Sex and education: A reply to Dr. E. H. Clarke's "Sex in education."

SEX

AND

EDUCATION.

TO

DR. E. H. CLARKE'S "SEX IN

EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION,

BY MRS. JULIA WARD. HOWE.

BOSTON:

ROBERTS BROTHERS.
1874.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by

ROBERTS BROTHERS,

office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

7/ fr 2..T

Cambridge:
Press of John Wilson and Son.

CONTENTS.

PACK

INTRODUCTION 5

ART.

I. JULIA WARD HOWE 13

II. THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. (From the

"Woman's Journal," Nov. 8 and 15, 1873.) . 32

III. MRS. HORACE MANN 52

IV. ADA SHEPARD BADGER 72

V. CAROLINE H. DALL 87

VI. BY C 109

VII. ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS 126

VIII. FROM "BOSTON DAILY ADVERTISER" .... 139

IX. MERCY B. JACKSON 150

X. PROFESSOR BASCOM 164

XI. ABBY W. MAY 170

XII. MARIA A. ELMORE ....'. 174

XIII. A. C. GARLAND. (From " Providence Journal.") 183

TESTIMONY FROM COLLEGES 191

Vassar College 191

Antioch College 196

Michigan University . . . . 199

Lombard University 201

Oberlin College 202

—

-— THK '

XTtfivi

INTRODUCT

I DO not know that I can better introduce
this volume than by saying that it contains
the views of a number of thoughtful persons,
chiefly women, upon the matters treated of
in Dr. EDWARD H. CLARKE'S work entitled
44 Sex in Education," and upon the book
itself. Nearly all the papers here presented
were contributed to various publications soon
after the appearance of that book ; several
of them have been revised by their authors.
Each is an independent expression of opin-
ion, modified by no plan or intention of
subsequent combination. The general agree-
ment in their tenor, and the permission
to republish them at this time and in this
form, afford the only ground upon which

6 INTRODUCTION.

the Editor can assume to speak for their
authors. Her "we" therefore must be
taken with this limitation.

Most of the writers are experienced in
the office of tuition, and in the observa-
tion of its effects. All of them have
had occasion to form their own theories
of what is desirable for the improvement
of the condition of women. The facts
and experience of their lives have led
them far from Dr. Clarke's conclusions.
To most of them, his book seems to have
found a chance at the girls, rather than a
chance for them. All could wish that he
had not played his sex-symphony so harshly,
so loudly, or in so public a manner. But
since he has awakened public attention with
his discovered discord, all would gladly com-
bine in reassuring mankind of the compati-
bility of its foremost interests. Dr. Clarke's
discord exists not in nature, but in his own
thought. An appeal to the great laws of

INTRODUCTION. 7

harmony will be sure to solve it, and set it
out of sight

Most of us feel compelled to characterize
this book in one aspect as an intrusion into
the sacred domain of womanly privacy. No
woman could publish facts and speculations
concerning the special physical economy of
the other sex, on so free and careless a plane,
without incurring the gravest rebuke for
insolence and immodesty. And yet it is
important that mothers should know enough
of these to guide and influence their sons
in the right direction. But no man could
endure the thought of having the physical
functions peculiar to his sex so unveiled
before the common sight of society, so sug-
gested to and imposed upon its common
talk. However, then, people may differ
concerning the coarseness or refinement of
the book, all must, we think, agree that its
method violates the Christian rule of doing
to others exactly as we would have them do
to us.

8 INTRODUCTION.

Despite Dr. Clarke's prominent position
in this community, we do not feel compelled
to regard him as the supreme authority on
the subjects of which he treats. .'The ob-
ject, then, of our publication is twofold.
First and foremost we wish to put in a solid
and tangible form the impression which his
book makes upon men and women to whom
the interests of Woman and of Humanity
have long been the theme of careful study
and anxious thought. And in the second
place we desire to appeal to the wisdom
and chivalry of the two professions on whose
blended domain the book imposes its forced
and absolute conclusions.

To those most eminent in physics and
in sociology we would say : " Take the so-
cial mixture of to-day, with its antecedents
and concomitants. Analyze it fairly and
thoroughly; and then tell us if the over-
education of women is its most poisonous
ingredient."

INTRODUCTION. 9

To the high courts of education we
would say : " Remodel carefully your laws
and ordinances. The mischiefs arising
from the .'separation of the sexes during
the period of education are such as to
make their co-education imperative. Youth
cannot be driven and overworked in one
sex with more impunity than in the other.
Boys as well as girls break down under
severe study, men as well as women, and
at least as often. Let a milder and more
humane regime be devised and enforced.
No one loses health through the lessons
of wisdom wisely explained. It is the hur-
ried, undigested (also indigestible) tuition
which nauseates and fatigues. Let the
community be careful not only of what is
taught, but of how it is taught. And
above all, in view of the good of society,
let not man and woman, who are to be part-
ners in all the earnest tasks of life, come
forth from a separate and unequal disci-

I0 INTRODUCTION.

pline, to meet as strangers in their fiery
youth. What knowledge of character, what
insight into sympathy and compatibility,
may we not hope to find among young
people who have met in the august pres-
ence of wisdom and science; who have
assisted each other, not in the mazes of a
bewildering dance, but in noble operations
of intellect, in unravelling the problems of
the agesrin building the structure of the
social world ! "

And to parents may we not say : Do not
longer feel obliged to surrender your daugh-
ters, in the very bloom of their youthful
powers, to the unintelligent dominion of
Fashion. You subject them to the extrava-
gant, immodest rules of display; you ex-
pose them to the intercourse of flattery and
folly, to the poison of heated and crowded
rooms, late hours, and luxurious suppers.
You countenance the lavish waste of time,
talent, sensibility, and money, and all this

INTRODUCTION. 1 1

because without it your daughters may not
marry. And with it. indeed, they may not.
Take courage then, and come to a loftier
stand. Educate the future wives with the
future husbands. Give the two in common
the highest enjoyments and the happiest
memories. Then shall the marriage wreath
crown the pair in its true human dignity,
never to be displaced or lost.

J. w. H.

UNIVERSITY

SEX AND EDUCA

I.

BY JULIA WARD HOWE.

WHEN a book challenges public attention to
its especial object and intention, we may not
inappropriately deal with it before we consider
its author. As to the book, then, called " Sex
in Education," let us endeavor to make up our
minds concerning its character, before we pass
on to deal with the topics it suggests.

Is the book, then, a work of science, of litera-
ture, or of philosophy, or is it a simple practical
treatise on the care of health ? We should call
it none of these. It has neither the impartiality
of science, the form of literature, the breadth
of philosophy, nor the friendliness of counsel.

I4 SEX AND EDUCATION.

It is a work of the polemic type, presenting a
persistent and passionate plea against the admis-
sion of women to a collegiate education in com-
mon with men. The advisableness of such
education in common is a question upon which
people differ greatly in opinion. So many peo-
ple of conscience and intelligence hold opposite
theories concerning this, that it may be consid-
ered as a question fairly open to discussion, and
asking to be tested in the light of experience.
Dr. Clarke supports his side of the argument by
a statement of facts insufficient for his purpose,
and <by reasonings and inferences irrelevant to
the true lesson of these facts. He makes in
the first place a strange confusion between
things present, past, and future, and in the terror
of the identical education to come sees identical
education of the sexes in the past and present
as the cause of all the ills that female flesh is 2
heir to. He asserts the fact of an ascertained
and ever increasing deterioration in the persons
of American women from the true womanly
standard. He finds them tending ever more

SEX AND EDUCATION. j5

and more towards a monstrous type, sterile and
sexless ; and these facts, which some of us may
strongly doubt, he considers accounted for by
the corresponding fact that boys and girls re-
ceive the same intellectual education. *• Accord-
ing to him, you cannot feed a woman's brain
without starving her body. Brain and body are
set in antagonism over against each other, and
what is one organ's meat is another's poison.
Single women of the intellectual type he char-
acterizes very generally, not only as agamai,
but as agenes ; and his portraiture of them is
sufficiently revolting. The powerful influence
of climate is lightly estimated by him. One
hundred years would be insufficient to change
the stout, heavily boned English or Irish woman,
with her abundant covering of flesh, into the
wiry, nervous Yankee woman, characterized by
nerve and brain, The cause of all this, of the
undeveloped busts, fragile figures, and uncer-
tain health of American women, resides in the
fact that with us, as he says, girls and boys
receive the same education.

!6 SEX AND EDUCATION.

The periodical function peculiar to women is
a point upon which Dr. Clarke dwells with per-
sistent iteration. Its neglect he considers the
principal source of disease among the women
of our land. Its repression or over-produc-
tion are equally fatal to health ; and, in the
years which nature consecrates to its establish-
ment, the recurrence of the function should be
observed by the avoidance of bodily and men-
tal fatigue. Dr. Clarke's reasoning upon this
point affirms that American women neglect
care in this direction beyond all other women,
and that the school education which our girls
receive is the moving cause of this neglect.

We cannot remember a single point in Dr.
Clarke's diagnosis of American female hygiene
which is not included in the present rapid rJ-
sumtf. The Doctor's prognosis is even more dis-
mal and unpromising. Open the doors of your
colleges to women, and you will accomplish
the ruin of the Commonwealth. Disease — al-
ready, according to him, the rule among them
— will become without exception. Your girls

SEX AND ED L/C AT/ON. ij

will lose their physical stature, and your boys
their mental stature, since the tasks set for the
latter would be limited by the periodical dis-
ability of the girls. The result will be a physi-
cal and sexual chaos, out of which the Doctor
sees no escape save in an act akin to the rape
of the Sabines. Tennyson's line suits with
his mood : —

" I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky
race."

A number of persons have commented wisely
and wittily upon this book and its contents.
There is, perhaps, no need of any further de-
tailed criticism of its scope and statement. We
have endeavored to give its sense and spirit in
little. And we will supplement this synopsis
by giving as briefly our own impressions con-
cerning these.

To begin with the observance of the periodi-
cal function. This is a good old grandmotherly
doctrine, handed down from parent to child
through all the ages of humanity. Ignorance
of the laws of health would, no doubt, in all

SEX AND EDUCATION.

ages, induce young persons to disregard the
cautions of their elders on this as on other
points ; and the sharp proverb which tells what
young people think of old people, and what the
latter know of the former, must often recur to
the minds of elderly women preaching care and
prudence to daughters and nieces. On the
whole, if a pretty wide and long personal expe-
rience can go for any thing, I incline to think
that the elder generation is much more careful
of this point of health than of any other. Many
young women who are allowed to eat, dress, live,
and behave as they like, are periodically kept
from all violent exercise and fatigue, so far as
the vigilance of elders can accomplish this. The
wilfulness and ingenuity of the young, however,
are often more than a match for this vigilance ;
and a single ride on horseback, a single wetting
of the feet, or indulgence in the irresistible
German, may entail lifelong misery, which the
maternal or friendly guardian has done all in
her power to prevent. I myself once knew a
German lady who, married and childless for

SEX AND EDUCATION. I9

many years, confessed to me that a ball attended
in her early youth was the cause of this mis-
fortune.

I have known of repeated instances of incura-
ble disease and even of death arising from rides
on horseback taken at the critical period. I
have known fatal pulmonary consumption to
arise from exposure of the feet in silk stockings,
at winter parties. Every matron knows and
relates these sad facts to the young girls under
her charge. They are sometimes heeded, of-
tener not. Nothing in our knowledge of youth
would lead us to consider them as of rare occur-
rence. And yet Dr. Clarke attributes most
failures of the function and its concomitant,
maternity, to the school education received by
our girls.

