for
anxiety, and often break in health at the time when she develops into a
woman, not because of the special demand for strength made at that time,
but because the demands on the general system for strength have been,
for twelve or fifteen years, greater than the system could supply. It is
not the last straw that breaks the camel's back, but it is all the
straws. The mother who has educated her daughter into a healthy appetite
for food, as to quality and quantity; who has educated her into a
healthy appetite for sleep; who has, through constant watchfulness over
her clothing, assured herself that no undue demands were made upon the
strength of sustaining muscles, and the constructive and repairing power
of the general vital force, has no need of hours of anxiety as to the
girl's health, and will find no critical periods in her life, for the
hours of anxiety have already been represented by minutes of wise and
rational supervision in all the previous years, and need not be spent
over again.
EXERCISE.
Bodily exercise is in one sense a means of repair, inasmuch as it
quickens the circulation and respiration, and makes the whole organism
more active. The old maxim that Exercise strengthens every power must
not be overlooked, as the arm of the rower or the wrist of the confirmed
croquet-player will testify. But it must also be remembered, and this is
a matter of prime importance, that it is only _judicious_ exercise which
gives strength; and by judicious exercise is meant that in which the
parts exercised are not too steadily on the strain, and that which is
regular. For instance, continual standing in one spot is not judicious
exercise for either man or woman, because the muscles whose contraction
is required to maintain the body in an upright position, are kept for
too long a time in a state of action; the continual tension prevents the
free passage of the blood, and the uniformity of the circulation is
destroyed. Continual standing, in the teaching profession at least, has
broken down many a man as well as many a woman. With women, and
especially with growing women, the danger is greater, resulting, of
course, from the greater breadth of the pelvis and the less physical
strength; and any woman who persists in it, simply exhibits an amount of
recklessness which can be cured only by her own experience, and never by
the advice of others.[6] If she had been better educated, she would know
better and act more wisely. Secondly, exercise which is irregular or is
used spasmodically, is not judicious. If, for instance, our girls had
from their earliest childhood and during many months of the year, been
accustomed to skating, no harm would probably result from it. But when,
as was the case some twenty years ago, a sudden fashion sprang up for
this exercise, and girls in all parts of the Northern States insisted
upon learning to skate, with untrained muscles, and to skate for hours
together during the freezing intervals of our uncertain climate, an
immense amount of harm was actually done, the results of which
multitudes of women in Boston and New York are to-day enduring.
There are, it is to be presumed, forms of exercise which are not
judicious from their very nature; but I find myself at a loss to name
any one which girls desire, or in which they indulge, that would
properly fall under this class, unless it be sewing and washing.
Whenever our girls have been injured by physical exercise of muscle or
nerve, it has been, probably, because the exercise taken has been
injudicious in one of the senses above defined. Even with regard to the
stair-climbing, which our modern houses make a necessity, the harm
generally comes from the fact that too many flights are ascended at
once, or that the lifting of the weight of the body through the twenty,
or forty, or sixty feet is too rapidly performed. But long flights of
stairs are a necessity where land is so dear that, though a man may buy
an unlimited extension up and down, he can usually afford to purchase
little on a horizontal plane, and thus, to our city-bred girls, at
least, the necessity of climbing stairs exists from their earliest
attempts at walking, so that stair-climbing may, by my second
limitation, come under the head of judicious exercise. It were, however,
well to inquire whether there are not different sets of muscles called
into requisition in this universal exercise by different individuals,
and whether children should not be so educated in climbing, that they
may lift the unavoidable weight rather by straightening the knee than by
making undue demands, as many do, on other muscles not so well placed
to bear it. It seems to me that there is a great difference in this
respect in different persons. It were also well that architects should
remember that shallow steps may be, and, indeed, generally are, much
more fatiguing than steps of the usual height, for the very reason that
an _unusual_ demand is made, a greater number of volitions or impulses
required, for a given height. A greater width in the step, also, makes
the effort more difficult--partly for the same reason, and partly
because a greater and unusual effort has to be made to throw the body
forward at the same time that it is lifted up.
To Dancing, in itself, no objection can be made. Freed from its almost
inevitable accompaniments of late hours, thin dresses, and irregular
food, it is undoubtedly beneficial. But when we are better educated, so
that we shall appreciate the absolute necessity of a strict and rational
regimen of food, sleep, and clothing for the individual while yet
immature, this matter will be righted, and only then. There is one
additional objection to be urged, however, against parties for young
people, which is not generally spoken of, though we all know practically
that one of the first preparations for an entertainment of this kind
consists in sending at least almost all the chairs and sofas out of the
rooms which are to be used, and the dancing may not do as much harm as
the enforced standing. The woman who has to stand behind the counter, or
behind the bookkeeper's desk, or at her loom in the factory, may,
perhaps, accustom herself in a measure to the daily strain; but the girl
to whom it is an irregular exercise, and who, besides, is probably
over-excited as to her nerves, cannot fail to suffer, though the blame
is not, as a general rule, laid where it belongs.
There is another exercise which has come into vogue within twenty years,
a game against which it is reckoned heresy to speak slightingly--I mean
Croquet--which certainly involves an amount of standing vastly
disproportioned to the amount of exercise which it gives. This, together
with the fact that it is likely to be played during only a few months of
the year, and often on damp ground, and for an unreasonable length of
time, may, perhaps, furnish an apology for wounding so large a number of
feelings as one must wound who has the heart to venture a caution
concerning it. It seems to be peculiarly well described by saying that
it is "the game which tires without exercising." To Skating I have
already referred for the purpose of illustration. It is gravely to be
doubted whether, in our changeable climate, where, moreover, it can be
practiced during only a very few months in the year, it does not do more
harm than good. Horseback riding, rowing, and bowling are very valuable,
provided that they be judiciously used.
But there is one exercise to which no doubt attaches, one which can be
regular, and hence judicious. This is Walking; and the fact that so few
of our girls and women really enjoy it, that so few are capable of
walking four or five miles without fatigue, and that they come in, after
a walk of one mile, jaded and tired, instead of invigorated, points to a
grave error of omission in their education. The walk of the little girl
should be so regular a thing, so much a part of the day's routine, that
she would as soon think of dispensing with her morning bath as of
passing a day without it.[7] Healthy children of three years old, who
are educated to walk regularly, can, as I know by actual careful
observation, walk two miles at once without fatigue, coming in at the
close, brighter and more active than when they set out. This matter of
walking is a matter which, as well as sleep, food and clothing, belongs
to education; and if the girl does not enjoy walking--nay, if she does
not demand it with as sharp an appetite as she has for her food and
sleep, it is generally because she has not been properly and rationally
educated.
If it is said that it is "not natural" for some to like to walk, the
only proper answer to the objection would be that the question whether a
thing is natural or not is not at all pertinent, and involves an entire
misunderstanding of education itself. The very essence of civilization,
of morality, and of religion, consists in the overruling and directing
of the merely natural. By nature, man is not man at all. Only in so far
as by force of spirit he overcomes, rules, and directs the nature in
him, can he lay any claim to manhood. Education, physical, intellectual,
moral or religious, is in its process only this directing of what is
natural for us. Its material is the natural man; its result is the
spiritual man; its process is the rationally-directed transition from
the former to the latter. Between the helpless infant, aimlessly
stretching out its feeble arms, and the well-trained and
fully-developed man; between the mind of the savage who roams the
forest, and the mind of Bacon or Shakespeare; between the brute who
strikes down his wife as he would knock over a stick of wood in his way,
and the physician who stands at his post, tenderly and wisely caring for
the fever-stricken patients in the Memphis hospitals, laying down his
life for strangers; between the man who follows the caprice of this or
that moment, as a desire for present pleasure may suggest, and the
noblest Christian who daily sacrifices his own to the Divine will, there
is but one difference--that of Education. The natural part of any one of
us is, in any significant sense, simply the uneducated part. If a
certain course of action is once recognized as rational, it is
unnecessary to state that it is "not natural," and the formation of
rational _habits_ of body, as of mind, these habits which constitute our
second and better nature, is the very work with which education is
concerned.
There is room, however, for misunderstanding here, and this I must pause
to guard against; I must not be interpreted as saying that all natural
feelings or actions are to be crushed out by a cold, reasoning logic.
But it must be remembered that every virtue has its negative
representative, and that this negative phase is simply and only the same
virtue, but in an uneducated state, and not at all another and different
thing; as, for instance, license is not different in its essence from
self-control--it is only uneducated self-control. Obstinacy is merely
uneducated firmness, and the worst forms of barbarous superstition are
but the outcome of uneducated reverence. The lawlessness and bravado of
our American children and youth, so severely commented upon by
foreigners, are simply an index of the uneducated state of the greatest
amount of directive force that the world has ever seen. A fatal error is
committed in education when this central truth is overlooked, as when
one treats these manifestations as in themselves wrong, instead of
recognizing their value, and bending the energies in their proper
direction. If a missionary should begin his work by destroying in the
mind of the savage all reverence for his own and only gods, he would
have sawed off the branch on which he himself hoped to stand, and it
were wise for him to make his escape from the country as soon as
possible.
SEXUAL EDUCATION.
Up to the period of life at which the sexes diverge, that is, up to the
time when the boy becomes a man and the girl a woman, the physical
system pursues the even tenor of development, broken only by the two
marked advances of the cutting of the first and second teeth. But now,
the strength of the general system is supposed, in the counsels of the
Creator, to have attained sufficient strength and firmness to be fully
capable of assuming a new duty. In both sexes, organs up to this time
quiescent, that is, as to any functional action, take on rapidly an
independent life, assert their own character, and take up their peculiar
work. Heretofore, all the physical development of the child has been for
self alone; the gradual growth of each organism has pointed to nothing
outside; each has been in a manner isolated. But now we have a
foreshadowing of a nobler meaning to human life, for man is not to be
alone, an isolated individual; he attains his highest significance only
in relation to others.[8] I say it is supposed that by thirteen or
fourteen years of steady _educated_ growth, the system in both sexes has
acquired strength enough to assume this last duty; and if this growth
has been educated growth in both sexes, it does do so. I am considering,
however, only the girls, and all that is said hereafter must be
understood as applying specially to them. It makes its first trial of
its newly acquired power, and, in a well-trained organism, such as we
are thankful to know are yet found in our own country, it does do so
with as little effort, with as little outer disturbance of the general
system as is manifested when the first new tooth cuts through the gum of
the seven year old little girl. If it is asserted that such cases are
rare, I can only answer that such is not the testimony of other women of
large acquaintance, whom I have consulted; and that even if they were,
the sufficient answer to the statement would be that cases of girls who
have been physically thoroughly educated, are equally rare. No
impression can be given to American women which will tend more directly
towards producing the opposite result in our girls, than one which
should lead them to believe thoroughly that this last period of
development is necessarily a period of great physical or mental
disturbance. American women have common sense enough to know that they
must submit to the inevitable, but they have also common sense enough to
fight against, and to conquer, what is not inevitable, provided it is
not desirable; and if what I have said above could become the conviction
of every American woman as thoroughly as it is that of some of them, we
should in thirteen more years be able to prove it by innumerable cases.
Every woman who knows it and acts upon the knowledge in educating her
daughter, thereby becomes a benefactor to her country and her race.
We all know that many a baby cuts all its first teeth without any
trouble, noticeable nervous excitement, or derangement of any of the
bodily functions. We know, also, that large numbers are sick; that large
numbers die, showing, that where the organism is weak, it is unable to
carry on the new and sudden process without over-action, since we have
only a limited quantity of vital force. Over-action in one part, is
inevitably under-action in another, and either is but another name for,
and not the cause of, disease.[9] We know that a larger proportion of
children cut their second teeth without any disturbance, and this result
was to be expected; for the terrible, and yet most merciful hand of
death, seven years before, had thinned the ranks by transplanting the
weakest to a clime where the burden of the body is not a hindrance, and
had left us only the strongest for the second trial. We know also,
however, that many children do suffer from nervous irritability, and
from weakness in other directions at this time. If it is the digestive
or respiratory organs that manifest the strain, the child is tenderly
cared for; if the over-action is in the nervous system, we "wonder what
possesses the child," and she, probably, is sent out of the room, or
punished in some other way, in word or act.