The accusation then of systematic neglect of
the periodic function by the educators of youth
among us cannot be admitted without more evi-
dence than Dr. Clarke has thus far given us.
That women in America particularly neglect
their health, that women violate the laws of their

20 SEX AND EDUCATION.

constitution as men cannot violate theirs, and
that the love of intellectual pursuits causes them
to do so, — this is the fable out of which Dr.
Clarke draws the moral that women must not go
to college with men. Fable and moral appear
equally unsubstantial. If Dr. Clarke had said that
the best men and women of the State, the wisest
and noblest, should never allow this subject of
education to pass out of their minds or out of
their care ; if he had said that, after worthily
receiving education, the first duty of man and
woman is to secure it to the succeeding genera-
tion, he would have pointed to the true remedy
for all that is amiss on this head. The great
increase in the study of physiology among us,
and especially among women, must tend, we are
sure, to a wiser and better self-culture and care
of the young. Education is necessarily "line
upon line and precept upon precept" The elder
generation can only do its best, and trust to the
docility and good faith of the young.

The special character of Dr. Clarke's book
provokes the question whether he has not un-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 21

duly specialized facts which are general, and not
limited to any coincidence with that which he
especially attacks, — the education of American
women, and their physique as affected by it.
Is it wholly or principally in America that young
women fail of sexual development, have imper-
fect busts, are afflicted with ill-health and in-
sanity, and in marriage are sterile, or if they
have children cannot nurse them ?

A well-known sentence of Solomon's shows
that even in his time the female form sometimes
failed of completeness. Rousseau says of one
of the women whom he admired, " et de la gorge
comme de ma main!' with a general slur upon
all women so formed. In Paris has been in-
vented and advertised an artificial bosom war-
ranted to palpitate for a whole evening. It is
not likely that this invention has been patented
for the exclusive use of American women.

To return to Biblical times, one of the persons
healed by our Saviour was a woman suffering
from what Dr. Clarke would call menorrhcea. It
may be as well to remark by the way that

22 SEX AND EDUCATION.

during the twelve years of her suffering she had
spent all that she had upon physicians, and still
was nothing the better, but rather the worse.
Sterility was common in the times both of the
Old and of the New Testament. It is common
to-day among the savages of Africa. It is by
no means true that the women who themselves
show the greatest physical development are
always those whose offspring are the most
numerous and healthy. Slender women are
often more successful mothers and nurses than
the stout sisters whose full outlines attest their
\ own robusticity. Even as to the facts of nurs-
ing, women with small breasts often have an
abundant supply of milk ; while women with
fuller outward development often have little or
none.

Andrew Combe in his book on Infancy speaks
of the great number of infants who in Germany
are brought up by hand. He gives most careful
rules for rearing infants on artificial food, and

does not treat this as at all an uncommon

*

necessity. English women confined in Italy

SEX AND EDUCATION. 2$

and other foreign countries proverbially lose
their milk, and the profession of wet-nurse to
an English family has long been one of the
most common in Rome and Naples. Many
German women in America are obliged to feed
their infants wholly or in part, and many
American women are good nurses and prolific
mothers.

Again we see in Paris papers advertisements
of the new remedies, " which the patient herself
can apply, and which will spare her the un-
pleasant necessity of examinations," &c. Phy-
sicians of large practice and experience are
able, in all parts of the world, to chronicle many
cases of uterine disease, of functional derange-
ment, and of arrested development among
women, in which cases no plea of excessive
cerebral action induced by over-study is at all
admissible. But Dr. Clarke sees disease chiefly
in American women. In them reside leucor-
rhoea, dysmenorrhoea, amenorrhoea, &c. In them
are ateknia, agalactia, amazia. And the reason
why they have all these evils is simply this,

24 SEX AND EDUCATION.

some of them wish to enter Harvard College,
and some of them have already passed through
other colleges.

Now that the topics of sex and education
need careful study and remodelling of ideas
and methods, nobody is less disposed to deny
than the writer of these lines. She is perfectly
sure that the philosophy of sex is thus far
little understood in America, or anywhere
else. She has the same impression concerning
the philosophy of education. The physical evils
attendant upon the female constitution are as
old as that constitution itself. They deserve
and require the most careful investigation. But
the feminine hygiene will be higher and more
complete when it is administered by women.
Personal experience adds an important element
even to the closest and most scientific obser-
vation.

Before this pet theory of the incompatibility
of health with intellectual activity, for women
only, was discovered, men of science speculated
concerning the deficient busts of American

SEX AND EDUCA TION. 2$

women. The dry, stimulating climate was sup-
posed, in a great measure, to account for it.
The fact itself reaches back to the grandmothers
of the grandmothers of to-day/. * It was and is
chiefly observable in the northern and eastern
States. As you go south, you find fuller forms,
but not always combined with emptier heads.
The effect of the climate of this portion of the
country upon the masculine physique is equally
noticeable, and has long been a subject of re-
mark. Men here are for the most part wiry,
sinewy, nervous, and brainy. If any of us, car-
rying out Dr. Clarke's views, prefer to mate
with men in whom flesh and muscle counter-
poise the tyrannous nerve system, we too must
go over the borders, and bring the progenitors
of the future race from lands where the east
wind blows not. But this reminds us of the
well-known overplus of sixty thousand single
women in Massachusetts alone. Dr. Clarke
arraigns the mothers, actual and possible, for
being no better than they are. But what is he
going to do about the impossible fathers, in view

26 SEX AND EDUCATION.

of the coming generation to which he is so de-
voted ?

If one thing could be more astonishing than
another in Dr. Clarke's treatment of his subject,
we should give the palm to his consideration
of the influence of climate on the human organ-
ism. He is unwilling to consider it at all as
a factor in the alleged ill-health of American
women. According to him one hundred years
are not enough to mould the European organ-
ism in accordance with the American type.
If this is really his opinion, his experience must
have differed widely from that of others. I
have observed important effects of modification
produced by climate, in shorter periods of time
than this. Two brothers of one family, resident
in Boston, separated at the conclusion of the
Revolutionary War. One remained in this city,
one migrated to Nova Scotia. Those who at
a later day were able to compare the children
of these two gentlemen found the Boston family
marked with every characteristic of the New
England race, thin, nervous, wiry, alert, intense.

SEX AND EDUCATION. 2J

The Nova Scotian family were stout, full-
blooded, and plethoric, altogether of the Eng-
lis^i colonial type.

English families resident in India soon lose
the freshness of their coloring and the fulnesa
of their outline. In fact, the adaptation of one
nationality to another is sometimes astonishingly
rapid. Mr. Burlingame looked almost like a
Chinaman before he died. The writer has seen
an American official long resident in Turkey
whose physiognomy had become entirely that of
his adopted country. The potent American cli-
mate works quickly in assimilating the foreign
material offered to it. Two generations suffice
to efface the salient marks of Celtic, Saxon,
French, or Italian descent. The Negro alone is
able to offer a respectable resistance.

It may occur to some that the assumed iden-
tity of the intellectual education given to girls
and boys in America may have less to do with
the ill-health of the former than the dissimilarity
of their physical training. Boys are much in
the open air. Girls are much in the house. Boys

28 SEX AND EDUCATION.

wear a dress which follows and allows their
natural movements. Girls wear clothes which
impede and almost paralyze their limbs. Boys
have, moreover, the healthful hope held out to
them of being able to pursue their own objects,
and to choose and follow the business or profes-
sion of their choice. Girls have the dispiriting
prospect of a secondary and derivative existence,
with only so much room allowed them as may
not cramp the full sweep of the other sex. The
circumstances first named directly affect health,
the last exerts a strong reflex action upon it.
" We are only women, and it does not matter,"
passes from mother to daughter. A very esti-
mable young lady said to me the other day, in
answer to a plea for dress-reform, " It is better
to look handsome, even if it does shorten life a
little." Her care of herself probably does not
go beyond that indicated by this saying. Dr.
Clarke cites a few instances of functional de-
rangement. But by far the most frequent dif-
ficulty with our women arises from uterine
displacement, and this in turn comes partly

SEX AND EDUCA TIOX. 29

from the utter disuse of the muscles which
should keep the uterus in place, but which are
kept inactive by the corset, weighed upon by the
heavy skirt, and drawn upon by the violent and
unnatural motion of the dancing at present in
vogue. Is it any wonder that these ill-educated,
over-burthened muscles give way, like other ill-
trained, over-powered things ? Some instances
of remarkable robustness in women have been(
the result of a physical education identical with
that usually given to boys. In these cases, the
parents, after repeated losses of children through
much cherishing, have at last determined to give
the girls a chance through athletic sports and
unrestricted exercise in the open air. And this
has again and again proved successful.

Much in Dr. Clarke's treatment of his subject
is objectionable. We are left in doubt whether
his book was written for men or for women, and
we conclude that his method of statement is not
good for either. Much of his remarking upon
sex is justly offensive, and his statements con-
cerning those single women of culture whom

30 SEX AND EDUCATION.

he terms agenes would scarcely be endured in
any household in which these single saints bear
the burthens of all the others, and lead lives
divinely wedded to duty. The odious expres-
sion which completes his picture of " the girls
tied to their dictionaries," &c., would exclude the
book, and the writer too, from some pure and
polite circles. And we must say to him, with all
due regard for the good intentions with which
we desire to credit him, —

" These things must not be thought of on this
wise."

I have thus attempted a brief addition to the
comments of women upon Dr. Clarke's work,
telling pretty plainly what I think of it, and why.
But a full discussion of these great themes of
Sex and Education can hardly be had in answer
to a summons so sharp and so partial as his own.
Not to dogmatize and counter-dogmatize upon
these points will make either men or women
wiser. Not for those who think they know every
thing about the matter to discourse to those
whom they judge as knowing nothing about it.

SEX AND EDUCATION. 31

These processes will always retard instead of
advancing the discovery of truth. But when
men and women may meet together for fair and
equal interchange of thought, the men not want-
ing in modesty, nor the women in courage, then
we shall be glad to listen, if we do not speak.
And if we do speak, we shall say, " Father, thou
hast made all things well, and without thy wis-
dom was not any thing made that was made."

32 SEX AND EDUCATION.

II.

BY THOS. WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

THOSE who are anxiously studying the prob-
lem of the Education of Women may be trusted
to read with eager interest this little book by
Dr. Clarke. The author takes pains to recognize
the intellectual ability of women ; and he puts
on record a most valuable and emphatic denial,
from his own professional experience, of the
common assertion that American women habitu-
ally desire to escape the duties of wifehood and
motherhood. I should not call the book gener-
ally coarse, but very needlessly rough and plain-
spoken, especially for a book destined to popular
perusal ; and the author certainly touches the
verge of coarseness in his description of a possi-
ble sexless woman. He, however, indulges in
no unfair fling against the advocates of the
equality of the sexes, except as far as is con-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 33

tained in the following sentences : " Woman
seems to be looking up to man and his develop-
ment, as the goal and ideal of womanhood. The
new gospel of female development glorifies what
she possesses in common with him, and tramples
under her feet as a source of weakness and badge
of inferiority the mechanism and functions pe-
culiar to herself." (p. 1 29.) If this is intended to
describe the " gospel " proclaimed by the " Wom-
an's Journal," for instance, there is not a num-
ber of the paper, from the beginning, which does
not contain the material wherewith to refute the
statement. And that it is not true of the agita-
tion in America, as a whole, is shown by the fact
that this movement has been constantly under
criticism from European and Roman Catholic
sources, for precisely the opposite tendency ;
that is, for encouraging the study of physiology
in schools, and for thus making young girls too
well acquainted with those special laws of their
own being, about which they were once studi-
ously kept in ignorance. The two charges de-
stroy each other: both cannot be true, and I

2» C

34 SEX AND EDUCATION.

think that neither is. Certainly^ thejstrongest
argumentsjnjavor of Wo^naji^uffrj^e-are^based
not on the identity, but on the difference of the

It is claimed by admiring critics, in regard
to Dr. Clarke's book, that " his method is purely
scientific." From this I should be inclined to
dissent. The method does not seem to me
purely scientific, but popular ; and not so much
popular as 'clinical, — that is, as if familiarly ad-
dressed by a physician to a circle of students
or patients, among whom the personal authority
or popularity of the teacher might be relied
upon to fill some gaps in the argument. The
purely scientific method waives all such per-
sonal prestige. Darwin offers his basis of facts
as modestly and as amply - as if he were an
unknown man ; and proceeds step by step, still
fortifying himself, or stating frankly where he
is unfortified. I have been a pretty careful
reader of books on Natural History all my life ;
and I cannot help thinking that contemporary
science offers a standard, both as to facts and

SEX AND EDUCATION. 35

inferences, whose demands are hardly met by
the book now under discussion.