When the third and last especial and exceptional work takes place, we
may expect the same results, and we find them. Up to seven years of age,
however, the little girl's life has been comparatively a healthful one,
at least as far as sleep is concerned. As far as clothing affects
freedom of motion, she has also, probably, not suffered, though when she
has walked in our chilly winter and damp spring air, she has had
interposed between her body and the climatic influences only a defence
of one thickness of cotton, while her brother has been carefully guarded
by thickly woven woolen garments. But from seven to fourteen, the
deteriorating causes in the average American family increase rapidly in
intensity, in fact, much faster than the increase of the growing
strength. The food remains nearly the same, though even this is not
always the case, for the times at which it is taken often become
somewhat more irregular, and its material more varied and innutritious;
her hours of sleep are considerably curtailed, from different causes;
her clothing, while not increasing in warmth and thickness, is drawn
closer, and, in addition to this, the brain is set definitely to work in
actual study. Is it not manifest, that while the demands upon the vital
force have been increased, the supply of material has been decreased? If
this have been the case, she arrives at the period when the third and
last demand is to be made on her growing power, with not force enough to
assume the additional work, and in consequence she shows signs of
disease. And then, forgetting all the previous want of education, we
either tacitly assume that God treats his children as Pharaoh treated
the Israelites in his unreasonable demands, or, holding to our faith in
him, we seize upon the first cause that presents itself to our startled
vision. Because the education of the body has had for a long time, in
our thought, an importance secondary to the education of the mind, we
very naturally seize upon the latter as the cause of the evil, and
remove the girl from school. One is here almost tempted to wish that the
mind might be proved only a "mode of matter," if, by that means, the
body might be raised up to the level of our mental horizon, and within
the circle of our rational sympathy, for if we knew that matter and mind
were the same, the matter of which our bodies are composed might then
secure a chance for respectful and rational attention.
But there are here other considerations of immense importance which must
not be overlooked, and it is to these that any rational treatment of the
subject must turn its main attention. Besides laying the foundation of
trouble at this time, in a neglect of proper physical education for
thirteen years back, we have also taken pains to lay it in too great an
attention to mental education for exactly the same number of years. It
must not be forgotten that the little girl, as she looks out for the
first time through her intelligence-lighted eyes, by taking notice of
anything, while she lies in her mother's arms, looks out upon a vast and
complicated world of civilization, of which she is entirely ignorant,
and that, from the very fact that she is "the heir of all the ages," she
has to make acquaintance with her inheritance. To the baby, the light,
all sounds, its cradle, the room, its own moving fingers, its mother's
face, are vast regions of unexplored knowledge. There is absolutely
nothing, however small, which is common or customary, and, as she grows
older, to the three year old child even, a walk down one of our avenues,
or the examination of a bureau drawer, is as exciting as a journey in a
fairy palace. In fact, the whole world around her is merely one vast
fairy palace, in which miracles are continually occurring, quite as
astonishing and exciting as the appearance of the Genies at the rubbing
of the wonderful lamp. And her world grows every day fuller and wider
and more enchanting, just as the hazy cloud of the milky way unfolds and
reveals itself to us under more and more powerful telescopes into
star-dust, into myriads of distinct shining points, into stars and suns;
and, under the telescopes of reasoning science, into worlds separated by
distances so great, that "the imagination sinks exhausted," and very
properly. Now, if any one will recall the sensation with which she first
looked through a powerful telescope at this sight, she will then
understand the state in which the brain of the little girl lives, as a
continual atmosphere, and she will have no need to ask herself whether
it is needful or allowable to add much cause for activity to that brain,
for, at least, the first seven years of its life.
If mothers could only go to walk themselves with their little girls more
often, instead of sending their ignorant nurses, they would comprehend
this more fully. The fact that they do not "want to be bothered" with
the child, only shows that they are dimly conscious of the truth, though
their action testifies that they do not appreciate its significance. It
is not necessary to speak only of city life here, for a walk along a
country road keeps the little three year old girl in a state of
continual high excitement. Is there not the wonderful thistle-down to be
blown away, and the flight of each silken-winged seed to be watched
with anxious eyes? Are there not clusters of purple and white asters in
unexpected places? Are not the steep and dangerous rocky precipices by
the side of the way to be daringly scaled and slid down? Do not the
geese live in this pasture, and the sheep and the one solitary pig in
that? The raspberry vines droop their rosy fruit into her hand, the
tall, big, golden-rods snap their stalks so unexpectedly when she bends
them, while she finds herself unable to gather the slender grasses. Then
there are such charming nooks for hiding, among the ferns and
hazel-bushes, and the bits of mica glistening all along the road are
each of a different size and shape, and must be carefully collected. The
toad startles her as it leaps out of the road, the grasshoppers strike
her face, and wonderful people drive by in wonderful machines, drawn by
vast and wonderful animals. The amount of knowledge which an intelligent
child will accumulate during seven weeks' stay in a quiet country town,
alone can measure the amount of brain activity which has been carried on
for that time; and yet we drive and force this activity from her
earliest years, when we ought only to direct it. We exhibit her in her
babyhood to crowds of admiring and exciting friends, we overwhelm her
with an unreasonable number and variety of exciting toys, we tease her
to repeat her little sayings for the amusement of grown people, and
lastly, we send her to school to be still more excited, and to have vast
additional fields of knowledge of a different kind open to her. The fact
is, that no child is ready to go to school till she has had time enough
allowed for the dazzling and exciting illumination which pervades the
atmosphere of childhood, to
"die away
And fade into the light of common day."
We send children to school--or rather we begin voluntarily to teach
them, too early by several years, and the only result is that the brain
is "too early overstrained, and in consequence of such precocious and
excessive action, the foundation for a morbid excitation of the whole
nervous system is laid in earliest childhood." As far as the home-life
fosters this over-activity, that is, before the time of school life, I
think it will be readily acknowledged that this showing-off process is
applied with greater force to girls than to boys. The boy is left more
to his own devices, but the girl must be made to contribute more to the
general amusement of the family, and she must learn "to make herself
useful." It is true that to be of service to others, in a rational
sense, should be her ruling motive of action, but one may, perhaps,
question whether such early expectation, in such ways, be not, at least,
"penny wise and pound foolish." To this cause may be attributed a great
part of the failure in the health at the last special time of
development.
As to the mental progress made, John Stuart Mill may, as he says, have
entered life "a quarter of a century in advance of his contemporaries,"
but was he a quarter of a century ahead of others of his own age when he
left it? The question is at least suggestive of the truth.
But, with the development of the organs which are so indissolubly
associated with the deepest feelings and with the mental powers, there
is also a corresponding mental development. Not only does "the blood
rush more vigorously, the muscular strength become more easily roused
into activity, but an indefinable impulse takes possession of the whole
being," and a great excitation of the imagination also is perceivable.
Just here, then, the educator recognizes a duty. This increased force,
which we could not prevent if we would, and would not if we could, must
be guided into rational channels--and here I have to speak of a branch
of the subject which is not often considered. I mean the duty of the
mother, who is in this department the proper educator, to speak
earnestly, fully, and plainly to the girl of the mysterious process of
reproduction. Rosenkranz[10] says, somewhere, that when any nation has
advanced far enough in culture to inquire whether it is fit for freedom,
the question is already answered; and in the same way, when a girl, in
her thought, has arrived at the point of asking earnest questions on
this subject, she is fit to be answered. But just here let me call
attention to the infinite importance, in this part of education, of
perfect confidence and freedom between mother and daughter, and to the
equally important fact, that this confidence which does exist at the
beginning of life, if once lost, can never fully be restored. If there
is a shade of reserve on the part of the girl, it will manifest itself
just here and now. Instead of seeking the information which she really
desires, at its only proper source, at that source whence she would
receive it pure, and invested with a feeling of reverence and sanctity,
of which she could never divest herself, she seeks it elsewhere. She
picks it up piece-meal in surreptitious and clandestine ways, as if it
were some horrible mystery which must, from its very nature, be covered
up from the light of day. She talks it over with her young companions in
secrecy, and the charm of mystery keeps her thoughts unduly brooding
upon the subject.
In old times, and even now, in other countries, the danger was not, is
not, so great. Foreign girls have a much closer supervision exercised
over them, and their life in the nursery is far less nerve-stimulating
than that of American children. They do not ask questions so early as
the American girl, and when they do, they have at hand not nearly so
many sources of information. If this all-necessary love and confidence
is unbroken, and if the mother have been so educated herself, that she
recognizes the importance of the moment, and has the requisite
knowledge, there is no danger at all. The occasion is seized, and her
womanly, "clear, and dignified statement, destroys all the false halo
with which the youthful fancy is so prone to surround the process of
reproduction, and, at this time, the fancy is very active with relation
to whatever pertains to it."
I do not for one moment forget that I am speaking of physical education.
The physical consequences of mistakes on this point are decided. By the
continual dwelling of the imagination on this subject--of the
imagination, I say, for there can be no thought where there is no
clearness--the blood is diverted to these organs, and hence, "the brain
and spinal cord, which develop so rapidly at this period, are not led to
a proper strength. The easily-moulded material is perverted to the
newly-aroused reproductive organs," and the preternatural activity thus
produced is physical disease.
But more than this: I should be fairly accused of quitting the physical
for the moral side of education here, if it were not that I am now upon
ground, where, more than on any other, body and soul, matter and spirit,
touch each other, and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to draw
the dividing line. The inter-action of the two upon each other here
becomes so rapid and intense, that one scarcely knows the relation of
cause and effect. I repeat--more than this: The patched and medley
knowledge of the young girl to whom her mother does not speak, comes to
her garbled and confused, the sacred seal of modesty torn off, soiled
with the touch of vulgar hands, defaced by the coarse jests of polite
society, its sanctity forever missed. The temple has been invaded, its
white floors trodden by feet from muddy alleys, the gods thrown down. Is
not the temple as much ruined when this profanation has been
accomplished, as if the walls had fallen? I will not be misunderstood as
doubting, for one moment, the purity of soul of American girls as a
whole; but I assert, that the result of which I have spoken is terribly
common in our large cities, and that it is much more likely to be common
in America than in any other country, from the effect of our climate,
our free institutions, and the almost universal diffusion of printed
matter.
The remedy lies alone in the hands of the mother, and, where a girl is
away from her mother, in the hands of her woman guardian, whoever she
may be. When our women are better educated, there will be less prudery
and more real modesty.[11] When the minds of our girls and women are
kept busy on other things, they will have no time for this most
dangerous brooding. Most truly does Schiller say: "_In müssiger Weile
schafft der böse Geist_," and he spares neither body nor soul.
It is always asserted that woman makes and rules society. When our women
are better educated themselves, their righteous indignation will banish
forever from all conversation in which they have a part, the fashionable
jests on subjects which do not admit of jest, and the _doubles
entendres_ whose power to excite a smile consists in their vulgar and
profane suggestions. They are as common in companies of average women as
in companies of average men, and they evidence thoughts, and are
themselves as much coarser and lower than the outspoken utterances of
Shakespeare's ideal women--whom they assume to criticise and condemn--as
the smooth and subtle rhymes of Swinburne and Joaquin Miller are below
the poetry of Chaucer and Spenser.
Closely connected with this part of my subject is that of the reading in
which girls are passively allowed to indulge. How large a proportion of
mothers and guardians exercise anything which can be called watchful
care as to what books and papers the children shall read; and yet the
booksellers' shelves groan under the weight of the most dissipating,
weakening, and insidious books that can possibly be imagined; and
newspapers which ought never to enter any decent house, lie on the
tables of many a family sitting-room. Any one who will take the trouble
to examine the records of any large circulating library, will be
astounded at the immense demand which there is for these average novels.
And in our parlors and chambers to-day, myriads of little girls are
curled up in corners, poring over such reading--stories of complicated
modern society, the very worst kind of reading for a child--stories
"whose exciting pages delight in painting the love of the sexes for each
other, and its sensual phases." And the mothers do not know what they
are reading; and the children answer, when asked what they read, "Oh,
anything that comes along."
How find a remedy for this evil? How stem this tide of insidious poison
that is sapping the strength of body and mind? How, but by educating
their taste till they shall not desire such trash, and shall only be
disgusted with it, if by chance it fall under their eyes? How, but by
giving their minds steady and regular work? If the work be intermittent,
it will, under the general principles laid down in the remarks on
exercise, not only be, from that fact, injurious to the brain, but it
will afford, at the most susceptible period of life, leisure for
reveries which can lead only to evil, moral and physical. But give our
girls steady and regular work of muscle and brain, a rational system of
exercise for both, so that the "motor and nervous systems may weary
themselves in action, and may be desirous of rest," and evil will be not
only prevented, but cured, if existing.
Even if these trashy books, which we find everywhere, not excepting the
Sunday-school libraries, be not actually exciting and immoral in tone
and sentiment, they are so vapid, so utterly without purpose or object,
so devoid of any healthy vigor and life, that they are simply
dissipating to the power of thought, and hence weakening to the will. No
one needs to be told how great is the influence of the will over
physical health, and any weakening of it tends inevitably to a
slackening of all the vital forces, by which alone we preserve health,
or even life itself.
All such books can be kept out of a house, and their entrance should be
guarded against far more vigorously than we oppose the entrance of
noxious gases, or even of draughts of pure air. Some of us, many of us,
have reason to be grateful that in our fathers' houses no such books
were to be found. Poets were there, novelists were there in abundance,
but of such poisonous and weakening literature, no trace; and as we are
grateful to our parents for the care and simple regimen which preserved
our physical health for us, we thank them also for the care which kept
out of our way the mental food which they knew to be injurious, and for
which they themselves had been too well educated to have any taste.