Let us consider, first, Dr. Clarke's facts, and
then his inferences.

I. Dr. Clarke s Facts.

I certainly am conscious of no manner of bias
against Dr. Clarke, who was my townsman and
college classmate ; and I opened his pages,
honestly hoping to find an array of facts that
should be impressive both by their quality and by
their quantity. To show, by citing individual
instances, that the pressure of our school sys-
tem injures health very often, is not enough.
To take seven cases out of a physician's note-
book, and then assure us that there are a good
many more, is not enough. Yet this is pre-
cisely what Dr. Clarke does ; and, strange to
say, one of these is the case of an actress and
another of a clerk, leaving only five educational
instances in all. This does not seem to me
what would be called, in any other branch of
science, a satisfactory basis of facts. For in-

36 SEX AND EDUCATION.

stance, I open the last " American Naturalist,"
and find Professor Wilder thus criticising the
new work on " The Cerebral Convolutions
of Man," by Ecker : " The value of such a gen-
eralization might be estimated if the author
had given us the number of individuals upon
which it is based." This is precisely the criti-
cism I should make on the generalizations of
Dr. Clarke.

That our edur^onal system is faulty on the
physiological side is an old story. The evil
has been under discussion, in a general way,
for years, — by Horace Mann, Dr. Howe, Dr.
Butler of Providence, and by myself, among
others, in a paper called " The Murder of the
Innocents," published in the " Atlantic Month-
ly " for September, 1859, and afterward included
in " Out Door Papers." It seems to me that
what is most needed is not the mere reiteration
of those facts, even if more ably and con-
vincingly stated, but rather to show by careful
and discriminating statistics to what extent
girls have been injured, beyond boys, by the

SEX AND EDUCATION.

37

system. Dr. Clarke does not marshal his facts
in any such way as this, and in some cases
almost commits direct unfairness by the omis-
sion, — as, for instance, where he cites " Bits
of Talk," to show the superior physique of the
Nova Scotia children as compared with those
of New England, and forgets to state that the
italics he introduces are his own, and that the
author of that book does not emphasize the
superiority in the one sex more than in the other.

It has been pointed out, again and again, in
the <4 Woman's Journal " and elsewhere, that
there are whole classes of facts to be had, bear-
ing most closely on this question, which neither
Dr. Clarke nor any physiologist opposed to
co-education has yet attempted to obtain. In-
stead of shrinking from these facts, we are
constantly begging for them. Until they are
obtained, systematized, and displayed, the whole
argument of Dr. Clarke has but an insufficient
basis of facts. They are such as these : —

I. We need facts as to the comparative physi-
ology of American women in different localities.

38 SEX AND EDUCATION.

There are highly educated communities and
very uneducated communities. Has Dr. Clarke,
or any one, compared the health of women in
cities and in country towns ; in cities with
good schools and cities with poor schools ; or
in highly educated States like Massachusetts
and Connecticut, as compared with States where
the climate is similar, but the school system
less thorough ? The standard of female educa-
tion is not very formidably high in Pennsylva-
nia, where they also have an equable climate,
no east winds, and most comfortable living ;
and yet one of Dr. Clarke's severest statements
as to female debility (p. 113) comes from Penn-
sylvania. In country villages I could name,
where there are only very poor district schools,
kept for less than half the year, the traveller
constantly observes, among the farmers' daugh-
ters, cheeks as pale and vitality as deficient as
in the best educated metropolis.

2. Again, we need facts as to American-born
women of different races. Dr. Clarke says of a
century, "that length of time could not trans-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 39

form the sturdy German fraulein and robust
English damsel into the fragile American miss."
(p. 1 68.) How does he know it could not ? I
have seen this change very nearly effected, in a
single generation, among the children of Eng-
lish, Irish, French Canadians, and even the Nova
Scotians whom he so praises ; and this in fam-
ilies where even reading and writing were rare
accomplishments. As far as I can observe, the
effect of climate, change of diet, change of living,
on all these classes, is almost sure to produce
the same result of delicacy, almost of fragility, in
the second generation, with or without school-
ing ; and among the boys almost as much as
among the girls. A physician in a large manu-
facturing town once told me that the unhealth-
iest class of the community, in his opinion,
consisted of the sons of Irish parents.

3. We need also the comparative physiology
of different social positions. As a rule, the
daughters of the wealthy in America, who are
sent to private schools, or taught by govern-
esses, are far less severely taxed, as to their

40 SEX AND EDUCATION.

brains, than the daughters of the middle classes,
who go to the public schools. Is Dr. Clarke pre-
pared to show that those of the former class are
decidedly more healthy ? If so, this is another
point that would have a direct bearing on his
argument. My own impression is that he would
find it hard to prove this. '

4. But there is still a fourth class of facts,
only to be obtained by an extensive record of
individual instances. Letting go all discrimi-
nations of locality, race, and social position, and
looking only at individuals under similar con-
ditions, is Dr. Clarke prepared to assert that,
as a rule, it is the hardest students in the school
who become invalids ? He would say, on a
priori grounds, that it must be so. But do
facts show it ? Looking over families and
schools that I have known, I certainly cannot
say that the young girls who have lost their
health were the most studious, — quite as often
the contrary. I have asked teachers of wide
experience, " Have you observed that your
best scholars have furnished the larger proper-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 41

tion of invalids ? " and they have always said
" No." Yet who that knows the affection with
which teachers are apt to follow the later career
of their pupils will deny that this evidence
has much value. Here is a fourth class of facts
which have a direct bearing upon the subject,
and the ignoring of which weakens the value
of our author's statements.

5. I am struck with the farther point, that
Dr. Clarke seems to have entered on his inquiry
in the spirit of an advocate, not of a judge, and
to have taken absolutely no account of the
physiological benefits of education for WODICH.
There certainly are many instances — all teach-
ers have known them — of great benefit to
health, in case of girls, under the stimulus given
by study. Either Dr. Clarke knows such in-
stances, or he does not. If he knows them, he
is bound to state them in such an argument ;
and, if possible, to arrange and tabulate them,
in order to set them against the instances on
the other side. If he does not know them, it
simply shows that, while the facts of disease

42 SEX AND EDUCATION.

impress the physician, the facts of health may
elude him. This beneficial influence has been
well analyzed by a woman of great sense and
judgment, herself a college graduate, Miss
Mary E. Beedy, now residing in London. I
have lately had the pleasure of reading an
essay of hers, about to appear in " Scribner's
Monthly," on "The Health of English and
American Women." In this she incidentally
gives reasons why the health of studious girls
is often better than that of any others, —
because their minds are happily occupied, —
because they are thus kept from social excesses,
far more prejudicial than study, — because their
mental training improves their judgment and
self-control, — and because they are less reckless
about their health in proportion as they have
an object to gain. I quote these points from
memory. Coming from a graduate of Antioch
College, they are surely entitled to considera-
tion ; and yet all the thought and observation
of Dr. Clarke had not suggested one of these
points to his mind. If he had thought of them,

SEX AND EDUCATION. 43

he would surely have mentioned them ; for
they were essential to the justice of his state-
ment.

It seems to me fair to point out, also, the
insufficient way in which Dr. Clarke presents
his authorities, when he goes outside of his own
observations. The single statement which I
have seen cited from his book, by the news-
papers, twice as often as all others put together,
is his citation of the opinion of " a philanthro-
pist and an intelligent observer," that *' the co-
education of the sexes is intellectually a success,
physically a failure." Yet Dr. Clarke does not
give the name of this informant, nor any thing
but the vaguest hint as to the extent or value
of his observations. The gentleman to whom
the remark has been, I find, popularly attributed,
Rev. C. H. Brigham, of Ann Arbor, Michigan,
expressly disclaims it in a private letter to me,
and he has recently published a statement looking
quite the other way. Dr. Clarke also states that
" another gentleman, more closely connected with
a similar institution of education than the per-

44 SEX AND EDUCATION.

son just referred to, has arrived at a similar
conclusion." (p. 144.) I must say, with due
deference to Dr. Clarke, that this does not
seem to me a scientific way of adducing evi-
dence. During the hurry and excitement of
the first days of our civil war, it was considered
worth while to telegraph all over the country
the opinions of " a reliable gentleman " or the
statements of " an intelligent contraband ; " but
we do not find such authorities gravely cited in
the official reports of the " Surgical Results of
the War."

It seems to me, therefore, that Dr. Clarke
by no means comes up to the recognized stand-
ard of science either in the quantity or the
quality of the facts on which he bases his argu-
ment. But, granting his premises sufficient, is
his conclusion just?

SEX AND EDUCATION. 4$

II. Dr. Clarke s Inferences.

In a first article on Dr. E. H. Clarke's work
*' Sex in Education," some criticisms were made
on his statements of fact ; and it was pointed
out that all the cases actually cited by him, of
special injury to the health of women through
school education, amounted to precisely five.
Since writing that article I have visited Vassar
College, where I found a good deal of dissatis-
faction to exist among the authorities, over one
of those five cases, as stated by Dr. Clarke. He
mentions a certain Miss D. who entered Vassar
College at fourteen. The President and the
Resident Physician assured me that no pupil
had ever entered that institution at that age.
Dr. Clarke says of this young lady that " she
studied, recited, stood at the blackboard, walked,
and went through her gymnastic exercises, from
the beginning to the end of the term, just as
boys do." The same authorities told me that
this statement, taken as a whole, was an abso-
lute untruth ; the gymnastic exercises being

46 SEX AND EDUCATION.

absolutely forbidden to the students at certain
periods, and the greatest care being enjoined
upon them in all respects. The President and
the Resident Physician also expressed some
surprise that, in a case of such importance, their
testimony should not have been at least called
for, instead of relying solely on that of the
patient. I believe that it is customary among
physicians to show some consideration or cour-
tesy to each other in such matters, before putting
cases in print which seem to reflect on the pro-
fessional fidelity of any one. Be this as it may,
this denial of fundamental facts leaves this in-
stance at least open to suspicion ; and reduces
Dr. Clarke's yet undisputed cases of injury to
the health of girls, through schooling, to four.
But suppose the instances were four thou-
sand. Grant all his premises. What is his
conclusion ? All that he demands of an educa-
tional establishment for girls is that "the
organization of studies and instruction must
be flexible enough to admit of the periodical
and temporary absence of each pupil, without

SEX AND EDUCATION. 47

loss of rank, or necessity of making up work,
from recitation and exercise of all sorts."
(p. 158.) And yet he goes on to declare that
for Harvard College, for instance, to adapt itself
for the introduction of young women, would be
a thing so enormously difficult that it would
cost two millions of dollars! (p. 151.)

This is what is so inexplicable to me in the
conclusions of the book. Grant all Dr. Clarke's
facts, and all his demands, — what follows ? Of
course, in that case, those grammar schools and
high schools to which girls are admitted must
be essentially remodelled. These I waive. But,
so far as our leading colleges are concerned, —
and Harvard in particular, — I not only do not
see why the remodelling for the admission of
women should cost two millions, but I do not
see why it should cost a cent. I do not see,
indeed, why there is needed at Harvard any
remodelling at all : only a quiet carrying out
of what is already the marked tendency in that
institution, — to substitute elective for required
studies, voluntary attendance on exercises for

48 SEX AND EDUCATION.

required attendance, and examinations as tests
of scholarship in place of daily marks. Surely
it cannot have escaped Dr. Clarke's notice that
if he were having Harvard College arranged
on purpose to suit girls, according to his formula
just quoted, it could hardly be done by a more
effectual process than is actually going on at
this moment, without any reference to women
at all. If this be so, why not extend this new
system to women and let them have the benefit
of it ?