The possession, through the instrumentality of education, of simple and
healthy appetite and taste, physical and mental, is the most valuable
gift that the father, that the mother, can give their children, a gift
in comparison with which a legacy of millions of dollars sinks into
utter insignificance. And a tithe of the thought and care which are
expended in accumulating and investing property on the part of the one,
a tithe of the care and thought used on dress on the part of the other,
would serve to secure it!
The exclusively American habit of taking young girls to fashionable
resorts for the summer should also be alluded to here. No custom could
be more injurious than this in the influences of food, clothing and
sleep, which it almost inevitably brings; and added to these, girls in
idleness, and left to amuse themselves, are often in such places thrown
into contact with persons of both sexes, whose conversation is the
worst possible in its effect on mind and body.[12]
But, according to the general principle of education, we must not
repress imagination in one direction without furnishing it some rational
food in another; for education, as has been said, consists not in
destroying but in training the natural man, and any system which aims at
destroying any natural impulse only defeats its own end. For this
purpose, and at this period of life, it were well to draw the
imagination to "the enjoyment of the beautiful through an actual
contemplation of it, and for this purpose the study of painting and
sculpture is of pre-eminent value. * * * * * Through their means the
allurement which the wholly or especially the half-undraped form has for
us, becomes softened and purified. The enjoyment of beauty itself is the
enjoyment of something divine; and it is only through a coarse,
indecent, and already infected imagination, belonging to a general
sensuality, that it degenerates into excitement."[13] "Let our artists
rather be those who are gifted to discern the true nature of beauty and
grace, amid fair sights and sounds; and beauty, the effluence of fair
works, will meet the sense like a breeze, and insensibly draw the soul,
even in childhood, into harmony with the beauty of Reason."[14]
There is another matter which can scarcely be passed over in silence in
this discussion, but the evil effects of which are seldom recognized.
There are many men in middle life against whose character no whisper has
ever dared to raise itself, men of culture and power, men of strong
personal "magnetism"--I use the term because no other will express
exactly what I mean--who often attract the almost idolatrous admiration
of young girls and young women. They may do this at first unconsciously;
but they are pleased by it finally, and seem to enjoy being surrounded,
as it were, by a circle of young incense-bearers, and they seem to see
no harm in, to say the least, passively permitting this excessive,
sentimental, and unnatural admiration. No harm is done? But harm is
done, and that of the most insidious character. There is a time in the
life of a majority of girls and boys when the half-conscious and just
awakening spirit is, as it were, casting around in every direction for a
some one, they know not who;[15] and if at this time the young girl
comes under the influence of one of these men, she is likely to fall
into a most unnatural and morbid state; and the man, whoever he be, that
shows himself pleased by such adoration and devotion, who does not by
the force of loyalty to the simple Right, persistently and quietly
repel, and effectually repel, all such tribute, is responsible for much
harm, and must answer for much unhappiness. The remedy would lie in an
education for these girls which should be sound and healthful; in ample,
active employment of the thought in other directions. The safeguard,
however, lies in the mother's hands. No mother who holds the
unquestioned confidence of her daughter need ever fear for her in this
or any other way. So long as the girl knows that she can go fearlessly
to her mother with all her thoughts and fancies, foolish though they be,
so long as she is never repelled or shut up within herself by ridicule
or want of comprehension, so long she is as safe, wherever she may be
and into whatever companionship fallen, as if fenced about with triple
walls of steel. But let that perfect confidence which should subsist
between mother and daughter be once lost or disturbed; let the girl once
fear to think aloud to her mother, and the charm is broken, and dangers
encompass her around. No thoughtful woman can see a girl, thus alone,
carried away by her impulsive feeling, devoting herself to the worship
of some prominent man who dares to encourage or permit such tribute,
without longing to step between and defend her, as Spenser's Britomart
did the innocent Amoret from what she knows is the unseen, unfelt, and
yet real danger.
As to direct physical care of themselves, American girls between
fourteen and twenty-one are to be ruled only through their own
convictions on the side of prudence, for they will not, as has been
before said, blindly obey what seem to them arbitrary rules, as the
girls of some other nations can be easily made to do. The American
mother is not so likely to say to her daughter, "You must not go to this
party," as, "Do you think you had better go?" If a girl, then, is made
to know that when any organ is in a congested and softened state it is
much more likely to be injured than at other times, she will not, while
this is the case, if previously properly educated on the will side, draw
her dress tightly around her yielding form, and stand or dance at a
party for hours together; she will not skate for hours; she will
probably not ride for hours on a trotting horse; she will not take long
walks; she will not race violently upstairs, or plunge violently down,
because she has been taught to believe that no one can with impunity
array her individual will against the laws of nature; and thus two of
the most frequent causes of trouble, which are displacements or the
bending forward of any organ, will be avoided. If she persists in trying
experiments, she will not be obliged to experiment for a very long time
in order to satisfy herself that the wisdom of ancient tradition is of
more value than her individual opinion; but the girl who has been
properly educated for fourteen years has already made this discovery.
However, if, after all advice, any one should persist in so unreasonable
a course, she is, when fully grown, a rational and responsible being,
and, as such, is answerable alone to herself and to her Creator for the
marring of his workmanship. What folly, what worse than folly, should we
think it in the managers of a steamship to intrust the care of the
machinery to an engineer who knew nothing of its construction, or of the
way in which the parts act upon one another; and yet, the mother who
leaves her daughter in ignorance, and then does not carefully guard her
herself, is guilty of worse than this; and when the evil is done, the
advice of the wisest physician can only be the enjoinment of the very
sanitary rules which she herself should have long before enforced; for
"the true method of Sexual Education must remain that which has been
always hitherto spoken of, that of correct living."
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Mrs. E. M. King, _Contemporary Review_, Dec., 1873, in an article on
"Coöperative Housekeeping."
[2] _Principles of Political Economy_, Mill. American Ed., D. Appleton &
Co., Vol. I., p. 551.
[3] _Body and Mind_, 2d Ed., p. 300.
[4] Referring to New York, Boston, or places on same isotherm.
[5] I have never seen the actual figures given on this subject, and in
the interest of positive science, therefore, subjoin the following,
which any one can easily verify for herself. The following articles,
viz., merino and cotton drawers, flannel skirt, a light Balmoral, a
short, light hoop, corsets, and dress-skirts, over and under, weighed
9lbs. 4oz. Avoirdupois. It must be also remembered that this pressure is
not regularly exerted, but on account of the swinging and swaying motion
of the skirts, is applied now in one direction, now in another. The
dress weighed was not of the heaviest material, but of fine
old-fashioned merino, or what is known this year as _Drap d'été_.
[6] Lest this should seem to imply that women should not be employed as
bookkeepers, I would call attention to the fact that it presents
practically no obstacle whatever to their employment. For instance, one
of the largest wholesale and retail firms in St. Louis has for years
employed a woman bookkeeper, and she has never been expected to stand.
Low instead of high desks are in their counting-room, and low chairs are
also found there. The books, bills, etc., are convenient to her hand,
and no difficulty whatever is experienced. It may, perhaps, be a
pertinent question to ask, in what consists the advantage of a high
stool and a high desk over a low chair and a low desk, and whether it
takes any more time to rise from a chair, than to swing down from a
stool.
[7] In a most valuable and instructive article on the Comparative Health
of American and English Women, soon to appear in _Scribner's Monthly_,
Miss Mary E. Beedy, an American woman who has had unusually large
opportunities for knowing English girls, states that this is exactly the
feeling with which the English girl and woman regard their daily walk. I
call especial attention to this forthcoming article because it abounds
in accurately observed and skilfully generalized facts; and because it
is most suggestive on the whole subject of the health of women, and the
causes of its failure.
[8] "The change of character at this period is not by any means limited
to the appearance of the sexual feelings and their sympathetic ideas;
but when traced to its ultimate reach, will be found to extend to the
highest feelings of mankind--social, moral, and even religious. In its
lowest sphere, as a mere animal instinct, it is clear that the sexual
appetite forces the most selfish person out of the little circle of
self-feeling into a wider feeling of family sympathy, and a rudimentary
moral feeling."--Maudsley, _Body and Mind_, 2d Edition, p. 31.
[9] Maudsley: _Body and Mind_, Am. Ed., p. 304 _et seq._
[10] Dr. Karl Rosenkranz, Doctor of Theology, and Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Königsberg.
[11] I quote again from Rosenkranz, because I cannot improve upon his
words: "Modesty is the feeling of the primitive harmony of nature and
spirit, and it is very decidedly active in children, however
unconstrained they are with regard to nature. True modesty is as far
removed from coarseness as from prudery. Coarseness takes a delight in
making the relation of the sexes the subject of ambiguous, witty,
shameless talking and jesting, and it is just as blamable as prudery,
which externally affects an innocence no longer existing therein. Here
is, consequently, the point in which physical education must pass over
into moral education, and where the purity of the heart must hallow the
body."
[12] A friend of undoubted accuracy testifies to a case where acute
dysmenorrhoea and menorrhagia, begun in over-excitement and tight
clothing, and aggravated by the very cause above-mentioned, gradually
yielded to regular and nutritious food, a rational mode of dressing,
regular sleep, and to the regular brain-work which gave sufficient
employment to the over-excited imagination.
[13] Rosenkranz refers here, of course, only to the antique, and to the
products of modern art which breathe the true spirit of the antique; for
it is unfortunately quite possible to find a Joaquin Miller and a
Charles Reade, or a Tupper and a T. S. Arthur, in painting and sculpture
as well as in literature.
[14] Plato, _Rep._, Book III.
[15] "The great mental revolution which occurs at puberty may go beyond
its physiological limits in some instances, and become pathological. The
vague feelings, blind longings, and obscure impulses which then arise in
the mind, attest the awakening of an impulse which knows not its aim; a
kind of vague and yearning melancholy is engendered, which leads to an
abandonment to poetry of a gloomy, Byronic kind, or to indulgence in
indefinite religious feelings and aspirations. There is a want of some
object to fill the void in the feelings, to satisfy the undefined
yearning--a need of something to adore; consequently, when there is no
visible object of worship, the Invisible is adored. The time of this
mental revolution is, at best, a trying period for youth; and when there
is an inherited infirmity of nervous organization, the natural
disturbance of the mental balance may easily pass into actual
destruction of it. * * * * * What such patients need to learn is, _not
the indulgence but a forgetfulness of their feelings, not the
observation but the renunciation of self, not introspection but useful
action_." (The italics are ours.)--Maudsley, _Body and Mind_, 2d
Edition, pp. 83, 84.
"The next step will be to desire our opponent to show how, in
reference to any of the pursuits or acts of citizens, the nature
of a woman differs from that of a man. That will be very fair;
and perhaps he will reply that to give an answer on the instant
is not easy--a little reflection is needed."--PLATO, REP., BOOK
V.
MENTAL EDUCATION,
or,
THE CULTURE OF THE INTELLECT.
"Now, as refusal to satisfy the cravings of the digestive faculty
is productive of suffering, so is the refusal to satisfy the
craving of any other faculty productive of suffering, to an
extent proportioned to the importance of that faculty. But, as
God wills man's happiness, that line of conduct which produces
unhappiness is contrary to his will."--FRANCIS BACON.
If one is to educate the body, she would be presumptuous in the extreme
if she made the attempt without first understanding in some measure its
anatomy and physiology. With as much reason, in approaching the subject
of mental education--that one third of education which with too many
persons stands for the whole--we must pause a moment for a few
reflections on the nature of mind and the necessary results thereof.
"_Mind is essentially self-activity_." In this, as we have been taught,
lies its essential difference from mere matter, whose most essential
property is inertia--_i.e._, absolute inability to move itself or to
stop itself.[16]
When, therefore, mind acts at all, it must act from within, and no
amount of information given will be of the slightest concern to it,
unless by its own activity the mind reach forth, draw it in, and
assimilate it to itself. This voluntary activity, directed towards any
subject, is Attention, and so great is the power of mind when in this
state, that it dissolves and draws in all food, no matter how abstruse,
that may present itself. Thus the problem of mental education, which had
seemed so complex, resolves itself very simply. We have first to educate
the attention of the child, so that she shall be able to use it at will,
and to turn it towards any object desired; and secondly, we simply have
to present to the aroused attention the knowledge which the past
centuries have created and accumulated, and to present this in such
quantity and in such order as the experience of the same centuries has
decided to be best for its normal growth.
To begin with, then, we must educate the child from the first into a
habit of controlling and directing her naturally drifting and capricious
attention by the will. The power of the child is very limited in this
respect. Her eyes, the index of her attention, wander easily from one
external object to another, and consequently our work must be very
gradual, for, if we attempt to hold the attention one moment longer than
the mind has strength for, the tense bow snaps, and the overstrained
activity lapses into inanity. We must ask her attention for very short
intervals at first, and during many years; for every time that we
attempt to convey information for so long that the attention gives way,
we have weakened, and not strengthened the power. Exercise, to be
judicious, we must remember, must, in mind as well as body, be regular,
and increase steadily in its demand. The object of the first teaching
should, therefore, be the steady and methodical cultivation of the
faculty of attention, and not the acquisition of knowledge. Our first
work must be to give such judicious exercise that the mind shall acquire
a habit of exercise and an appetite for it, and not to spoil at the
outset the mental digestion. A healthy appetite being once created, we
have then only to spread the table and place the courses one after
another, at proper intervals, and within convenient reach, in regular
order, and the work is done.