When Dr. Clarke and I were in Harvard
College, every absence from daily prayers or
recitation counted as an offence. Now each
student is allowed sixty absences from prayers,
— almost one-fourth of the whole number, — and
no questions are asked until that number is
exceeded. Then almost all rank turned on
marks given at the daily recitation. Now there
are departments in which no daily marks are
given, and the question of scholarship is deter-
mined by occasional examinations. To these, it
would seem, Dr. Clarke does not object, for he

SEX AND EDUCATION. 49

says (p. 1 34) " it is easy to frame a theoretical
emulation, in which results only are compared and
tested, that would be healthy and invigorating."
Yet such emulation as this is all that seems
likely to be left at Harvard in the way of dan-
gerous rivalry, when the present system shall
have been fully developed. " The steady, un-
tiring, day-by-day competition " that Dr. Clarke
deprecates is being utterly laid aside ; and a
more flexible system is being introduced for
young men, which turns out to have also the
incidental advantage of being precisely what
young women need.1

It is a valuable discovery that, the more you
transform a college into a University, the better
it is adapted for both sexes. The same advan-
tage may be noted on another point, the con-

1 An additional illustration of this is in the resolution in-
troduced at the meeting of Harvard Overseers, Dec. 30, 1873,
and since adopted : —

" Resolved, That the Board of Overseers consents that for
the academic year 1874-5 all rules imposing penalties or marks
of censure upon Seniors for absences from church, and from
recitations, lectures, or exercises other than examinations, be
suspended."

3 D

50 SEX AND EDUCATION.

sideration of which may throw light on Dr.
Clarke's demand for two million dollars. I
mean the question of dormitories. * If the ad-
mission of girls to our colleges does nothing
else but to break down the present system of
brick barracks, and to substitute the simpler
boarding-house system of Michigan University,
it will be a work well done. Of course, if there
must be duplicated for girls the vast array of
dormitories now encumbering the scanty college-
yard at Cambridge, it will cost a great deal of
money. But just now, when all the boarding-
house keepers of Cambridge are deploring their
occupation gone by reason of these structures,
it is the very time to introduce young women into
the humbler quarters left vacant ; and why, in
this case, will these students cost the college
more than so many additional young men ? Once
adopt the plan, which I believe to be the true
one, that it is simply the office of the college to
provide facilities of instruction, and that of the
pupils and their parents (under the general super-
vision of the college) to look out for food and

SEX AND EDUCATION. 51

lodging, medical attendance and spiritual guid-
ance,— and the increased expense of joint col-
legiate education turns out a mere chimera.
Were it ever so great, I should still regard it as
the best way of spending money, since, in any
case, the expense of providing for girls equal
advantages in a separate college would be still
greater ; but I do not see it to be great, or
indeed to amount to any thing worth mentioning
at all. Nor do I see why, even if we admit all
Dr. Clarke's facts, he has given a single valid
reason why our colleges should not admit girls
to-morrow, — making, as many of them have
already made on other grounds, the necessary
changes to secure sufficient flexibility of system.
It therefore seems to me that, as his facts are
not worked out with sufficient thoroughness to
justify any general conclusion whatever, so his
conclusion that our present colleges, and par-
ticularly Harvard College, cannot, except at a
vast expense, admit women, is utterly unsus-
tained by his facts.

52 SEX AND EDUCATION.

III.

BY MRS. HORACE MANN.

DR. CLARKE'S " Sex in Education " would have
been an invaluable addition to popular works
on hygiene, if it had been written in a different
spirit, — without insult to woman, whom the
author professes to respect, and whom he pro-
nounces to be capable of as extended education
as men are. This admission on his part is
actually overlooked by many of his reviewers,
because their feelings are so hurt by his un-
gentlemanly jeers, and- his vulgar attack upon
the noble army of unmarried women, who are
often in the respectable ranks of " spinster-
ism," as he calls it, out of self-respect, and be-
cause their ideal of the marriage state is far
beyond that of the average woman.

The average woman has unfortunately been
educated to consider matrimony more respect-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 53

able than the state of single blessedness, which
has thus been well named when compared with
the heartless or heart-breaking condition of in-
compatible or unworthy marriage. Probably not
one of these women would have refused marriage
if the conditions she required had been fulfilled,
but without these her self-respect would have
been compromised. Probably the sentiment of
love has been awakened in the breasts of all. It
would be unnatural, I concede, if it were not so.

" God gives us love,
Something to love he lends us ; "

but it is far better for the soul to live in an ideal
union with a possible twin-soul than to enter
marriage upon a low plane of thought or feeling.
When this most vital institution of society is
demoralized by worldliness, cupidity, or other of
the manifold forms of selfishness, the greatest
unhappiness is sure to follow ; on the principle
that the corruption of the best is the worst. It
is in this fatal disappointment of life that we
see the undeveloped women ; and many a young

54 SEX AND EDUCATION.

woman, who has an opportunity to make the
observation, is made cautious of trusting her
happiness to what appears to be, and has justly
been called, " the lottery of life." It seems in-
credible that a man who has had Dr. Clarke's
opportunity of seeing domestic life has not real-
ized that unfortunate marriages are the circum-
stances under which the harmonious development
of nature is arrested and perverted. Such cir-
cumstances stunt growth and spoil family life,
and the children who are its unhappy result.
Indeed, the idea with which many women enter
into the married state, even when their affections
are engaged in it, pervert and maim the develop-
ment of the human being, and often end in a
loss of faith in human nature. This idea is that
the oneness of the union is the oneness of the
man, and not a new oneness born of the union.
The assumption of the authority of the average
husband extends even to the opinion of the wife ;
so that there is often a concession to a para-
mount will where the wife is the superior by
nature. It is the freedom from this bondage

SEX AND EDUCATION. 55

which constitutes the happiness of single bless-
edness, and is at the root of the unhappy ten-
dency to divorce which is characteristic of our
times. Far higher is the unmarried state, as
a condition for the development of the human
being, than this low state of marriage, which
latter in its ideal form is a condition of mutual
growth. A new code of morals is needed in this
regard. It is not a mere matter of speculation,
for in true marriage the ideal is realized. The
one will is only truly one when based upon per-
fect freedom and mutual sacrifice, — which indeed
is not conscious sacrifice, but only a loving con-
tention for self-renunciation.

I believe it is a fact that the higher the state
of civilization and refinement, the more unmar-
ried women there are ; and yet Dr. Clarke could
add his voice to the vulgar hue and cry against
them. Such is the prevalence of this hue and
cry that women who are not elevated above its
influence by early inculcations of noble princi-
ples, of self-respect, and of a lofty ideal, rush into
matrimony because they are ashamed to appear
to be unsought.

56 SEX AND EDUCATION.

The maternal feeling is as intense and pure in
many unmarried women as in their married sis-
ters. Indeed, if we each take an observation in
our own circle, we shall see it far more devel-
oped in many of them than in many married
women, to whom children are a burden and a
hinderance, and always considered and treated
as if of secondary importance to their pleasures,
and even to their more rational pursuits. The
world cannot be divided in that way. The ma-
ternal sentiment is planted in the heart of every
sympathetic and affectionate woman, — indeed,
woman is abnormal without it, — and, if not de-
veloped by maternity itself, this sentiment may
be so by right education, and thus saved from
becoming a root of bitterness such as opinions
like Dr. Clarke's are calculated to plant. How
many an orphan child has found the very essence
of motherly feeling and life-long devotion in a
maiden aunt ! The man is to be pitied who has
not seen this in his acquaintance with society :
one almost wishes to cite names to prove one's
words. Has Dr. Clarke no touch-stone within

SEX AND EDUCATIOX. $7

himself to prove such characters, — for he must
have seen many of them ? The maternal feeling
is often more judiciously exercised where the
passion of maternity — what some moralists
have called brute maternity — has not been
roused into activity by actual motherhood. I
would farther explain this by a reference to those
mothers in whom every other sentiment, even
that of good wifehood, is absorbed by the ma-
ternal feeling ; and where, if they are undisci-
plined in mind, this feeling makes it impossible
for them to see the faults of their children, or
to allow any one else to note them, or give them
any aid in their correction. Even the father is
deprived of his natural right to share in the care,
and is treated as their natural enemy if he criti-
cises them. The loving but unimpassioned aunt,
or co-operating educator, whose maternal feeling
has been cultivated by her vocation, can see the
facts more clearly than such mothers, and can
often suggest the remedies. I think it may
safely be asserted that the first proof of im-
provement in the popular feeling about marriage

58 SEX AND EDUCATION.

will be the respect for those unmarried women
whose independent lives bear the noble fruits of
culture, benevolence, and devotion to human
improvement. Dr. Clarke misses the truth
greatly also in asserting that the advocacy of
high education for women emanates chiefly from
unmarried women. None are more eloquent in
its cause than the mothers — the good mothers,
of course — who have felt the pain of their own
deficiencies of education when they found them-
selves mothers, and too ignorant to fulfil their
duties to their own satisfaction. " What can I
do for my child ? I do not know any thing about
its needs, or how to supply them : my own edu-
cation had no system or definite object, and
now I feel it worthless." Such complaints are
continual, and give one the feeling that every
woman should serve her time, be she sick or
be she poor, in practical education, by actually
being brought into contact with children, and
being taught how to instruct them. I have
often ventured the remark that the best edu-
cated women I knew were those who had been

SEX AND EDUCATION. 59

practically engaged in education. I make it
more earnestly than ever, for education is not
merely the knowledge of sciences, languages, or
systems of philosophy, but consists in the use of
the faculties and their application to life thus
developed by these and other studies. "The
proper study of mankind is man," is an utter-
ance that has often been quoted to prove that
the exact sciences were inferior objects of pur-
suit to the study of language and philosophy ;
but man cannot be studied aright without a sci-
entific basis, and this is the greatest argument
for the complete education of women, in whose
hands is the moulding of the human race. When
they do not hold their normal place and func-
tion, — which they cannot do if uncultivated, —
the condition of such portions of the human
race shows it palpably.

But I must not, like many of Dr. Clarke's
reviewers, forget that he concedes woman's right
and her capacity for the most extended edu-
cation.

Let us now look at facts in regard to the dan-

60 SEX AND EDUCATION.

ger of systematic and persistent study for women.
One would think, judging by Dr. Clarke's " dread-
ful little book," as some one has called it, that
women had generally been educated to death,
while the deplorable fact is that she has only
been half educated at the best. When in those
instances, few and far between, where high cul-
ture was desired, the time for real study has
come, the necessity for making up for former
deficiencies has sometimes made it too severe.
In half a century's acquaintance with the details
of female education, I can remember no instance
in which study has proved injurious to those
who came to it in good health : excepted cases
are truly exceptional, and not the average. I
have also known instances where young women
who were invalids have made a studious life their
recreation, and have gained health and vigor
meanwhile, — all the happier and better for the
intellectual life.

The best remedy for too hard study at any
one time of life is a thorough and gradual men-
tal training from childhood up. The earliest

SEX AND EDUCATION. 6 1

education of both boys and girls is, generally
speaking, aimless and indefinite. A certain
amount of reading, writing, arithmetic, and geog-
raphy are considered necessary, but instruction
in these is not in itself cultivation* of mind. It
may be perfectly arbitrary and wooden, done
without any reference to or attempt to develop
the nature. Even reading and writing need not
be taught so mechanically as is done in the
scfiools. Very little attention is given usually in
American schools to the subject-matter of the
reading : each child is called upon to read a sen-
tence or a paragraph, in a reader, instead of
having a work of genius put into its hands, which
is to be read in company, and which is interest-
ing enough in itself to chain the attention and
to bring out the natural elocution by making the
rest listen while one reads.* Geography is usu-
ally taught by map and outline, with little or no

* In making this criticism, and other possible ones, upon
the schools, I ought not to forget that one teacher is expected
to minister to the mental wants of fifty, and sometimes even of
a hundred scholars, — a relic of barbarism which it is hoped
that time will ameliorate.

62 SEX AND EDUCATION.

descriptive or picturesque explanation of scenery,
fauna, or remarkable natural features ; and arith-
metic in as uninteresting a way, instead of being
made living by being connected with geometri-
cal science. Children's industrial faculties are
not set at work, and the whole routine becomes
tedious, is disconnected with life, and is shirked
as much as possible. Very little training in the
native language is given, and even in the most
advanced public schools little attention is paid
to the art of writing down thoughts and impres-
sions,— an exercise which can with advantage
be begun in childhood. Boys and girls begin to
study Latin thus without an interesting idea
about human speech.

Boys are at last set to work systematically
to prepare for their higher education, and every
aid is given them to make up for lost time.
Girls sometimes share this training for a little
while in some places ; but, as it leads to nothing
in particular, it soon loses its interest, unless
perchance they are preparing to be teachers.
Girls rarely go far in mathematical studies,

SEX AND EDUCATION. 63

which are the basis of all scientific education ;
and, if they study what are called the higher
branches in schools, without this thorough
mathematical training that boys have, it is very
superficial study, and soon forgotten. In the
exceptional cases, consisting of those whose
strong native talent and favoring circumstances
urge on to hard study, the necessity of making
up for lost time may injure the weak, and even
break down the strong, as is often the case
with men. I do not believe the overstraining
of the brain is any more injurious to young
women than to young men, and it is not a thou-
sandth part so common. The evil effects that
appear at that time of life in both sexes are
due to other causes than those Dr. Clarke points
out so exclusively. He says there are other
causes, but he passes them over lightly. One
of his reviewers has pointed them out ably
and in detail. As far as they refer to study,
the system of cramming and emulation, in both
public and private schools, should bear the
brunt of his accusations. It would undoubtedly

64 SEX AND EDUCATION.

be far better for girls (or for boys) between
the ages of fourteen and nineteen to be with-
drawn from these, and study more calmly and
gradually without the stimulus of emulation,
and to defer the completion of their education
in colleges till that tender age is past.

I do not share in the fears expressed by Presi-
dent Eliot, of a demoralizing influence from
the co-education of the sexes. Experience has
amply proved that such fears are groundless.
Young men and women have long been edu-
cated together in country high schools, in acade-
mies and normal schools, and of late in colleges ;
and the result has been satisfactory, — a healthy
stimulus, a great enjoyment, and productive of
mutual self-respect. But I agree with him
that Harvard College is not the place to try it
in at present, for several reasons, — the tradi-
tional prejudice, the want of proper arrange-
ments, the very low moral character of the
college community ; but I think the history of
Antioch College, where the system was car-
ried out under great advantages, is a sufficient

SEX AND EDUCATION. 65

testimony to the success and good effects of
co-education as well as to the possibility of har-
monious persistent study for women.

The only feature of it that was ever objec-
tionable in my eyes has been the gathering of
young girls into the preparatory school, where
they could enter at the age of twelve. It is
unfortunate enough to be obliged to send young
boys away from home, but it is far more ob-
jectionable to send young girls away. They
ought to live at home while getting their pre-
paratory education, and all the more if they
are to follow it up with college life. Domes-
tic life is made null to them thus. The only
apology for having a preparatory school of the
kind there was the fact that so many people
live scattered in the West that schools are not
accessible to them, and the preparation required
for a college course could be obtained in no
other way. My heart used to ache for the
lovely little girls, separated from their mothers
at an age when they should have been in
their arms every night, with all those little

66 SEX AND EDUCATION.

confidences and confessions that mothers only
can elicit. No matron could supply the moth-
er's place, even if devoted solely to the office
of mothering the children of a large boarding-
school.

But the case was very different with the
young women who came to take a course of col-
lege study. With an occasional exception, they
were of an age and maturity of character that
made them competent to take care of them-
selves. One of the chief principles of that col-
lege discipline was the absence of all emulation
as a motive power. There were no honors to
be studied for, there was not even a rank list
to show comparative progress, there was no
competition for pre-eminence in college gradu-
ation, for every student was called upon to
prepare himself or herself to speak ; and when
the graduating class was large the speakers
were determined by lot, and not by choice. No
pupil necessarily knew how a fellow - pupil
stood. If ill-health interrupted study, time and
opportunity were given to make up the defi-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 67

ciencies without any publicity; so that* Dr.
Clarke's objections to co-education on that
score fall to the ground, as far as that college
is concerned. The mental and moral influences
of the mutual college life were very marked in
the superior moral deportment and refinement
of manners in the young men, and the un-
excited and modest demeanor of the young
women, both meeting with mutual respect for
each other's intellectual and social claims. One
or two instances of extravagant ambition for
scholarship, and still more for dispatch, were
the only cases of failure in health among the
young women ; and these were not sanctioned
or promoted by any stimulus from the president
or professors. One ambitious teacher in the de-
partment of the preparatory school, who wished
the pupils in her classes to make a greater
show than others, was duly checked by inter-
ference from the seats of authority. The health
of both the young men and women improved
in a marked manner during their college life.
Many came with no knowledge of hygiene or

68 SEX AND EDUCATION.

theif own physiological need, and special in-
struction was given in those branches of knowl-
edge. The health of the girls was much better
than that of the young men.

Young women who came with their systems
out of order, through ignorance and unhealthy
living, were greatly benefited, and sent home to
spread the knowledge they had gained. But
one death of each sex occurred in six years (the
period of which I write), and they were both
cases of poisoning by food in metallic vessels ;
yet the hardships were great during the first
years, and the exposures rather exceptional,
owing to the poverty of the food and the in-
adequacy of the buildings as to ventilation and
water supply.

Regular occupation and mental activity are
as good for women as for men. Dr. Clarke
probably judges of women by the invalids he
has tended ; and his observations have been
chiefly limited, to all appearance, to the un-
healthful life and habits of cities. It cannot be
hard study that has chiefly injured the young

SEX AND EDUCATION. 69

women he has known, for I suspect few have
ever undertaken it. It has been late hours,
fashionable dress, with its necessary sacrifice of
warmth and ease, hot houses and school-rooms,
and unnatural cramming to meet the demands
of unhealthy emulation.

The educators of our private institutions for
girls will testify that they have found it diffi-
cult to induce their pupils to a continuous and
thorough course of study. The demands of
society, as it is called, have been allowed to
interfere ; and fashionable schools have lived by
fashion rather than by merit. One of the ablest
teachers of a private high school in Boston tes-
tified that her school suddenly rose to unex-
ampled popularity without any internal changes,
because one or two fashionable girls entered
it ; and it as suddenly settled back to its usual
numbers because they and their followers left
it in dudgeon for some cause. All such edu-
cators know the frail tenure upon which they
hold their city schools ; and even gentlemen
who have taught young ladies' schools have

70 SEX AND EDUCATION.

experienced the same sudden reverses. In the
late movement for higher education in Boston,
one of the most earnest women in the cause,
when it was suggested to her that the girls in
high life did not, as far as educators could judge,
care for higher education, replied, " We must
make it fashionable, and then they will care
for it."

• No, the demand comes from a very different
quarter, — from those whose means cannot com-
mand facilities to meet literary, artistic, or scien-
tific aspirations, and who are willing to make
sacrifices for education. If Dr. Clarke had
assailed the abuses of society, — children's par-
ties, fashionable dress in its features of bare
neck and limbs, thin shoes, sudden change of
costume, late hours, and a thousand hardships
and exposures to which the less favored classes
of society are subjected, — he would have done
better service than by discouraging women's
systematic education, and throwing obstacles in
the path of their culture. Still deeper, I would
again testify, is the wrong he has done to

SEX AND EDUCATION.

women by assailing those who devote
lives to charity, to their own culture and to the
culture of others, and whom those who know
them feel would be profaned by worldly mar-
riages. The children they act for rise up and
call them blessed, and by their affection go far
toward making up to them for the lost rapture
of actual motherhood.

72 SEX AND EDUCATION.

IV.

BY ADA SHEPARD BADGER.

No thoughtful reader can fail to appreciate
the nobleness of the purpose that actuated Dr.
Clarke in writing " Sex in Education." No lov-
ing and thinking mother can lay aside the book,
after reading the first pages, until the whole is
perused. But no candid woman teacher, with
the interests of education for girls deeply at
heart, can quietly allow Dr. Clarke's statement
to pass without wishing to suggest essential
modifications of its main idea.

In her double capacity of teacher and mother,
the writer of the present article begs leave to
call the attention of other mothers and teachers
to a few facts bearing upon the other side of
this quczstio vexata.

And, to begin with that branch of the subject
which is least essential, since education stands

SEX AND EDUCATIOX. 73

\>zimz co-education in all minds, — and, so that we
obtain the former, we will not insist too strongly
upon the latter, — Dr. Clarke quotes the opinion
of "a philanthropist and an intelligent observer,"
holding an official connection with a college for
men and women, that " the co-education of the
sexes is intellectually a success, physiologically
a failure." He does not state the facts from
which this inference is drawn. Doubtless this
observer has known instances where women who
studied in classes with men finally succumbed to
disease, as did some of their male classmates, in
all probability.

But what gives him the power to decide that
the proportion of the sufferers among the female
graduates is greater than that among their male
classmates, or that the seeds of the particular
form of malady which has prostrated any woman
student were not sown, before the birth of the
latter, in the organism of a mother to whose
youth the opportunity for a liberal education was
denied ? And how can he know that their very
origin was not attributable to the lack of that

4

74 SEX AND EDUCATION.

knowledge of physiology requisite to instruct a
woman as to the commonest facts with regard to
the care of herself required by the approach of
the sacred office of maternity ? And what proba-
bility is there that, had the sufferer in question
pursued one of the alternatives to a student's
course, a life of fashionable folly,, or even one of
common toiling, uninspired by the light of a
newly awakened intellectual life, these germs of
disease would have been less likely to come to
fruition ? What are the grounds of belief that
regular study is a prominent cause of physical
degeneracy ?

Facts of the nature of those stated by Dr.
Clarke (in Part III., chiefly clinical) would
doubtless be adduced by the observer above
cited, were he called upon to substantiate his
opinion. But, could we look at any one of these
cases with the power to judge the hidden as
well as the revealed causes in operation, con-
sidering also what would have been the probable
alternative adopted by the individual in question,
had study not been her chief pursuit, is it not

SEX AND EDUCA TION. ?$

quite possible that the conclusion at which we
should arrive would contradict that of the work
before us ?

One of the most striking cases mentioned in
Part III. chances to have been known to the
writer from the earliest infancy of the subject
And, although the details of such a case are
forbidden by many considerations, the circum-
stance of studying in and being graduated with
honor at a college planned for both sexes, and
in which, indeed, she remained through the
senior year only, was but a slight cause among
the many that converged to menace, and finally
to overcome, that rarely endowed but perilously
poised organization. The congenial pursuit of
the studies that were so large a part of her life
probably delayed for years a result that dis-
cerning observers saw imminent for her from the
dawning of her conscious life. Neither " death
from over-work," nor " death from unphysiolog-
ical work," was a verdict to pass unchallenged
in her case.

Who that looked upon Story's bust of Eliza-

76 SEX AND EDUCATION.

beth Browning could come away without a sym-
pathetic tingling, as it were, of the whole being,
from the possibilities of suffering — beyond the
conception of most mortals — revealed in that
exquisitely sensitive face ?

But Mrs. Browning did not go to a man's
college, or to any college. She studied with
her father at home, and could take all the rests
required by the needs of her physical life. No
college routine, but, possibly, the very absence
of its regularity, was responsible for her suffer-
ings throughout her life. God wrote on her
organism the lines that could not be effaced by
time or circumstance.