But the child, as she grows from child to woman, must pass through three
stages, showing three different directions which are successively taken
by the intelligent activity. First, she is occupied in perceiving
objects. She then passes into the years dominated by the imagination,
and she should emerge from this into the dominion of rational, logical
thought, but, through the fault of a defective education, she often
never passes beyond the second stage. Thus dwarfed and crippled she
remains during her whole life, physically a woman, mentally a child.
Better days are, however, dawning, though the sun be but one hour high.
Again, serious errors are made in education, from the want of a proper
appreciation of the time at which the girl passes inevitably from one to
the other of these stages. When, for example, authors of text-books on
Natural Science, History and Reading, designed for pupils of fifteen
and sixteen years of age, cover more space with illustrations than with
text, we recognize the fact that they forget that at that age, the first
or intuitional stage is past; and when publishers endeavor to recommend
their books to teachers, by sending them specimens of the pictures in
the books, instead of specimens of the explanations and statements, the
teachers know that they are supposed to be equally admirers of fine
wood-cuts.
In the first, or intuitional stage, when the child is chiefly employed
with perceptions, there is little to be done but to train the eye, the
ear, the hand and the voice, and to teach the correct use of distinctly
spoken language.
It is clearly impossible to investigate the subject of mental education
in detail in the present essay; I must content myself with a few
suggestions and statements.
First, is it not evident that it is all-important what kind of training
the little girl receives in the first years of her school life, while
she is yet in the intuitional or perceptive stage? A failure to properly
train her attention here, and the whole of her after-work is
invalidated. Her school work becomes, in its progress, tiresome, and
hence disagreeable, from the constant necessity of repetition, a
necessity arising from the want of a trained power of attention. She is
found fault with for restlessness and want of interest, as if that were
her fault, and not her misfortune; and, at the end, her knowledge is at
best but "a thing of shreds and patches," till, when all is done and the
result exhibited, we ask, with a sigh, "whether it be really worth while
to go through so much to gain so little." And yet, what care do
guardians take to secure the best advantages for their daughters at
fifteen and seventeen, and of how little importance do they consider
it, under what kind of teaching they place them between eight and
fifteen! The error is all the same in the intellectual as in the
physical education of our girls. We are continually carefully locking
the stable-door after the horse is stolen; we are continually allowing
things to go wrong, and then making superhuman efforts to right them,
not remembering that it is far easier to keep out of trouble than to get
out of it. If a girl must be trusted to incompetent, or, at the best,
doubtful, teachers during half her school life, let that half be the
last, and not the first, and incompetency will be shorn of half its
power to injure. Not only directly in the interest of the girls, but in
the interest of my own profession--though the two are one--I ask this,
for in that case, our profession would soon be elevated in its general
tone by the elimination from it of those who ought never to have entered
it.
Passing from the intuitional epoch to the age when the imagination and
emotion become the ruling powers, we next arrive at the time at which it
becomes necessary for parents to see to it that plenty of good reading
is provided for the eager child. It makes not so much difference what
kind of books she reads, but they should always be the very best of
their kind, for this is the time in which the formation of a correct
taste becomes, perhaps, the most important duty of the educator. To
poetry, either in verse or not, each child inclines naturally, as did
the race in its childhood, and the stories of the Old Testament and
Homer are never wearisome. Generally, "the proper classical works for
youth are those which nations have produced in the earliest stages of
their culture."
Now is the season for fairy stories, and the Germans, who, of all
nations best understand the needs of children, have them ready furnished
to our hand. I do not mean the absurd, aimless, and meaningless fairy
tales with which modern writers endeavor to supplant the fairy classics,
and which, for the most part, the instinct of a child at once condemns.
I doubt very seriously whether it is possible at the present time, and
in America, to write a fairy story which shall have the true ring in it,
any more than it would be possible for any one to write a genuine epic
poem. The circumstances favorable to the production of both have passed
away with modern times, but the productions are left us, a perpetual
legacy of delight and charm to every little girl.
We are too apt to forget that the child must live through certain stages
of thought and feeling in order to arrive at maturity. And perhaps
Americans are more liable to this error than any other nation. We might
as well expect the full bloom of the rose to burst from the root without
the intervention of stem and bud, and the slow passing of the years. It
is right that the children should devour fairy stories, and she, who, at
this period of life, fails to read the _Arabian Nights_, must miss
forever a most valuable part of her mental education: for this period,
once past, never returns. Don Quixote and Gulliver's Travels may be also
mentioned here. It is true that they were not written for children, but
so true and genuine are they, that the child enjoys them thoroughly,
while the most mature find them a profitable study. This peculiarity of
adaptation to all ages belongs to all the genuine myths of any nation,
its best modern master being Hans Christian Andersen. It is the royal
sign and seal of authority in stories. Ballad poetry belongs too to the
beginning of this stage. Scott comes in later, but Tennyson does not
belong in it at all. These examples will be sufficient to express my
meaning.
It would be a very valuable aid in the education of our girls at this
time, if some one who is capable would, out of her riches of wide
reading, give us a list, with publishers' names, of these books of all
time which ought to be read by every child; a list to which any mother,
anxious for the right guidance of her little girl's taste, and yet
ignorant of the best means, might refer with perfect confidence.
We must not, as has been well said, deprive books for children of the
"shadow-side" of life, because in that case they become artificial and
untrue, and the child rejects them. "For the very reason that in the
stories of the Old Testament we find envy, vanity, evil desire,
ingratitude, craftiness and deceit among the fathers of the Jewish race,
and the leaders of God's chosen people, have they so great an
educational value," and when we have purged the narrations of all these
characteristics, and present to the child an expurgated edition, we find
that they no longer charm her. Nothing disgusts a child sooner than
_childishness_ in stories written for her, and it is because very few
people can rightly draw the line between what is childish and what is
child-like, that we find so few who are able to write stories which are
really adapted to children, and that so many who address Sunday-schools
fail to interest. Every woman who has proved her power in this direction
may be said, in the dearth of valuable books for children, to owe a duty
to her country by giving them more. As the child grows towards
womanhood, tragedy will take the place of the epic poem and ballad, and
will lead, it may be unconsciously, to a deepening of the sense of
responsibility.
The question what the girl shall read belongs not at all to herself, but
to those who know the world better than she, and who, through the fact
that they are educated while she is not, know what and when to select.
Hence the immense importance, not only to the girl herself, but to the
whole country, of the thorough intellectual education of our girls.[17]
But enough has been said on the subject of reading, and of the
distinctions which should be made. I may add, however, that the line
before alluded to is to be drawn in novels. As, for instance, the girl
is ready for Dickens before she ought to read Thackeray, as Dickens
dwells more in the region of the simple emotions, while Thackeray has
moved on into the sphere of emotion which is conscious of itself, or of
the reflecting and critical understanding.
Supposing now that the girl has passed beyond the psychical stage of the
Imagination into the stage of Logical Thought, it is immensely important
that in this stage also she should not miss a systematic education. If
this should be the case, she is defrauded of the key which alone can
render intelligible the scattered work of the previous epoch. The work
of education in the first, or intuitional epoch is general; in the
second, or imaginative, special; and in the third, or logical, returns
again to the general; and thus only can it constitute a whole. In the
first, the child picks up facts and general principles from them; in the
second, the little girl pursues, each for itself, different branches of
study; in the third, she should be led to see the connection and
interdependence of these branches, to weave together the loose ends. If
she is not so led, if her education stops with the work of the second
stage--the only work which it is possible to do in the second stage, on
account of the laws of the development of the intellectual power--her
education remains forever unfinished, a garment not firm enough to
endure the stress of time, not fine enough to bear a moment's keen
scrutiny, and only strong enough to fetter and trip feet that endeavor
to make any real after-progress by its aid.
And yet this is what we are in the majority of cases doing for, or
rather against, our intelligent and energetic American girls. Does it
ever occur to us to ask what becomes of this energy, deprived thus of
its natural outlet? We have only to turn to the records of our insane
asylums or to the note-books of the physician and we are partially
answered. This is more true than is generally supposed. If these girls
had had real work for which they were responsible, and felt themselves
able rationally to utilize the power of which they were blindly
conscious, they would not be found to-day in the wards of asylums, or
condemned to the luxurious couches on which they spend their "inglorious
days." Or, thirdly, we may find another and quite different development
of this perverted but not destroyed energy,[18] this closing of the top
of the chimneys. Many a woman is antagonistic, is combative, because she
is forced into such a position, not because she herself desires it. The
smoke starts for the top of the chimney, as it should; but, baffled, it
frets itself in eddying whirls against the bricks, till, driven by the
necessity of an outlet somewhere, not understanding what the trouble is,
but only dimly realizing that there is trouble, it rushes back, choking
in its passage the fire, and revenging itself on the author of the
repression.
Men and women are wonderfully alike after all. The same motives move
them, the same incitements spur to honorable effort, and if a girl is
assured that, being half-educated, half-educated she must remain, she
will not, unless driven by the internal fire of irrepressible genius,
try very earnestly to fit herself for the higher plane which she can
never reach.
"Were it not better done, as others use,
To sport with Amaryllis in the shade,
Or with the tangles of Neæra's hair?"
By all means it were far better, if effort for broader work be of no
avail, to cease to think of it, and to make one's self as comfortable as
possible. And yet, how about the comfort in the coming years, when her
girls, who, thanks to the inevitable march of Truth, will have a better
chance than she, and her boys, to whom the last stage of education is to
be had for the asking, come to her in vain for sympathy and
appreciation, to say nothing of the husband, from all understanding of
whose rational thought she finds herself barred out?[19] Babies and
half-educated children are very pretty to play with, interesting to
watch, and delightful to care for, but when they are married and have
children, for they can never be said, in any true sense, to be wives or
mothers, they appear in a somewhat different aspect. I have sometimes,
out of sheer pity, wished that there were some State asylum for such
children, when they are left, as the chances of life and death so often
leave them, unprotected in the world, with dependent children clinging
to their useless hands. I have never seen a sadder sight than such a
woman, her physical system in perfect order and superbly developed,
looking stunned and helpless into the world, unable to do anything for
herself or her children, and dependent upon the charity of her dead
husband's friends--and perhaps the wise thought and tender care of a
faithful servant, whose practical education was complete in the stern
school of necessity--for food, clothing, and shelter. They have been
only half-educated, and it seems as if the authority which has refused
in the past to provide them with the power for their own maintenance,
ought to recognize their right to be supported; as much as it does
recognize the duty of supporting others, for whose education it has
failed properly to care in their youth, in jails, penitentiaries, and
prisons.
As to the effect of the want of education and culture upon what are
known as the most characteristic womanly qualities, whether physical or
mental, no better illustration can be furnished than that of the women
among the Arkansas refugees, who during the war came crowding for
protection into Missouri. They had not dwelt in a frigid and contracting
climate; they had not been physically overworked, and they had not been
co-educated, for they had not been educated at all, either physically,
intellectually, or morally. Should we not have expected to find in these
children of nature, these women who had spent their lives in idleness,
undisturbed by any brain-work, at least, finely developed forms? But
what did we find in the quarters assigned them? Without a single
exception, they were tall, thin, and angular in face and form, while the
masculine loudness, harshness, and depth of their voices, and the
masculine expression of features and movement, made us involuntarily
recoil from them as if they were something monstrous, in being neither
man nor woman. The animal nature, informed only in a small degree by the
spiritual, inevitably descends through lower forms, and when we find it
deprived entirely of spiritual guidance, we find a something lower than
the dog that is grateful for our kindness, or the horse that whinnies as
he hears our step on the gravel-walk; for we find the idiot.
But meantime, while the child is passing through all these stages of
mental development, as ordained by the Creator, the definite school-work
is intrusted to the hands of professional teachers. American parents
throw this responsibility entirely off from their own shoulders when
they send their girls to school, with somewhat the same feeling of
relief as that with which they lead their family physician to the
bedside of the little girl, for whose indisposition they have, before
summoning him, anxiously endeavored to care. There is only one
difference: in the case of the physician, they relate to him fully all
the symptoms and previous treatment; they remain by the bedside after he
has gone, in the capacity of nurses, and they see to it that his
prescriptions are obtained and administered, and his suggestions in
every respect exactly followed, while, in the case of the teacher, they
send the child, leaving her to make her own discoveries as to previous
symptoms and treatment, and they do not inquire into the directions
given, the nature of the work prescribed, or the effect. Having thus, as
they think, placed the whole matter in the hands of the teacher, they
are often surprised and annoyed at the result. I am taking it for
granted here that the teacher is qualified for her part of the work, as
to method; and, if not working under a course of study laid out for her,
as in the public schools, is herself able to arrange and plan. This is
the most favorable aspect of the subject. But there is indisputably
another side. If mothers would only work with the teachers, so that the
home influences brought to bear on the girls in matters already
discussed, especially in the direction of the reading of their
daughters, should be healthful and strong, the teachers would be saved
much time and energy, which could be far more usefully applied for the
benefit of the child. I speak from the midst of a profession which often
suffers in reputation, nay, even in actual character, from this very
cause.
To go in detail through the part of intellectual education which belongs
especially to the teacher, is impossible here, nor would such a
discussion be in place in these pages. It has its place properly only in
professional literature, just as the details of the treatment of a case
placed under medical care, whether preventive or curative, belong only
in the pages of a medical journal. A few suggestions only will be added
in this department.
It is evident to the most superficial observer that a vast amount of
time is spent over such studies as grammar, geography and history in our
schools, with but little perceivable result. This is due in great
measure to the fact that the manufacture of text-books has become in
America a profitable business in a money point of view, and that,
consequently, what text-books shall be used in our schools, both public
and private, is decided more by the publishers than by the educators.
Hence the graded series of School Geographies, for instance, through
some five or six of which the pupil is obliged to wade, one after
another, to find in each, only the same matter in sentences of a
somewhat greater length. Hence, to go one step farther, the stupefying
of so many minds in our schools. Nothing is more deadening to all mental
activity than unmeaning repetitions, a fact easily verified by any one
who, wakeful through mental disturbance at night, will take the trouble
to repeat and re-repeat any meaningless thing. It is the lounging,
deadening brain-work of which we have too much, not the active,
vivifying brain-work of which we have too little, that does injure the
system. The whole healthy tone of the mind is destroyed, and evils,
mental and physical, follow in rapid succession.
From the process of text-book manufacturing also spring the endless
number of compendiums and abstracts with which our schools are deluged,
mental power diluted, and the pockets of the parents unnecessarily taxed
for the support of large publishing houses, not for the education of
their children.
Another cause of this stupefying process is the rigid system by which
most large schools are conducted, where promotions, from one class to
another, can take place, say, once a year, the pupil who, on
examination, falls short of the required per cent of correct answers,
being forced to review the work of the entire previous year before going
on. More elasticity, more fluidity, as it were, is sadly needed in our
system of public school education before this evil will be to any great
extent modified.[20]
It would be a waste of time to say that one ought not to be overworked,
were it not that some persons always seem to imply that any intellectual
work is overwork. It would seem equally superfluous to say that for
intellectual health there ought not to be any surplus energy, for the
latter statement seems as axiomatic as the former.
The problem with which educators are chiefly concerned is that of fully
employing the energies without overtasking them. If the dividing line
between _enough_ and _too much_ could be determined as exactly as the
Mississippi River marks the series of lowest points where the eastern
slope of the Rocky Mountains meets the western slope of the Alleghenies,
our work as teachers were easy indeed. Teaching, however, is not the
only profession where such unsolved problems exist, for individual
cases, and we teachers are thus but a part of a noble army of
professional workers, so we take heart of grace, and are not ashamed.
But the fact remains to be considered that the work of school education
is, as the result of unavoidable destiny, in America, passing very
rapidly into the hands of women. We may deplore this, but we cannot
prevent it. The last census showed that the number of women teachers in
the United States stands already to that of the men as 123,980 to
78,709, and the ratio is daily increasing. There is no other country in
the world, then, where it is so all important that the girls should
receive a complete education. In one view, this tendency of the times is
of great value. The years spent in teaching are often the most valuable
training for the work of the mother. No other employment calls for a
greater exercise, and hence, a greater development, of the directive
power, and of the knowledge of human nature which will enable her well
and wisely to direct her children, successfully to grapple with the
"servant problem," and to sweep a large circle of details within the
compass of generalized rules. She has learned what industry means, not,
as was said by a Christian writer of the thirteenth century, only "to
pray to God, to love man, to knit and to sew." She has not
"everlastingly something in her hand, though no one profits by her
labor, and she is reduced to look for her sole reward in civil speeches
made for useless gifts, or insincere praise of household ornaments that
are in everybody's way," covers, and covers for covers, and covers for
covers of covers.
Many women "are busy, very busy; they have hardly time to do this thing,
because they really wish, or ought to do that, but with all their
driving, their energy is entirely dissipated, and nothing comes from
their countless labors," and I ask, in the words of a Russian woman, "Is
it not a great loss to the economy of society when such an amount of
strength is wasted and leaves behind it no good work!"
But many persons continually pursue self-contradictory ends, simply for
the reason that their education has been so narrow and limited that they
are not able to see these ends as self-contradictory.
Indeed, there are other disabilities than the physical for the duty of a
mother. "The want of self-control that comes of an objectless life, the
uninquiring habit of frivolous employment, disable her from fulfilling
this duty, and to remain a child does not give the ability to educate
children."[21] The power of independent thinking, without which there
can be no judgment, and which alone frees the soul, the real mother must
have, and our girls should be most carefully educated into it.
Which course, then, will be best to fit the average child for her future
work in the active world, a course of private lessons, or the life of
the school, which is in itself a miniature world, where she learns to
measure her own acquirements and character by those of others, and is
educated into the knowledge that individual caprice cannot be allowed as
a rule of conduct? And is there any country in the world whose citizens
need to learn a respect for law more than in America?
As to the branches which girls have the ability successfully to pursue,
the question is no longer an open one. The experiments at Oberlin,
Antioch, the Northwestern University, Michigan University, Vassar and
many other institutions, not to go out of our own country, are
sufficiently positive and conclusive to convince the most
incredulous.[22] If the question be as to the branches which she ought
to pursue, that is also to some extent settled. The courses of study
which are laid down for students in European and American universities,
represent simply the condensed judgment of centuries of experience and
induction as to the means by which the human intellect may be most
surely strengthened and developed. They are the results of long
generalization, and are founded deep on a knowledge of the human mind.
Shall we venture to depart from the old ways, and to decry the customs
handed down to us from the ages gone by? Do we not know that the wisdom
of twenty centuries, as to the best means for developing the human mind,
is greater than the knowledge of one? Since we are "heirs of all the
ages," why throw away our inheritance?
In one word, our girls should be so educated intellectually that there
will no longer be any internal barriers to their progress, and when this
is done they will find that the external barriers, against which they
fret themselves, have disappeared. When Britomart had fairly conquered
and bound with his own chains the enchanter within the castle, she
found, as she passed out, that the castle walls, the iron doors and the
fire which had barred her entrance had no longer any existence. We can
yet afford to learn lessons of wisdom from the prophetic "woman's poet"
of the sixteenth century.
Whether our school girls and college girls will be injured physically,
mentally or morally, by granting to the boy and man students, in our
high schools and universities, the advantage of fellow-workers of the
other sex, is a question which, though practically settled to a large
extent by experience, ought not perhaps to be passed over here in
entire silence. One very curious feature of this question with regard to
the education of our girls seems to be this: those who are most urgent
that the question should be decided by facts do not bring them forward,
but base their position on general principles assumed, and on theory. As
has been well said by President White, of Cornell, to seek for
information on the real results, so far, of the experiment in our
colleges from the authorities of colleges that have never tried it,
would be to commit the same absurdity as "if the Japanese authorities,
aroused to the necessities of railroads and telegraphs, had corresponded
with eminent Chinese philosophers regarding the ethics of the subject,
instead of sending persons to observe the working of railroads and
telegraphs where they were already in use." Where inquiries were made of
universities which had never tried the experiment, "the majority of
responses were overwhelmingly against the admission of women. It was
declared to be 'contrary to nature,' 'likely to produce confusion,'
'dangerous,' 'at variance with the ordinances of God;' in short, every
argument that a mandarin would be sure to evolve from his interior
consciousness against a railroad or a telegraph which he had never
seen."
I am not forgetful that the high ground of philosophy is the only proper
one from which to settle the question of the sphere of any human being,
and what education will fit her for it; but after this has been done, if
special objections are raised against the possibility or advisability,
in a utilitarian or physiological point of view, such special
assertions, in default, from their very nature, of any other possible
demonstration, must be proved or disproved by experience--and yet these
material facts are not allowed in evidence by those who theoretically
insist most vigorously upon facts.[23] The opponents of higher
education for women, which practically is the same thing as
co-education, have within a few years shifted their ground. At first it
was asserted that woman was not equal, mentally, to the thorough
mastering of the higher branches of study. Having been driven from that
position by the indisputable evidence of percentages on written
examinations, they have taken up their new position with the assertion
that women are not able physically to pursue a thorough and complete
course of study--for, I repeat again, that for the masses, co-education
and higher education for women are practically one and the same thing.
In this position of the question, we have only two things for which to
be profoundly thankful: The first is that we, as living women, are
asserted by no one to be composed of more than two parts--spirit and
body. The second is, that we have in our own hands, at last, the means
of finally disposing of this question, by disproving the second
assertion.
To us as women, as wives, as mothers, as older sisters, as friends, as
teachers, as college girls, as school girls, and to us alone, the
settlement of the question has at last been fairly handed over. We have
only, in all these relations, to learn the laws of physical health, and
to obey them, and the whole matter will be set forever at rest. We have
only to see to it, day and night, that our girls are educated into
proper ways of living as regards food, clothing, sleep and exercise,
till we have created for them a second nature of fixed, correct
physical habits--and we alone can do this--and the end is at hand. We
have at last the right to settle our own questions conceded to us. The
responsibility of the decision, whether our girls are to have what we
demand for them--nay, what they themselves are eagerly and persistently
demanding, is decided, by the new position, to belong to us, and to us
alone. Responsibility means duty. Are we ready to accept the one, and to
perform the other?
FOOTNOTES:
[16] On this statement we may perhaps rest, as our present distinct
object is to illustrate mind, and not matter; though any reader will, of
course, be entitled to his own "mental reservations" on the other side,
and his own ideas on the subject of Attraction, etc.
[17] When those who are supposed to be the educated women of America are
really educated, we shall not be pained through our sympathies, in view
of such wide-spread evil as the following paragraph from a recent
editorial of a leading New York journal would seem to attest.
"It must be confessed, we fear, that wives and mothers are responsible
for no little of our too general disinclination for that steady,
persevering pursuit of high intellectual aims, of which Agassiz was such
a bright example. They are naturally ambitious of the outward signs of
social position, and also, on account of those they love, eager for the
solid advantages to be obtained by money. They are not content if they
cannot be dressed as finely and 'receive' as elegantly as their friends
do; and, also, they fret if their children do not have such advantages
of education and association as will secure for them an enviable future.
And thus, husbands and fathers are driven, not only to ceaseless
labor--that they would bear willingly--but to the abandonment of their
best-loved pursuits, and their highest, most cherished purposes. Thus,
money-productiveness comes to be the test of the value of all
intellectual labor, even with men who would gladly devote their lives to
science or to literature, and perhaps be willing, for themselves, even
to be poor in a society in which poverty is almost a reproach. Thus it
is that high aspirations are checked, and that strong resolves are
broken. And thus it will be, until we have advanced to such a point of
civilization and culture that we shall award that something which is
only expressed by the word 'consideration' to other eminence than that
which is attained in politics or in trade."
I venture the question with extreme diffidence, but would not this
broader education of future wives and mothers save perhaps so much new
legislation on the subject of divorce as is now in progress in those
parts of the country most characteristically American?
[18] "We are imperfect beings, and in nothing more imperfect than in our
power of appreciating each other's mental suffering. We see the odd
contortions to which they give rise without seeing the reasons for them,
and they are to us fit subjects for caricature. We all know Mrs.
Pardiggle and Mrs. Jellyby, but few who have not borne it, know the pain
of the pressure from within that forces natural activity into such
distorted motion."--Mary Taylor, _First Duty of Women._
[19] "Young America is conceited, disrespectful, does not honor
over-much his mother. Commonly he soon outstrips, or thinks he
outstrips, her mental attainments. Her stature dwindles as his
increases. At best, in his fancied greatness, he pities while he loves
her. But what if she has traversed every inch of these intellectual
regions before him, has scaled those heights, has conquered those
enemies, has looked deeper into those mysteries, is superior at every
point, can in an instant flood his darkness with light, sweeps with
steady gaze the circumference of his groping thought, and shows him ever
an angelic intellect as well as a mother's heart! With such a mother,
filial love would almost become worship.
"How much of Francis Bacon's greatness was due to his mother, who was
the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to King Edward VI.? Every
evening when Sir Anthony came home, he taught his daughter the lessons
he had given to his royal pupil. Anne Cooke mastered Latin, Greek, and
Italian, and became eminent as a scholar and translator, and she taught
her son. A suggestion of Bacon's reverence for her, some conception of
what he felt that he owed her, may be gained from the touching request
in his will that he might be buried by her side. 'For my burial, I
desire it may be in St. Michael's Church at Gorhambury, for there is the
grave of my mother.'"--_Address of Homer B. Sprague, at the laying of
the corner-stone of Sage College, Cornell University._
[20] For a full and masterly discussion of this subject, its evils and
remedies, I must refer to the report on the St. Louis Public Schools for
the year 1871-2, by Wm. T. Harris, Superintendent, p. 80 _et seq._
[21] A Mary Taylor, _First Duty of Women_, p. 93, Emily Faithfull,
London, 1870.