Yet she could write, in that patient sweetness
which was more wonderful than her version of
" Prometheus Bound," or her " Drama of Exile,"
and which made her a glorious woman more
essentially than a gifted poet : —

" Oh ! we live, — Oh ! we live, —
And this life that we conceive
Is a strong thing and a grave,
Which for others' use we have,
Duty-laden to remain.

?Sv

^TY
SEX AND EDUCATIONS 77

We are helpers, fellow-creatures,
Of the right against the wrong : —
We are earnest-hearted teachers
Of the truth that maketh strong, —
Yet do we teach in vain ? "

No generalizations can be drawn from one
case, or from seven cases, of women who have
become invalids after working continuously " in
a man's way." Far more numerous cases might
be cited, by physicians and teachers, of girls who
were seized upon by the Proteus of disease, as
a retribution, let us think, for not having worked
with the method of " a man's way," or for not
having worked at all. Nowhere in our own
country does the average woman present so
feeble and diseased an aspect as in those parts
of the West and South where education is of the
smallest moment to her. Lacking the delicate
beauty and the intellectual tastes of the New
England girl, she also leads a life of greater
physical suffering, and a more hopeless inca-
pacity for usefulness. Is unremitting study a
cause of the weakness of the Georgia planter's
wife or the Cincinnati merchant's daughter?

?8 SEX AND EDUCATION.

Facts in the writer's possession, through an
intimate acquaintance, during the first ten years
of its existence, with one of our Western col-
leges, established for the joint education of the
sexes, are somewhat significant as indicating
whether, notwithstanding the many difficulties
under which this infant college was obliged to
struggle on, the education there given to girls
was destructive or constructive. Out of twenty-
seven women graduates (all that memory can
recall in the absence of catalogues which might
permit a full statement), nineteen have married,
and eight have remained unmarried, so far as
the writer knows. Out of these twenty-seven,
graduating between 1857 and 1863, one only has
died. All but three, whose post-graduate his-
tory has been unreported, are known to have
done effective work, for a longer or shorter term
of years, in educational and other departments ;
and a large number of them have blooming fam-
ilies to "rise up and call them blessed." The
writer has never heard of but three cases of
even temporary invalidism among these women

t>EX AND EDUCATION. 79

graduates, while a large number of the male
students of the same classes have died, or been
prostrated by grievous maladies. One of the
three cases just referred to was the indisposition
for some months of a lady who has since recov-
ered ; and who has recently taken her eldest son
to Germany, to pursue there her favorite study
of music, to which she has consecrated, as pupil
and teacher, a great part of her time for over
twenty years. Another, confessedly bearing
away the first honors of a class in which were
graduated two of our successful Unitarian
preachers, is now rearing a rosy family of boys
on the shore of a Western lake, having taught
most successfully for years in a high school.

Another, yet unmarried, is continuing her
studies in England, where her rare powers and
ripe culture are winning for her the appreciation
she years ago won from that long-time friend of
a wise co-education, the editor of the " Liberal
Christian," who wrote of her in glowing terms
from St. Louis, the former field of her work.

Another of these graduates, the mother of six

80 SEX AND EDUCATION.

remarkably fine, healthy children, is giving her
husband the most efficient assistance in his work
at the head of a Theological School in Eastern
New York.

Here, then, is a class of facts, small, it is true,
but significant as to some not unhappy results
of a liberal education for women, even though
obtained " in a man's way." " By their fruits
ye shall know them," said another Good Phy-
sician.

" In the development of the organization is to
be found the way of strength and power for both
sexes," says Dr. Clarke. " Limitation or abor-
tion of development leads to weakness and
failure."

Had these women been denied the privileges
of education which their natures craved so ear-
nestly that they were willing, in some cases, to go
alone to a distant State ; to borrow money to
defray their school expenses, so that the first-
fruits of their after-work went to cancel these
arrearages ; to give up the attractions of life in
New England, at the age when its charms are

SEX AND EDUCATION. 8 1

most alluring ; to spend, in a new country, in
privation and close study, years that might
otherwise have been squandered in dissipation
or wasted in futile attempts to teach at the
enormous disadvantage of inadequate prepara-
tion ; had these women been denied the edu-
cation they struggled for and obtained in the
only way then possible, who knows what hydra-
headed maladies might now be racking their
bodies and distracting their brains ? Study,
severe study, if you will, was their safeguard,
not their peril, even in a physical point of view.
Dr. Clarke justly — shall we say generously?
— concedes the right of women to the highest
culture of which they are capable. But the
point of his argument turns^ upon the method
of obtaining this culture. And just here, in a
man's view of the case, seems a mighty diffi-
culty arising. . But put one or two wise, mother-
ly women on the faculty of each college where
girls are admitted, (and what advocate for the
liberal culture of women would think of sending
girls to study where men alone preside ?) and

82 SEX AND EDUCATION.

t

woman's wit will speedily solve the great prob-
lem of " the periodical remission from labor."

'Assume that each girl student must rest
entirely from brain-work three days out of every
thirty, and the average of work could be easily
brought up by a little exercise of common sense
on the part of teacher and pupil. But it is not
to be assumed that every girl, or that one girl
out of ten, must rest three days, or even one
day, out of thirty. Not unfrequently girls who
afterwards developed into sound, healthy matrons,
standing the wear and tear of life in a manner to
astonish vigorous men hardly able to hold their
own in the rush of our American life, have been
known to attend, without a single exception,
every recitation of their classes for years, even
when going daily from quite a distance to school
or college. A moderate and regular use of the
mental faculties, such as should alone be per-
mitted in our schools and colleges, with ample
margins each week for the exigencies of life for
both sexes, has been again and again proved to
be conducive to the highest physical health for
women as well as men.

SEX AND EDUCA TION. 83

A few years ago a young girl of sixteen, who
had left school under a physician's advice, be-
cause of certain irregularities in her physical
health, was rapidly passing into such a state of
apathy to things ordinarily attractive to the
young, that wise friends feared the result of in-
sanity. As a last resort, she was placed in a
school where, amid pleasant companionship, her
faculties were gently though regularly stimulated.
She soon began to revive under a regimen of
mathematics, languages, and art-culture, and in
two years was in a state of perfect health. Dur-
ing these entire two years she was not absent
from school more than three times, nor did she
ever fail to prepare a lesson. Here regularity of
study was not a source of disease, but, appar-
ently, its cure.

But the instances in point, thronging the mind
of the writer, would tax the patience of the
reader unjustifiably. Passing over those omis-
sions and oversights in the book, so happily
specified in notices like that of the " Advertiser "
and the " Liberal Christian," a few words more

84 SEX AND EDUCATION.

must close this already too long reference to this
timely and, in many respects, valuable essay.

The evil to which our wise and kind physician
refers, is surely not to be overlooked. It exists ;
it stares at us from early graves, and, far worse,
from homes whose central figures are afflicted
with life-long sufferings before which the stout-
est-hearted men might quail.

What is its remedy ? Does our earnest-hearted
friend propose one which the exigencies of life
will permit women to adopt ? Has any writer
suggested a cure for this menacing ill?

If a warning trumpet is to be blown, shall no
one be found to herald also the hope of better
things ?

Let a woman's voice be heard pleading, not
for less work or less constant work, but for a
wiser method of work in our schools ! Let a
ban be put upon public exhibitions of both boys
and girls in schools ! Let the worry arising
from a false system of marks for recitations, and
from all comparisons and competitions, be ban-
ished forever ! Let the notion that girls must

SEX AND EDUCATION. 8$

recite all their lessons while standing vanish
from the minds of both teachers and physicians !
The use of the feet is not essential to a good lo ( a

jOLtft

translation from Homer or Goethe ; and even
the Calculus has been mastered by students who,
for the most part, sat at recitations. Let even-
ing parties, and the various forms of tempting
amusements which beset our young people while
attending to the serious work of their education,
be as strictly forbidden to them as they are
to their infant brothers and sisters yet in the
nursery! Let the tyrannous fashion-plate be
consulted less than the laws of harmonious col-
oring and real fitness of contour!

Above all, let the beginnings be right I Re-
member that far more valuable work can be done
for the education of any human being, and espe-
cially of a girl, by reason of her threefold nature,
between the ages of seven and fourteen than
between fourteen and nineteen. Let our girls
remain girls till they have reached the estate of
womanhood. Let their development be gradual
and normal, not forced and spasmodic ; and we

86 SEX AND EDUCATION.

shall have no hothouse flowers to fade and die
at the first touch of the ruder air of real life, but
blossoms that are the pledge of coming fruit.

It would be unjust and ungrateful in any wo-
man not to recognize the fact that Dr. Clarke's
book was necessarily written in haste, in hours
snatched from his absorbing labors in alleviating
the sufferings of those for whose good he wrote.
It was doubtless this haste that rendered possi-
ble such a verbal error as occurs on page 35,
where he hides the venerable Ulysses, instead
of the youthful Achilles, among the maidens.

In conclusion, we would insist not only that
the diseases so often referred to do not originate
generally in the schools, but that the only way
in which they can be reached and cured is
through the instruction imparted and the reg-
ularity of life, in all its details, required by wisely
conducted schools, covering the whole period
from early girlhood to full maturity.

SEX AND EDUCATION. 8/

V.

BY CAROLINE H. DALL.

"THE hand of iron in the glove of silk!" How
utter one word in the face of testimony like
this, — honest, conscientious, earnest ; adding to

*

the highest professional reputation all the force
of a pure and noble individual character ? How
do it, still further, in the face of personal ob-
ligations accumulating for more than twenty
years, and of that loving respect with which the
physician who is also priest is held in every
household ? I have anticipated this book with
pain. I lay it down with pain, far sharper and
far different from any that I foresaw. I start
from the same premises with Dr. Clarke ; for I
believe the spiritual and intellectual functions
of men and women to tend differently to their
one end ; and their development to this end,
through the physical, to be best achieved by dif-

88 SEX AND EDUCATION.

ferent methods. But I do not believe that any
greater difference of capacity, whether physical
or psychical, will be found between man and
woman than is found between man and man ;
and my faith in the co-education of the sexes
has been greatly stimulated by the present in-
elastic method, from which many boys do shrink
as much as any girl could.

Under a proper system boys and girls help
each other forward, not merely towards excel-
lent scholarship, but towards a perfect human-
ity,— that is, a perfect self-possession, — the
attainment for each of a sound mind in a sound
body. To understand this, however, not even
the President of Harvard will find possible un-
less he does more than look at a mixed college.
To have any fair comprehension of the elements
which constitute its power for good or evil, it is
necessary to pass at least a week within its
walls, sharing the " college commons " and the
college recreations ; studying its whole action as
if it were a large family.

When I laid down this book I felt the empha-

S-EX AND EDUCATION. 89

sis of my pain in a direction wholly unexpected.
Every woman who takes up her pen to reject
its conclusions knows very well that it will
penetrate hundreds of households where her
protest cannot follow ; and Dr. Clarke must be
patient with the number and weight of our re-
monstrances, since he knows very well that
upon the major part of the community our
words will fall with no authority, our experiences
invite no confidence. We must gain the public
ear by constant iteration, and by our " impor-
tunity " prevail. This book will fall into the
hands of the young, and that I deplore. They
should be taught the proper care of their grow-
ing bodies ; but any such cases of disease as
are here recorded are fruitful of evil stimulus
to any girl inclined to hysterics. If this subject
ought to be discussed publicly at all, a matter
open to doubt, teachers and mothers should dis-
cuss it. No amount of professional skill can
avail in place of that sympathetic intuition of
causes which should spring from identical physi-
cal constitution. In no pages that I ever read

90 SEX AND EDUCATION.

is the need of educated women physicians so
painfully apparent as in these. I expected to
find premises from which I should dissent, but,
with the exception of that upon which the book
is based, I did not find any ; and, so far as it
is an argument against co-education, the book
utterly fails.