[22] Extracts from the last two Reports of the President of Michigan
University on this point will be found in the Appendix.
[23] On the subject of Co-education, I refer again to the Report of Wm.
T. Harris, Superintendent of the Public Schools of St. Louis, for
1869-70, p. 17 _et seq._, where the actual effects, physical, mental and
moral are given in detail.
"The one that received the seed into the good ground is the one
that heareth the word and understandeth it."
MORAL EDUCATION;
OR,
THE CULTURE OF THE WILL.
"In hire is hye bewte withouten pryde,
Youthe withouten grefhed or folye;
To all her werkes vertue is her gyde,
Humblesse hath slayen in her, tyrrannye,
She is mirrour of alle curtesye;
Hir perte is verray chambre of holynesse,
Her hand mynistre of fredom and almesse."
--CHAUCER, MAN OF LAWES TALE.
The thorough education of the Will is that which renders the pupil
1. Civilized,
2. Moral,
3. Religious.
If educated into a civilized being, she learns to subject her own
natural and unregulated--her savage will, we might say--to the customs
and habits of civilized society. If educated into a moral being, she
learns to subject her will, not to the idea of what is agreeable or
useful, but to the idea of what is simply right. If educated into a
religious being, she learns to submit her will to the Divine Will, and
in her relation to God, she first becomes freed from the bonds of all
finite and transitory things, and attains to the region where perfect
obedience and perfect freedom coincide.[24] A woman who is virtuous, so
to speak, with regard to the first, might be characterized as polite;
she who is virtuous in regard to the second, as conscientious; and she
who is virtuous in regard to the third, as humble. She who is all these
may be said to have been thoroughly educated as to her Will. The culture
of the Will may be, then,
1. Social,
2. Moral,
3. Religious.
In this realm, as in that of the intellect, the process of education
consists in developing a spiritual being out of a natural being. It is
the clothing, or rather, the informing of the natural with the
spiritual. The part of education which relates to the social life is
almost entirely given to the parents; and generally, from the great
demands which business makes on the father, it falls almost wholly into
the hands of the mother. It is she who must train the little girl into
habits of neatness, of obedience, of order, of regularity, of
punctuality--small virtues, but the foundation stones of a moral
character, and into habits of unselfishness and of politeness.
_Social Culture._--Neatness in person, as in dress, is not natural to
the woman of a savage tribe, neither is it a characteristic of hermits.
It is the product of civilized society. It is a recognition, in some
sense, of the equality of others to one's self, a bending of the
undisciplined will to the pleasure and satisfaction of others. Like all
other habits, it becomes, in time, agreeable to the person who practises
it, but the first training into it, is a painful struggle.
Do we not all remember that in the picture painted by the melancholy
Jacques of the shadow side of human existence, the "_shining_ morning
face" of the child was not forgotten as one of the shadow tints of that
stage of life?
The education into habits of neatness is almost entirely in the hands of
the mother or of her deputies. She herself then must be thoroughly
educated into it, and it were well that she remembered and taught her
daughters to remember, that real neatness includes the unseen as well as
the seen. Neatness has a moral significance not to be despised, for
though it is true that the dress is an index of the character, and that
external neatness habitually covering untidy underclothing, is only
typical of some moral unsoundness, it is equally true that there is an
influence in the other direction, from the external, inwards. The habit
of neatness furnishes soil in which the tree of self-respect may begin
its growth. Do we not all know that a child behaves better in clean
clothes than in soiled ones? And has there not been a perceptible
elevation in the real character of the city police since they were
dressed in neat uniforms? I know that the fact that they are in
_uniform_ touches another point, and yet it is not all. If instead of
setting the beggar on horseback, we clothe him in clean and neat
garments, we all know that we have given him an impulse in the direction
of the good.
Obedience is perhaps the next habit to be spoken of. Unquestioning
obedience we must demand from the child for her own safety. It may often
be a question of life and death whether the little girl runs when she is
called, or throws away something which she has in her hand, instead of
putting it into her mouth. But has not this habit of obedience a higher
office than this? It is the first yielding of the untrained will to
rightful authority, and as such, has an immense significance. The mother
who cannot train her daughters and sons to obedience were better
childless, for she is but giving to her country elements of weakness,
not elements of strength. She is furnishing future inmates for jails,
penitentiaries, and prisons, and putting arms into the hands of the
enemies of law and order. And yet, how can a woman who has no clear
ideas herself of what should be demanded and enforced, and hardly a
sufficient command of language to express directions clearly, who was
never taught herself to obey, and who has no definite idea of what end
she really wishes to attain, educate her children into obedience? A
sense of exact justice, a persistent attention, and a consistent thought
are necessary. Has the education which we have been giving our girls
tended to develop these? Are they not "developed only by mental work in
those very directions which have scarcely heretofore formed a part of
the education of our girls?" Does not the welfare of the country
imperatively demand that we give those who are to be the only educators
of the children in their first and decisive years, a thorough, slow, a
well-founded and finished education?
Order, in any of its manifestations, is not natural to the race. But the
very nature of civilization forces it upon us. We may yield our will at
first to its demands, or we may oppose, but it will not take a very long
time in the latter case for the demands of social life to give us so
great an amount of annoyance, that the pain of the inconvenience
incurred will far outweigh the pleasure of lawlessness in this respect.
Here, also, the mother is supreme, though the teacher should come to her
aid very effectually when the school-days begin, and here I touch a
subject which demands a little more attention than has hitherto been
paid to it, for too much cannot be said of the great significance of
rules as educators in girls' schools. It is allowed in very large
schools, and where boys and girls are brought together, that there must
be strict rules, because large masses cannot be successfully managed
without; but it is generally taken for granted in a girls' school, and
where the numbers are small, that very little or no discipline is
required or even desirable. This view follows logically enough if one
assumes that the object of discipline is the present good of the school
as a whole. But if we assume that its prime object is the future benefit
of the pupils, individually, it will follow that the size of the school
is not an element which should enter into the question at all, and this
is the basis which I assert to be the only true one.
I do not deny that there may be too many rules. One may endeavor to
hedge pupils around with arbitrary prohibitions, but any attempt at
this, like any other unreasonable action, will soon result in its
opposite, so that the two extremes are ultimately the same in effect.
Many persons speak and act as if they believed rules to be in
themselves only a necessary evil, of which the less we have the better,
and an entire absence of which would be the desirable state. Rousseau
might be said to be the leader of this class, educationally speaking,
for this is pre-eminently the doctrine which he teaches, though I fancy
that those who object most to rules are not often aware that they are
arraying themselves under his banner.
That school-work should go on in regular routine, that a regular order
should be established, and that no slight cause should be suffered to
break this, that there should be some well-defined and regular order in
which pupils should come to and go from their hourly duties--the
importance of these things to quiet and economy of time is as nothing,
compared to the results of regulations like these on the intellectual
and moral character. The daily and hourly habit in external observances
repeats itself in habits of thought and study. Unconsciously, facts are
learned, and thoughts take on regular habits, and the impress made by
the silent work of years is ineffaceable. It will show itself, in years
to come, if we refer only to so-called "practical" things--and this is
what our condemners of rules are seeking for,--in well-ordered homes,
where each duty has its appointed time, and where the necessary labor
goes on so regularly that it is hardly noticeable, except in an absence
of all confusion and a permanent sense of quiet;--homes where, because
of this regularity, time will remain for higher culture, and the whole
family will be elevated thereby.
Closely connected with this matter of regularity is that of Punctuality,
which should be no less trained at school into a habit, and the effect
of which, on the moral character, is no less important. As far as
school goes, punctuality is necessary in order that work be thoroughly
done, and that time be saved. But it is not for this reason so much as
for the far-reaching influences on the whole character, that the little
girl should be made to feel it a matter of importance that she is in her
seat when the bell strikes, and that she is ready for her work at the
precise minute appointed. Is it not at once seen how a requisition of
this kind will gently force her into habits of order? If she suffer for
being late, because, when she started for school she could not find her
rubbers or gloves, she will be more careful the next day that they are
in their proper places. If she is late at recitation because her pencil
was not to be found at the call, she will finally conclude that it would
be a better plan to keep arithmetic, slate and pencil together; and so,
almost insensibly, her books and appointments generally will fall into
groups and classes in her desk. Not only there, but at home, will the
same effect be seen; and not only now, but through all her life, the
habit will run. It needs only a moment's reflection to show how great
will be the result. Accustomed to collect her thoughts at a certain
time, for a certain work, she will have acquired a mastery over them
which will make her self-controlled, ready in emergencies, and able to
summon her whole mental power at will for any work when it may be
necessary.
Again, that silence should be enforced in school may be desirable for
the immediate quiet resulting therefrom, but that the continual impulse
to talk should be restrained and held in check by the will, till the
subjection of impulse to will shall become a daily and hourly habit, is
a matter of no less than infinite moment.
And the wise teacher, who must always look beyond the present and
immediate result, to its future and mediate consequences, works
steadily, through the enforcement of such regulations, on the formation
of the character of the child under her influence, basing her action on
the rational foundations of the Science of Education, and mindful ever
that the so-called intellectual part of her work will not be well
performed if these be neglected.
Laws and rules are, to her, not an unfortunate necessity, inseparable
from society, but the divinely-appointed means whereby the human soul
shall attain perfect development; not a record of rights grudgingly
surrendered by the individual for temporal advantage, but the voluntary
placing under foot of capricious impulses, that by this renunciation the
individual may ascend to his own noblest freedom.
Do not the very weaknesses, habits and failures, which are considered
especially feminine, result from the general lack in a proper
appreciation of the educational value of strict and exactly enforced
rules? It is because little girls have not, in their educative process,
been forced to accept the responsibility, and to suffer the results of
their own deeds, that they are, in after life, placed in false and
ridiculous positions, when they are forced to come in contact, whether
in housekeeping or in business, with the rational regulations of
business life. They expect, and take, special privileges, and feel
themselves aggrieved if these are not accorded; they continually place
their own individual opinions or fancies alongside of the necessary laws
of trade, as if the two were to be balanced for a single moment; they
have not learned that there are times when silence is better than
speech, and they seem to think that a polite apology ought to be
accepted by the president and directors of a bank, in lieu of the
payment at the proper time of a protested note.
That these follies are universally characterized, wherever they occur,
by the term "a woman's way of doing business," is sufficient proof that
they are characteristic of the majority of women; but that the cause of
the trouble lies, not in their nature, but in their education is proved
by the fact that wherever women have received a thorough business
training, these charming and bewildering feminine characteristics, which
render them only a source of confusion, are not found. Co-education is,
in this respect, of incalculable good to our American girls, for the
necessary laws of rational discipline, in a mixed school, must bear as
well on the girls as on the boys, and the result is, if possible, of
greater value to the girls than to the boys.
When we tell the little girl that she must not insist on keeping all her
playthings tightly hugged to her bosom, and persuade her to allow her
sister to look at or play with them, when the little arms are slowly
unfolded and the toy half hesitatingly handed over, we behold the
bending of a natural will, and one of the first victories of the
spiritual being. There is a great struggle going on in the tiny thought.
She is probably too young to be amenable to reasoning, and simply yields
to the force of the already acquired habit of obedience, or to the force
of her affection.
But if she do not yield, if she still hugs the toys in her natural
selfishness, shall we be _educating_ her if by physical pain we force
her to drop them? A single illustration and question of this kind will
show how large interests are involved in what is seemingly so simple a
matter. The question of how we shall deal with her to force her to do
what she ought to do, cannot be answered without first determining what
is the end in view. Have we simply in mind as an end that the other
child shall have some of the toys in that particular instance, or is it
the training, the education of the untrained will, of which we are
thinking? And yet the question must be decided at once. The pouting
child stands there in full possession of all the playthings, her arms
rosy with the strain, and the other child, quite as natural, quite as
untrained, is perhaps preparing to take her share by violence, and cries
aloud for justice. Is it not manifest that every mother--that every
woman who may have the care of children, should be so educated that she
may guide her conduct in every such emergency by some established
principles, and with a clear vision of causes and results? How many such
questions come up for settlement in the course of twelve hours, only a
woman who has had for a day the charge of two or three young children
can know; and how often has she, in the course of half an hour, either
from the result of her decision, or from her own reflection, become
convinced that she has done exactly the thing which she ought not to
have done! This would not be so often the case if our girls were really
educated.
We hold a general in the army responsible for the mistakes of execution
made under his orders, and if he commit many, we assert him to be
incompetent, half-educated, and demand that he be superseded.