Co-education does not necessarily include
identical methods ; and, if it did, Dr. Clarke's
examples of broken constitutions are brought
from the clerk's desk, the theatre, and the
woman's college, as well. His examples have no
statistical value ; for nothing is told us of their
proportion to the whole number of students of
the other sex under the same precise conditions,
or to the failures in the same number of girls
educated tenderly at home. When the book
passes from the methods of education to the
effect of those methods on womanly functions,
the treatment of the subject is both one-sided
and incomplete. The only proper place for a
discussion of the latter in extenso is the columns
of a medical journal ; but this book is intended

SEX AND EDUCATION. 91

for popular use, and to the people must those
who criticise it appeal.

The most painful thing in the book is its tone.
Mr. Higginson has said that it is not coarse !
Surely never was a sentence written that more
eloquently betrayed the need women have to
speak for themselves ! Women read this essay
with personal humiliation and dismay. A cer-
tain materialistic taint is felt throughout the
whole, such as saddens most of our intercourse
with our young physicians, but which we had
hoped never to associate with this man, so long
and so justly revered. The natural outgrowth
of this tone are the sneers which disfigure its
pages, the motto from Plautus, and a few most
unhappy illustrations.

These things might be easily forgiven to the
immature student, as we pardon the rude man-
ners of growing boys ; but should not our friend
have denied himself the small relief of their
utterance ? We cannot excuse the trait merely
because the work has been undertaken in the
midst of more pressing cares. We feel that it

92 SEX AND EDUCATION.

indicates something in the author which is no
accident. We do not accept it as suitable in
the " beloved physician " for whose delicate and
thoughtful care so many have been grateful.
He, at least, should have given us pages that a
woman might read without a blush.

We are sorry that he thought it worth while
to invent a word to give point to his sneer. If
there are any " agenes " in the world, surely we
do not find them in the women who, seeking to
do some good work in the world, have sought
the development of their best powers in ways
unwise or absurd, and have in consequence
failed to satisfy the yearnings that they feel.
" Other tasks in other worlds " await them, and
the yearning may still prove the germ of a com-
pleted development. The true " agenes " are
the men who have lost manhood through vicious
courses, and whose innocent wives will never
hear the voices of their children in consequence.
We look from the possible mother to the father,
and I mean all that my words imply. It is the
testimony of one even more familiar with the

SEX AND EDUCATION. 93

nursery and the sick-room than with the theo-f
ries of the platform. The vices of men imperil
the populations of the earth far more than the
unwise studies of women.

Very painful, also, is the witness these pages
bear to the small number of wise and noble
mothers among us, — women who can so im-
press themselves upon their daughters that
they should follow modest and wholesome
courses, as if by instinct or habit, and should
shrink from all the possible unwomanly expos-
ure which has made these pages necessary.
Our author quotes a letter from a German
mother, as if it could not have been written
here. But the mothers of all my schoolmates
lived as if they had written it, and it gives the
experience of that portion of present society
who believe in motherly influence and exercise
motherly care. It is true that there are " fast "
young women, with whom the restraints of
proper feeling do not prevail ; but distinctions
should be made in the writing. Refined and
thoughtful women should be credited with their

94 SEX AND EDUCATION.

actual habits. Dr. Clarke has lost a most pre-
cious opportunity. It was in his power to
stamp the objectionable mode of life with its
real vulgarity. If any fathers would but guard
their sons as many women still know how to
guard their daughters ! The revelations of this
book are enough to chill any one with horror.

In the writing of this book acknowledged
statistics seem to have been wholly overlooked.
More female infants than male survive the
perils of infancy, and more girls mature into
womanhood than boys into manhood. Will
any one who looks carefully at the immature
half-developed figures of our young men, or
keeps the record of their vitality, claim that it
is superior to that of women ?

In all books that concern the education of
women, one very important fact is continually
overlooked.

Women, and even young girls at school, take
their studies in addition to their home-cares.
If boys are preparing for college, they do not
have to take care of the baby, make the beds,

SEX AND EDUCA TION. 95

or help to serve the meals. A great many girls
at the High Schools do all this. Then, if a
man who is a student marries, he is carefully
protected from all annoyance. His study is
sacred, his wife does the marketing. If his
baby cries, he sleeps in the spare room.

So far women have written in the nursery
or the dining-room, often with one foot on the
cradle. They must provide for their households,
and nurse their sick, before they can follow any
artistic or intellectual bent.

When it is once fairly acknowledged that
women properly have a vocation, they may be
protected in it as a man is. At present there
is* no propriety in making comparisons of re-
sults in regard to the two sexes.

It is in " education " that Dr. Clarke seems
to find the sole source of numerous evils. It is
true that he alludes to bad food and bad habits
of dress, but so slightly that the reader might
be justified in forgetting it. Of dissipation and
precocious folly there is scarce a word. He
alludes to " the pallor of our women " as if it

96 SEX AND EDUCATION.

were a new thing, whereas the second genera-
tion born upon these shores bore witness to it.
It was observed by travellers one hundred and
fifty years ago. As to the endurance of the
duties of motherhood, and the proportion of
surviving children born to them, our women are
far in advance of the first generation, born and
reared across the water. It was a rare thing in
that generation for man and wife to live together
through the whole natural period of conjugal life.
The men lived long ; but they had two, three,
four, and — more frequently than any one would
believe who had not examined — five wives. Nor
can this be accounted for on the ground that the
women were subj ect to uncommon hardship. The
settlers of Ipswich, for example, were wealthy ;
they built houses more comfortable than those
they had left ; and they testify that one of their
motives in coming to this country was the lack
of pure water and good drainage in the old.
Still their wives perished by the score. " The
wind at Madrid will not blow out a candle,"
says the old Spanish proverb, " but it can kill

SEX AND EDUCATION. 97

a man." The change of climate was at the
bottom of this early fatality. The condition of
things steadily improved to the happy time that
we all remember. If the last thirty years has
checked the steady gain, let us consider patient-
ly the era of French fashions, vices, and habits,
the era of unnatural hours and pastimes. The
movement in behalf of the higher education of
woman is a very modern movement. No single
generation can be said to have matured under
its influence. It is too early to examine the
results, but this is certain: whatever danger
menaces the health of America, it cannot thus
far have sprung from the over-education of her
women.

Mrs. Badger has already shown that the
health of Southern and Western women, whose
opportunities of education have been small, is
even lower than that of our cultivated classes,
a matter easily to be tested by any one who will
watch the crowd pouring out of a western rail-
road station. " The cerebral processes by which
knowledge is acquired are the samp^Dt^JJq^

f rmi

UNIVERSITY

98 SEX AND EDUCATION.

sexes," says Dr. Clarke ; but observing women
will hardly admit this statement. I believe it
would be hardly possible for women to become
students if the processes were identical. The
slowest woman who has any real power will con-
quer a new study in about half the time of the
average male student. Her method she does
not herself understand. She has ways and
means which are not apparent. I cannot be-
lieve that any " Oriental care of the body " ever
equalled the care given to the women of to-day in
America. The women who are now practising
as physicians in the harems of Europe and Asia
find fearful ignorance and absolute superstition.
For myself I can only say that I look for young
women of the strongest physique at this mo-
ment within the walls of academies and colleges.
The regular studies, the early rising and retir-
ing, the exercises in the gymnasium and the
open air, the companionship with charming and
cultivated women older than themselves, all tend
to the most perfect health. This is a reproach
to our homes, and perhaps indicates that care-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 99

lessness in mothers which was always avoided
when I was young, not so much because its re-
. suits were injurious as because it was in itself
unwomanly and indelicate.

Dr. Clarke fears that co-education will stimu-
late women to attempt what the method of their
physical life renders dangerous. Why, then,
does he turn from Oberlin, Antioch, and Cornell
to the one institution where co-education has
never been, and will never be, attempted, and
where the one fact of the resident physician
and the resident " lady principal " should indi-
cate to the most careless inspection a careful
adaptation to womanly needs ? Or why, if he
had an hysterical patient who happened to have
been a pupil at Vassar, did he trust, without
examination, to her statements ? I may chal-
lenge an audience when I speak of Vassar ; for
it is against my will if it fulfil any dream of
mine. From the hour that it first went into
operation I have been its frequent visitor. The
president and faculty might have banished me
as a spy, so thoroughly committed am I to the

I0o SEX AND EDUCATION.

cause of co-education. Instead they welcomed
me warmly, and gave me liberty and opportu-
nity to detect every flaw.

In a meeting of the " American Association
for the Promotion of Social Science," held last
May, I drew attention to the superior health of
the girls at Vassar. I pointed out the fact that
the health of the girls continued to improve
up to the hour of graduation ; and while I had
in my audience three members of the faculty,
Miss Maria Mitchell, the resident physician,
Dr. Avery, and President Raymond himself, it
was observable that they heard me with indif-
ference rather than pride, so perfectly familiar
were they with the fact. The parents of all the
pupils are also familiar with it ; and if Dr.
Avery were at any moment to resign her re-
sponsible post she would receive a warm wel-
come in any community that had sent pupils to
Vassar. The world may be challenged to pro-
duce, in any one neighborhood, four hundred
young women of so great physical promise. In
the following June I met .Miss Mary Carpen-

SEX AND EDUCATION.

ter at Vassar by appointment. She
amazement how close the actual
the pupils came to the curriculum proposed ;
but she concluded her investigation by ejacu-
lating, with the peculiar emphasis that all who
know her will recall, "And we must admit that
they have superior health, — it is most extraor-
dinary ! " This was the testimony of one accus-
tomed to the " rosebuds " in England's "garden
of girls." In regard to the case reported by Dr.
Clarke in connection with Vassar College, I was
so sure that there was some mistake that I wrote
at once to the resident physician, and she will
be glad to be held responsible for the following
statements.

The points will be perceived if the reader will
refer to the 79th page of " Sex in Education."
Vassar College does not receive students under
fifteen, even for the first preparatory year ; and
there is a preparatory course of two years. No
student ever entered the freshman class at four- -
teen. At the beginning of every collegiate
year the students are carefully instructed re-

102 SEX AND EDUCATION.

garding the periodic precautions necessary to
their health. They are positively forbidden to
take gymnastics at all during the first, two days
of their period ; and, if there is the slightest
diseased tendency, are told to forego those ex-
ercises entirely. They are forbidden to ride on
horseback, and are strongly advised not to
dance, nor to run up and down stairs, nor to do
any thing else which will give successive, even
though gentle, shocks to the trunk. They are
encouraged to go out of doors for quiet walks
and drives, and to do whatever they can to
steady irritable nerves or unnatural excitement.
That a student should faint again and again in
the gymnasium, and still be allowed to continue
her exercises there, is a statement that would
not be made by any one familiar with the per-
sonal physical care given at Vassar College,
not merely by the resident physician, but by the
teachers acting as a body. It is a statement
that will be believed by no one in the least
familiar with the college methods. The faculty
do not attempt to cut down the work of each

SEX AND EDUCATION. 103

girl periodically ; but they do mean to so regu-
late the work of the whole time that the end of
no day shall find her overtaxed, even though
that day bear an unusual burden. The average
age of the graduates is twenty-one and one-
half. The present freshman class numbers
seventy-nine.

The girls begin the work of the year at the
following ages : —

ii between 20 and 23.

14 „ 19 „ 20.

23 „ 18 „ 19.

24 „ 17 „ 18.
6 „ 16 „ 17.
i » 15 » l6-

This is a fair average class, except that it is
singular in the last item. That is almost the
only instance in the history of the college of a
student entering as a freshman under sixteen.
Few are under seventeen ; seventy-two of the
seventy-nine are over that age. Forty-eight, or
three-fifths, are over eighteen. " Eighteen,"
writes Dr. Avery, "is young ^ enough for any
woman to begin this course. At that age, with

104 SEX AND EDUCATION.

an average endowment of mind and body, she
pursues it with gladness and ends it with re-
joicing, as many of our classes can prove."