We put a girl who has never had the chance for any study or
comprehension of the only thought which could give a rational ground for
such decisions, at the head of a family, and when, either in devotion to
interests which she practically thinks of greater importance, or in
despair at her own want of success, fretted and worried beyond the
power of endurance, she fails in nervous health and gives up the care of
her children to ignorant nurses, we wonder that American children are so
unruly. We sow the wind and we reap the whirlwind, but the sowing was
done long ago in the narrow and unfinished education which we gave to
our girls, now the mothers.
Politeness does not consist in any outside mannerisms, nor is it simply
kindness. It consists, as a wiser than I has said, in treating every
person as if she were what she might be, instead of what she actually
is. A person tells us what we know not to be true. We do not contradict
her, which would be treating her as if she intended to tell a lie,
though we may be convinced that such was the actual case, but we treat
her as if she intended to be a scrupulously truthful person. We speak
not to _her_ then, but to a non-existing ideal of her, when we ask her
politely whether she may not be mistaken, or when we do not answer at
all, thereby assuming that her statement was correct. Or a
self-important salesman insists, very impolitely, because he thereby
implies that we know nothing of what we desire, that the piece of goods
which we are examining is of charming colors, tastefully combined, and
is in fact the very thing which we most need. If we answered him as our
natural impulse prompts, "according to his folly," we simply treat him
as what he actually is, and we are as impolite as he. The woman who has
been educated into true politeness answers him, if she answer him at
all, as if he were what he actually is not, a better judge of her needs
than she herself is. And so with all cases of politeness.
It is manifest that no manual of manners or etiquette of polite society
can be of the slightest avail, and all such would seem beneath notice
here, were it not evident from the number of such books published, and
the number sold, that there is a large demand for them.
Nothing to an observer can be a more comic sight than the result
produced on manners by their faithful study. It is sufficient for us to
try to imagine the man who of all our acquaintance is the most truly and
exquisitely polite, endeavoring to follow out the cast-iron rules
contained in these books, for us to appreciate the difference between
the politeness which springs from within and that which is only a shabby
veneering. Of American mothers and American teachers what proportion
are, by having attained a mastership in this art of politeness, fully
able to educate our girls into it? Are we not a sadly uneducated people?
But there is still something else to be done. In the unrestrained and
affectionate intercourse of the family, the girl has not felt the
necessity of concealing in any degree her real self. She is under an
observation that is intelligent and sympathetic, and she is sure of the
kindest construction of all her actions. If she talks or laughs loudly,
for instance, it is not supposed that this springs from a desire to
attract attention, but from the natural, innocent overflowing of
healthful spirits, and a forgetfulness of self. But her social education
cannot be called finished till she has in some measure been taught to
distrust others. She must learn that society is not one vast family,
abounding in sympathy, and always ready to put the kindest construction
on her words and actions. She must learn this sooner or later. Shall she
learn it by mortifying experiences, by finding herself often in absurd
and annoying positions, by having her confidence betrayed, and the
outspoken utterances resulting from her very purity of thought made the
occasion of coarse remarks and suspicions; or shall she be guarded
against all these by being taught that she must not give all the world
credit for being as pure and innocent as she? We must so educate her
that she will not lightly give her confidence, or show to uninterested
persons too much of her real self. In other words, we must educate her
into a reserve, into the gentle, unoffending dignity which holds all but
the nearest and dearest at a little distance from herself. This is not
teaching deceit. It is only teaching what must be learned, the means of
"possessing one's self in peace." The majority of our girls who talk and
laugh loudly on Broadway, do not do this to attract attention. They do
it simply because their education on this point is not yet completed. A
slight indication of the same defect in education is the profusion of
endearing pet names, which we find in the published catalogues of girl
students. If the girls themselves do not realize the impropriety of thus
publishing to a world of careless strangers, the names which family
affection has bestowed upon them, should not the teachers who compile
the catalogues, direct and overrule their uneducated taste? It is only
necessary to imagine the catalogue of Harvard or Yale, printed in the
same manner, to make manifest, even to the girls themselves, the want of
proper dignity displayed. Men, in their intercourse with the world,
learn sooner than women, by the rough teaching of experience, the
necessity of fending in their inner selves from the outer world. But
both boys and girls might be saved much time and pain, if parents and
guardians recognized more clearly that this was a part of education.
But in all the training of the will on this social side, we must never
forget, and here lies the greatest problem for the educator, that
individuality is not to be sacrificed, that it must be most jealously
preserved. We have only to remember what has been so often said before,
that education consists, not in destroying, but in training. The will is
only to be directed, never to be broken, or even weakened, and she who
endeavors to do this is working in the interest of evil and not of good,
while she who should, if it were possible, succeed in it, would have, as
the result of her efforts, only a total ruin instead of a fair and
stately edifice. It may often, indeed, become her duty to strengthen it,
for without a strong will, the moral nature will fall a prey to the
forces of evil as surely and quickly as the body, deprived of the life
principle, rushes to corruption and disintegration.
* * * * *
_Moral Culture._--In the previous division, the will has been supposed
to be guided by the educator, but now another guide is to be followed,
for it becomes the work of the educator to teach that "nothing in the
world has any absolute value except Will guided by the Right." We must
presuppose before we can produce any great effect in this direction a
considerable education of the intellect, in order that the child may
have some intelligent idea of the Right, otherwise we shall be leaving
her to the saddest mistakes. The African chief, who, being convinced
that it was right for him, before baptism, to dispense with one of his
two wives, for both of whom he had a sincere affection, performed, so
far as he knew, a highly virtuous action in eating one of them, and no
girl whose intellect has not been well trained can safely be delivered
over to the direction of her own conscience. The Spanish and the French
mothers tacitly recognize the truth of this proposition, by the
constant surveillance which they exercise over their daughters. It is
contrary to the whole spirit of our American life to be so watchful. By
so much the more, then, ought we to see to it, that the conscience, to
whose custody American mothers hand over their daughters' actions, be an
enlightened one. No merely prescriptive external rules, borrowed from
society when the mothers were girls, can fully answer the purpose. These
may do for communities that are comparatively stationary, but in our
rapidly moving American life, our girls must have a more stable guide.
It is not often recognized that the cause of much chafing and worry in
American homes--a chafing and a worry which is scarcely found in
Europe--is only this truly American phenomenon of rapid national
growth.[25] The mother who was educated only thirty years ago finds
herself unable to understand her daughter's restlessness. As great a
distance divides the thought of the mother and daughter in America as in
Germany lies between the great-grandmother and the great-granddaughter,
and these latter named relatives are, by a wise provision of Providence,
not often permitted to come into contact at the time when the girl
begins to assert her own individuality, and hence, the chafing referred
to above, is saved. If Methuselahs were not exceptional in these days in
America, who can estimate to how great a degree the unavoidable friction
of family society would be increased!
We must never, in this question of education, forget for one moment the
peculiar conditions which surround our girls, from the peculiarities of
national government and society. Again, then, it is, in this point of
view, of imperative importance that our girls be allowed, nay, forced,
to complete their intellectual education.
We have now so to educate the girl that she shall do what is right,
simply because it is right, and not because it is useful or politic so
to do; that she shall abstain from what is wrong, simply and, only
because it is wrong, and not because it will be harmful to her if she do
not. These two statements would, however, be fully expressed by the
first one, for it is evident that if she always do what is right she
will never be able to do what is wrong, and positive education is much
better than negative, and an active, better than a passive state of
mind. In the first years of the little girl's life this lesson can be
impressed upon her only by example, and fortunate have those of us been
who, both in grandmother and mother, from our earliest childhood up, can
remember no single instance, however trifling, of deviation from
obedience to the "stern daughter of the voice of God." Though at first
we did not know what the power was, we felt, through all our childish
consciousness, that there was a power behind the throne from which our
laws emanated, whose voice was authority itself. Some of us may even
recall the impression made upon us, as clear now as in the long gone
years, when we distinctly formulated in words, with a certain sense of
satisfaction, the conviction that "even grown-up people cannot do as
they please;" and yet, that the power which prevented this doing as they
pleased was neither fashion, nor custom, nor the opinion of society.
Let the little girl be so educated that "while she praises and rejoices
over, and receives into her soul, the good, and becomes noble and good,
she will justly blame and hate the bad, now in the days of her youth,
even before she is able to know the reason of the thing, and when Reason
comes, she will recognize and salute her as a friend with whom her
education has made her long familiar."[26]
But when the girl is older, and especially at the time when the whole
character is most impressible, this part of education can be firmly laid
in the cement of rational conviction, and if it is laid on no shifting
sands of contradictory character in the educator, we may safely trust to
its enduring support. There must be no compromise here. The doctrines
that the good are happy, that honesty is the best policy, etc., are of
no avail. They will not do as a guide for life, and the sooner American
mothers and teachers learn this, the better for America.
When the girl yields in every direction unquestioning obedience to Duty,
she is virtuous, and she is virtuous only in so far as she does this.
But as duty rules in every direction, to God, to the State, Society, the
Family, and ourselves, and as her voice is as authoritative at one time
as at another, it follows that no one virtue can be said to be superior
to any other. Those of us who have had the widest experience have
learned that the whole hierarchy of virtues generally stand or fall
together, for they are all only the making actual of simple duty.
I quote again from Rosenkranz, with regard to a habit often found among
girls: "The pupil must be warned against a certain moral negligence,
which consists in yielding to certain weaknesses, faults or crimes, a
little longer and a little longer, because he has fixed a certain time,
after which he intends to do better. Perhaps he will assert that his
companions, his surroundings, his position must be changed before he can
alter his internal conduct. Wherever education or temperament favors
sentimentality, we shall find birthdays, New Year's day, confirmation
day, etc., selected as these turning points. It is not to be denied that
man proceeds, in his internal life, from epoch to epoch, and renews
himself in his most internal nature, nor can we deny that moments like
those mentioned are especially favorable in man to an effort towards
self-transformation, because they invite introspection; but it is not to
be endured that the youth, while looking forward to such a moment,
should consciously persist in his wrong doing. If he does, when the
solemn moment which he has set, at last arrives, he will, at the
stirring of the first emotion, perceive with terror that he has changed
nothing in himself, that the same temptations are present to him, and
the same weakness takes possession of him. * * * In morality there are
no vacations and no interims."[27]
The power of voluntary Renunciation is another power which the educator
has to develop in the girl. It can be cultivated, of course, only by
judicious exercise.
But the formation of Character is the great work of the educator, for
this may be said to be the object of a woman's existence. Character has
been defined as "a completely fashioned Will"--_i.e._, a completely
educated Will. If it is "completely fashioned," it must of necessity be
consistent. It is scarcely necessary here to call attention to the fact
that by character, in any educational sense, we mean that which the
woman really is--not what she is thought to be by others.
Character may, it is evident, be either good or bad; for one may be
consistently bad as well as consistently good. But we are concerned only
with the building of character where that building means the "making
permanent the direction of the individual Will towards the actualization
of the good."
The woman of good character is she who, while she acts spontaneously,
acts in all things consistently; the parts of whose life grow together,
as it were, into one organic unity. We know what to expect of her. In
her friendship we confide, on her love we safely rely, by her judgment,
provided she has been intellectually educated, we regulate our action in
times of difficulty and distress. "The heart of her husband doth safely
trust in her, and her children rise up and call her blessed," and when
she passes through the gate of death, her country should mourn, for it
can ill-afford to miss her.
RELIGIOUS CULTURE.
When the girl has learned to accept duty as the decisive guide of her
actions, she is acting conscientiously, and passes over into the real
religious life. A distinction must be here made between Religion and
Theology, the latter of which belongs to special educators. At first, in
the child, religion is a feeling, a sentiment, which the mother
generally fosters and directs. It appears in the form of wonder at
natural phenomena, of fear and terror when these are disagreeable, and
of gratitude when they are agreeable. But this feeling or sentiment of
religion the savage has, and it properly belongs, in civilized Christian
communities, only to the period of childhood. If the little girl be not
educated into a higher religion than this, and if, at the same time, her
whole mental horizon have, from unfinished intellectual education,
remained narrow, she has nothing on which any teaching of Theology can
be based, and nothing which will bear the stress and strain of actual
life. In such a case--that is, if her religion is only gratitude for
favors, if her only idea of God is that of a Benefactor--when benefits
fail, her religion will fail also. While she has all that she can
desire, she is full of religious faith. She loses parents, husband, and
only child, and her faith has vanished, and she even doubts whether
there be any God, since he can allow so much misery. She asks why, if he
were good and kind and loved his children, he could not have divided his
gifts more equally, why he could not have taken one child from her
neighbor who has seven, instead of her one ewe lamb. Allowance must be
made for the first unreason of terrible torture to the affections, and
the first heart-broken exclamations are not always to be trusted as an
index of the religious faith. But when in many a woman, this becomes a
chronic state of mind, is it not a serious question for educators to
ask, whether the fault does not lie in her narrow education? Ought she
not to have had her intellect so cultured that she should be able to
hold at once in her thought, and without confusion, these two truths:
that God's thought and care for the Universe must be a thought of Law
which cannot be broken for individual cases, and also that even one
sparrow does not fall without his notice?
Ought she not to have been educated into so wide a horizon of thought
that she herself, and her affairs, her loves, and hates, should not loom
up before her in such disproportionate size? A woman is to live in her
affections? But what if her affections have been outraged, betrayed, or
crushed? The sentiment is a very good one, but it is but sentiment
still, and our American girls will not be less strong in their
affections if we educate them into thought and knowledge, as well as
into emotion and blind belief. If the mere religious feeling which
belonged to the child is not led over into a something stronger and
surer, it becomes morbid and degenerates into sentimentality and
mysticism. Can we afford to let the strong feeling in our American girls
be lost for all real good, in this way? Shall we not rather direct it by
a sound religious education, into more healthy channels? In such a
completed education alone can we find the ground for any active
acceptance of our lot. "The constant new birth out of the grave of the
past, to the life of a more beautiful future, is the only genuine
reconciliation with destiny."
* * * * *
Only when we have accomplished such an education as this for our
American girls, the best material the world has ever yet seen, may we
safely trust the interests of future generations to their strong,
intelligent, and religious guidance.
FOOTNOTES:
[24] I am following here, as elsewhere, the direction indicated by the
German philosopher, my obligations to whom I have before acknowledged,
and from whose work on the Science of Pedagogy I have so often quoted.
[25] We may, from the same cause, expect soon to detect signs of the
same trouble, to a marked degree, in Russia.
[26] Plato, _Rep._, Book III.
[27] _Pedagogics as a System._ Rosenkranz, p. 83, Published by William
T. Harris, St. Louis, Mo.
A MOTHER'S THOUGHT
ON THE
EDUCATION OF GIRLS.
"Why does the meadow flower its bloom expand?
Because the lovely little flower is free
Down to its root, and in that freedom bold.
And so the grandeur of the forest tree
Comes not from casting in a formed mould,
But from its own divine vitality."
A MOTHER'S THOUGHT
ON THE
EDUCATION OF GIRLS.
There is no situation in life more freighted with responsibility than
that of the mother of girls, be it one or many, the one as heavy as the
many, because the only child is less naturally situated; and therefore
upon the mother rests the necessity of intentionally providing many
influences which are spontaneously produced in a large and varied family
circle.
I emphasize also the responsibility of the education of girls over boys
for the same reason, because girls are more largely withdrawn from the
natural education of life and circumstances than boys, and their
development seems to depend more exclusively upon the individual
influence of the mother.
The public school, the play-ground, the freedom of boyish sports, the
early departure from home to college or business, the prizes offered to
ambition, all exercise a powerful influence upon the boy, tending to
modify the action of the mother's conscious training. More powerful than
her intellectual and determined effort is usually her affectional
influence, swaying him unconsciously and giving him always a centre for
his heart and life, to which he returns from all his wanderings.
For men, too, life, with all its evil, seems to be measurably adjusted.
We do not hear constant discussions of men's sphere and men's education.
Each man is left very much to work out his own career, without the
responsibility of the whole sex resting upon him. He is at liberty to
make mistakes in his medical practice, to blow up steamboats by his
carelessness, to preach dull sermons, and write silly books, without
finding his whole sex put under ban for his shortcomings, and so he
works with a sense of individual power and responsibility which calls
out his energies, and educates him even in spite of the foolish
cosseting of a mother or the narrow pedantry of a teacher.
But in regard to woman, there is a general confession that life is not
yet well adapted to her needs, or she to her place in the world. There
is a perpetual effort to readjust her claims, to define her position,
and to map out her sphere, and these boundary lines are arbitrarily
drawn at every conceivable distance from the centre, so that what seems
extravagant latitude to one, is far within the narrowest limits of
another.
Very few have arrived at the conclusion that woman's nature, like man's,
is self-determining, and that her character and her powers must decide
her destiny; that instead of prescribing the outward limits of her
action, the important point is to increase her energy, to regulate her
activity by self-discipline, to purify her nature by nobility of thought
and sentiment, and then to leave her free to work out her thought into
life as she can and must.
But this, it seems to me, should be the grand leading principle of a
mother in the education of her daughter, to give her such faith in
herself, such knowledge of the laws of her own being, such trust in the
guiding power of the universe, that she will have a principle of life
and growth within her which will react upon all outward circumstances
and turn them into means of education.
It is in this freedom alone that the essential meaning of her nature
will show itself. In free, conscious obedience to law, natural
limitations become a source of power, as the hardness of the marble
gives effect to the sculptor's forming stroke; but all arbitrary
restraints dwarf and deform the growing soul.
But in the very beginning a great difficulty meets the mother of the
girl who seeks to train her up into glad, free acceptance of life, for
instead of general rejoicing in the birth of her child, too often there
is a wail of discontent over the hapless infant who is "not a boy."
It is an idea very deeply grounded in our social feeling, that it is a
misfortune and an indignity to be a woman. True, all men do not, like
the Jews in the old service, insultingly thank God that he has not made
them women, while the meek woman plaintively thanks God that he has made
her at all. But how constantly is the thought and feeling expressed,
that the boy is a more welcome comer into the family circle than the
girl, and that the woman is to have a hard fate in life. And if the
popular idea of woman be true, is it not a great calamity to be born a
girl? "If man must work, and woman must weep," who would not choose the
former lot? It is a very common thing to hear women wish most earnestly
from their earliest to their latest hour of life, that they had been
born men. It is very rarely that the youngest boy wishes to be a girl,
or that men covet the vaunted privileges of womanhood.
Margaret Fuller alludes feelingly to this prevailing sentiment in her
noble _Essay on Woman_, and quotes Southey the despairing cry of the
Paraguay Woman, "lamenting that her mother did not kill her the hour she
was born--her mother, who knew what the life of a woman must be."
And yet, it seems to me, any woman is entirely unfit to educate her
daughter who has not so sifted her life experience, so learned the
meaning of her creation, so separated the accidents and follies of
to-day from the divine purpose, as to read clearly the meaning of life,
and to accept for her daughter, as for herself, the great fact of her
womanhood; not with submission merely, but with a joyful recognition of
its wonderful possibilities and its supreme glories.
That this is possible to achieve, I might bring the testimony of women
speaking from the midst of suffering and anguish, and yet rejoicing in
the spiritual ideal of womanhood. Mrs. Eliza Farnham has done great
service by her eloquent vindication of the claims of womanhood, which
she bases on very noble spiritual truths. But too often the high
estimate of woman is placed on purely æsthetic and sentimental grounds,
and does not satisfy the demands either of mind or heart in the hour of
trial, or the practical common sense applied to daily life. It hardly
strengthens a woman, to be told that women are more angelic by nature,
more amiable, more religious, and more holy than men, when she is
suffering from excessive nervous irritability, from neglected solitude,
from want of employment suited to her feeble powers, or from the unused
energies of mind and body which are devouring her day by day--to be
called an angel, when she is only a drudge, is not consoling.
The work must be begun early in life, and the mind of the girl must be
braced by a recognition of natural law to the acceptance of all the
conditions of her nature. But for this she must learn to distinguish
between the ideal and the actual, between woman's nature as God designed
it, and her nature as long years of hereditary sin and disease and false
custom have made it; between the unfallen Eve, the last best work of
Creation, and the daughters of corruption and luxury, bearing the sins
of their fathers and their mothers for more than three or four
generations.
The mother must be prepared to meet the terrible questionings of her
daughter on those points of physiology which are still baffling the most
candid observers.
She should prepare herself for this duty by obtaining all the knowledge
of the subject that is possible to her. She will find that the laws of
the human organization are marked by the same wisdom and beauty as those
of the physical world; and many things which seemed dark and cruel will
be seen to be beneficent and beautiful when their whole relation is
understood. She may then give some reasonable answer to the question
which the young intellect, struggling with the great problems of
physical life, is so prone to ask, "Why was I thus made?" It helps us
very much to learn the _how_, even if we can never solve the _why_.
Every mother has not the power to answer these questions scientifically;
but if she have it herself, she can at least inspire in her child a firm
faith that everything in creation has its meaning and its use, and that
until the workings of any function are made to promote the highest
health and welfare of every human being, its law has not been discovered
and obeyed.
The very search after the answer to her inquiry, is often the healthful
exercise of mind which will drive away morbid doubts.
Health is the holiness of the body, and every girl should have a high
standard of perfect health set before her, and be made to feel that she
has no more right to trifle with and disobey the hygienic laws, than
those of morality or civil society. She should be as much ashamed of
illness brought on by her own folly, as of being whipped at school for
disobedience to her teacher.
But how low, on the contrary, is the standard of health for woman! A
thoroughly strong, able-bodied woman is almost an unknown ideal to
American society.
A physician pleading before a legislative committee of Massachusetts a
few years ago, bade the gentlemen present he grateful for their happy
lot in being exempt from the infirmities that beset women. A very
admirable teacher once said to me, "I tell my girls they mustn't
complain if they do have to lose a year or two by ill health, it is
hardly to be expected they should not."
Michelet treats semi-invalidism as the natural, inevitable, and charming
condition of women. A perfectly healthy woman he considers to have lost
her great charm. Science makes the astonishing discovery, that on the
whole, women average a little smaller than men, and society seems to
accept the idea that therefore, the smaller they are, the more womanly.
But before we decide upon this puny condition as the necessary state of
woman, let us look at some of the facts on the other side, and see what
are the possibilities of physical strength and health compatible with
womanhood. In the University of Michigan, pursuing her studies equally
with the young men, is a young woman from Kentucky, who measures six
feet two inches in height, and is well proportioned. She has a younger
sister there who is already five feet eight inches high, and growing
very fast. At the South, the negro women performed every kind of labor
in the field, and were said to plough better than men. In Europe all
kinds of hard work are performed by poor women; even yoked with animals
for draught. In England women are employed in stacking large bars of
iron. In Dahomey the Amazonian guards of the king perform all military
duty with equal ease and thoroughness with men. Now, if these things be
possible to women of the poorer classes, and of other countries, it
proves that it is not her essential womanhood, but her artificial life
and her inherited weakness that makes the lady of Western Europe and
America an habitual invalid.
And this muscular power, though not the only essential to health, is of
the very first importance, and, within proper bounds, is absolutely
requisite for the healthy and full development of animal life. It is
possible to carry muscular activity too far, or rather to make it
exclusive of the exercise of other powers. The gladiator of old was not
found to make the best soldier, nor did the wood-cutter bear the
fatigues of the war as well as the cultivated citizen. But as a basis
for other culture it is all-important. And it is especially needful for
woman, for the great peculiar function of maternity requires the finest
muscular power. It is the want of it, among other causes, which produces
the pains and perils of child-birth, which are almost unknown to women
of savage life. "The women of Abyssinia," says a missionary there;
"never rest more than two or three days after child-birth," while in
luxurious Athens, where women of the higher ranks were kept alike from
physical and mental exertion, six weeks of seclusion was considered
absolutely necessary.
The German mother begins at the birth of her infant daughter to spin and
weave the linen which is to form her dowry in marriage. If all mothers
would begin to lay up for their daughters a dowry of muscular energy and
nervous strength from the time of their birth, how would the mythical
curse be removed from maternity, and the saddest of all deaths, that of
the young wife in the first child-birth, be as rare as it is in
Abyssinia.
The first requisite for the mother is to believe in a possible happy
destiny for her child, and to seek to secure it for her.
One great secret of all art, and therefore of all education, is the nice
balancing of the generic with the special or the individual. Coleridge
says "this is the true meaning of the ideal in art." False culture, by
the emphasis laid upon peculiarities of race, sex, or families, develops
these peculiarities more and more, and tends to produce monstrosities,
while nature always strives to mix the breed and restore the original
type.
Nature has her own boundaries, which she does not pass over, but they
are always delicate and nicely adjustable. When the gardener wishes
bleached celery, or seedless bananas, or monster squashes, he gives
special food in the soil of the plants, or covers them from the sun, or
nips off the spraying tendrils, that he may produce the variety he
covets, but when the farmer would raise corn or wheat for the millions,
he ploughs deep into the soil of the prairie, sows his seed broadcast,
and trusts it to the free influences of the sun and the winds, and the
harvest that he reaps is reproductive, and may be multiplied for
hundreds of years.
It is curious in tracing the progress of both vegetable and animal life
upwards towards humanity, to see how nature plays with the secondary
distinctions of sex. The great distinction always remains of the
fertilizing and the reproductive function; but as regards size, beauty,
the care of the young, and all moral and mental qualities, there is the
greatest diversity of manifestation. In some species, even, the male
builds the nest and protects the offspring from the ferocious mother,
who, like Saturn, devours her own children, and sometimes, among fishes,
even her mate. So is it in regard to the mental differences between men
and women. Few persons will deny that the difference of sex which runs
through creation, colors every part of life; and yet the difference is
so delicate, and so varied, that I have never heard any broad statement
which was not liable to sufficient exceptions to destroy its value. I
have again and again asked teachers of mixed schools, What difference do
you find bet
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