I consider this a most valuable exhibit, and it
is the book before us that has called it out. Vas-
sar never yet insisted on a " regimen not to be
distinguished " from that impressed upon boys,
and her pupils are guided physiologically with a
watchful tenderness impossible in most homes.
Such care is quite as much needed by boys.
Whenever co-education becomes a fact, the so-
cial head of the mixed college must be a woman
who will exercise loving motherly care for both,
and who will find no practical difficulty in the
natural differences.

Of one other case cited by Dr. Clarke as an
instance of over or unwise education, I had an
intimate and sorrowful knowledge. The de-
generacy imputed to excessive culture was, in
fact, the result of a tendency inherited from a
vicious father, — a tendency recognized by its
unfortunate subject with morbid pain from the
beginning.

SEX AND EDUCATION. IO$

Nothing will pain women more in this book
than the assertion that " old age is sexless."
Men and women do not lose the distinctions of
perfect womanhood and manhood as they draw
nearer to each other, unless we are prepared to
account these purely physical. A woman ceases
to be a mother only to fulfil the quite as sacred
functions of the grandmother. She is set free
from certain cares that a large experience of
life may show her all the more fit for certain
other cares, both social and philanthropic ; but
if she be not to her heart's core womanly, even
at the age of eighty, her life has been a failure.
Man, ripening alike through success and reverse,
grows nearer to woman as he grows old ; but his
advanced life is also worthless if it cannot offer
manhood's ripest fruit to her hand. Sweet
memories of happy firesides, where the winter
blaze crowned snowy heads with halos, bring
the quick tears to my eyes as I write. God be
thanked for manhood and womanhood completed
at fourscore, as I recall them ! It would seem
as if Dr. Clarke can hardly yet understand what

106 SEX AND EDUCATION.

a blow his essay deals at the industry of woman.
Did the world accept it, the movement now ad-
vancing would be checked in the bud. Thou-
sands of women are thrown upon themselves
for self-support at the age of fourteen. The
moment that school-tasks are remitted three
days out of thirty, clerks will leave the desk,
servant-girls their accustomed work, shop-girls
their counters. It is not too much to say that
male labor must replace service as intermittent
as this.

I Having shown what the facts are in reference
to the noblest institution for the culture of
girls, I will add that I am utterly tired of see-
ing any class of God's creatures singled out
for especial care. Bad habits, houses built
like packing-cases set on end, unwholesome
food, precocious reading, have much to do with
the ill-heath of American women. If they put
their money into comfort instead of flounces,
if they employed two servants where they now
have six, much of their mental lassitude would
disappear, and their bodies would bear witness

SEX AND EDUCATION. IO/

to the release. It is time that a generation of
healthy men were provided : the occult causes
lie within their own control.

The book before us may do something by
rousing mothers and daughters to contemplate
the situation ; but, if properly trained in wise
homes towards average health, the ends of life
will be far better served by the women who for-
get their own inconveniences and think chiefly
of those endured by others.

Nothing is so absurd as to press upon a young
woman's thought the idea that she is to become
a mother. What if she is ? Let her make
herself a healthy, happy human being, and what
will may befall. What would be thought of a
community which definitely undertook to train
young men to the functions and duties of fath-
ers ? A shout of derision would be raised at
once. " Let us have citizens ! " the world would
cry. I echo the demand. Mothers are no more
important to the race than fathers. We must
gain both by seeking first the " kingdom of
God." People should live out their young and

108 SEX AND EDUCATION.

happy days, unconscious of this issue, as the
flowers take no thought of seed. This is best
done when their minds are occupied with
other subjects than "periodicity" or " develop-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 109

VI.
BY C.

A FEW years ago an eminent divine felt it his
mission to expound to woman " the great facts
of her being." He began his harangue with
flattering admissions of her " intuitions " and
" delicacy of taste ; " and, having thus secured
himself a hearing, he proceeded to declare that
"woman cannot compete with man in a long
course of mental labor," and that " as for train-
ing young ladies through a long intellectual
course, as we do young men, it can never be
done, — they will die in the process."

With the same conventional concessions to
the equality of the sexes, Dr. Clarke introduces
his plea for what, with great adroitness, he calls,
" A Fair Chance for the Girls."

"Abstract right and wrong," he says, "has
nothing to do with sex. What is right or

110 SEX AND EDUCATION.

wrong for man is equally right or wrong for
woman. . . . Both have a right to do the best
they can, or, to speak more justly, both should
feel the duty and have the opportunity to do
their best. . . . Neither is there any such thing
as superiority or inferiority in the matter. Man
is not superior to woman, nor woman to man.
The relation of the sexes is one of equality, not
of better and worse, or of a higher and lower."

"Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes."

The old doctrine of woman's sphere shines
with equal clearness from the pages of Dr. Todd
and Dr. Clarke, though the latter carefully avoids
the obnoxious phrase. Just as plainly, though
in less offensive words, does Dr. Clarke announce
his belief that woman was made for man, and
that maternity is her only divinely appointed
mission, with an unmanly sneer at those who
fail to fulfil that destiny.

The sneer is too studied to be accidental, and
is to me the unpardonable sin of the book. Did
the author willingly expose himself to justified

SEX AND EDUCATION. Ill

attack on this point, for the express purpose of
reaching the ear and heart of those superlatively
weak women whom nothing can touch but a
masculine sneer? Not quite believing in his
own arguments, did he trust to satire to win him
approval with that class of people for whom his
book was written ? Surely he is not so ignorant
as not to know that the jeer will only weaken
the argument with all thoughtful people. But
was the book written for the thinking people, or
for those whom ridicule, not reason, convinces ?
For those especially who fear masculine ridicule
in all that relates to their external attractions ;
for those who can endure all loss save the loss
of admiration ; for those on whom an argument
is wasted, while a sneer converts ? One may fully
believe that the perfection of womanhood, as of
manhood, is reached in a true marriage ; one
may dissent from the opinion that man and wo-
man, being equal, are therefore identical ; one
may not yet be fully persuaded in her own mind
that the co-education of the sexes is desirable :
yet if she is an earnest and thoughtful woman,

1 12 SEX AND EDUCA TION.

as anxious for the intellectual as for the physical
perfection of her sex, she must feel the gripe of
the iron hand under the velvet glove in all Dr.
Clarke's admissions, coupled as they are with
such limitations. "Without denying the self-
evident proposition," says Dr. Clarke, " that
whatever a woman can do she has a right to do,
the question at once arises, what can she do ?
and this includes the question, what can she
best do ? ... The qucestio vexata of woman's
sphere will be decided by her organization.
This limits her power and reveals her divinely
appointed tasks. . . . Each can do in certain
directions what the other cannot ; and in other
directions, when both can do the same things,
one sex as a rule can do them better than the
other. . . . Many of the efforts for bettering her
education seem to treat her as if her organiza-
tion, and consequently her function, were mas-
culine, not feminine. . . . The lily is not inferior
to the rose, nor the oak superior to the clover ;
yet the glory of the lily is one, and the glory of
the oak is another, and the use of the oak is not
the use of the clover."

S-EX AND EDUCA TION. 1 1 3

" Whatever a woman can do she has a right to
do," is so plausible as to satisfy the credulous,
were it not for the ungenerous doubt contained
in the inquiry, " But what can she do ? and what
can she best do ? " — questions which she is not
to be allowed to settle for herself, but which Dr.
Clarke hastens to answer by telling her "her
organization limits her power, and reveals her
divinely appointed tasks." She is entitled only
to what she can attain as a woman ; and, being
a woman, her attainment is limited by her organ-
ization. What mother or teacher would have
the heart to -say to the healthy girl of fifteen,
just becoming conscious of her mental powers,
" My girl, hitherto you have talked, romped,
chased butterflies and climbed fences, loved,
hated (and studied) with your brother, with an
innocent abandon that is ignorant of sex. Here
your paths must diverge. He will go out into
the world free to attain the highest mental cul-
ture of which a human being is capable. You
were predestined to be a wife and a mother, and
are therefore endowed with a peculiar organiza-
H

114 SEX AND EDUCATION.

tion. To develop that organization to that end
becomes now your duty and mine." High med-
ical authority has declared that " force must be
allowed to flow thither in an ample stream, and
not be diverted to the brain by the school ; " and,
as the system never does two things well at the
same time, you must no longer spend in the
study of geography and arithmetic, of Latin,
Greek, and chemistry, in the brain-work of the
school-room, force that should be spent in phys-
ical growth. Your power is limited by your
organization. What robust girl to whom this
should be said, but would feel her sex to be a
galling chain, and her tasks any thing but di-
vinely appointed ? " The use of the clover is
not the use of the oak," says Dr. Clarke. " You
must not try to make the anemone into an oak,"
says Dr. Todd. Not at all. I only find it diffi-
cult to believe that a kind Creator intended my
mortal body to be a hinderance to the develop-
ment of my immortal mind, which physiology
and theology both assure me he has made equal
to that of my brother.

SEX AND ED L/C A TION. 1 1 5

This physiological scare is the most insidious
form under which the opposition to the higher
education of woman has yet appeared. I speak
advisedly ; for, though this book professes to be
a protest against the co-education of the sexes,
and even against their separate identical educa-
tion, I think it will be felt by the careful reader
to be a protest against any high intellectual
education for women.

While the author claims to use the term edu-
cation only in its broadest sense as " the draw-
ing out and development of every part of the
system," including necessarily the whole manner
of life physical and psychical during the educa-
tional period, it will be seen that he lays stress
only upon the physical education of girls, and
upon their physical education only as it is con-
nected with the duties of maternity. Nowhere
does he hold out to the girls the promise that,
if they will carefully obey his injunctions dur-
ing the critical period of their lives, they can
with safety, and may with propriety, seek a
higher mental culture. Nowhere does he urge

Il6 SEX AND EDUCATION.

them finally to demand the highest mental cul-
ture, as he insists that they shall have the high-
est physical culture, as their birthright.

Moreover, that regimen which precludes the
regular attendance of girls upon school, between
the ages of fourteen and nineteen, virtually robs
them of any extended course of study, since be-
fore the end of that period their so-called duties
to society are thrust upon them.

Is it fair, in contrasting the ruddy cheeks and
vigor of the English girl with the pallor and weak-
ness of the American girl, to attribute the latter
largely to the educational methods of our schools,
and to credit nothing of the former to the simple
domestic life of the English girl ?

Let us " emphasize and reiterate until it is
heeded " Dr. Clarke's statement that "jwpman's
neglect of her own organization adds to the
number of her many weaknesses, and intensifies
their power." Let us reflect awhile before we
accept his statement that "the educational
methods of our schools are, to a large extent,
the causes of the thousand ills that beset Amer-
ican women."

SEX AND EDUCATION. 1 1/

"Girls of bloodless skins and intellectual
faces," he says, " may be seen any day, by those
who desire the spectacle, among the scholars of
our high and normal schools ; faces that crown,
and skins that cover, curving spines which should
be straight, and neuralgic nerves that should
know no pain. ... A training that yields this
result is neither fair to the girls nor to the
race."

Are bloodless female faces to be found only
among the scholars of our high and normal
schools ?

When found there, what effort has Dr. Clarke
made to ascertain how much of their bloodless-
ness is due to brain labor ? Does he know any
thing of the home life of these girls ? Is it not
just possible that they may have been defrauded
of their childhood, — that in what is technically
and prettily called helping their mothers, lifting
and carrying baby, &c., their poor curved spines
may have got a -twist long before they had won
admission to the high school ?

Are there no bloodless faces among the sew-

Il8 SEX AND EDUCATION.

ing girls who do not stand at their work, whose
work is neither brain-work nor severe manual
labor, but that most often quoted to us as the
most suitable feminine occupation ?

" The number of these graduates who have
been permanently disabled, to a greater or less
degree, by these causes, is so great as to excite
the greatest alarm," says Dr. Clarke. Will he
give us the exact number, so that we need not
underrate or overrate the danger ? and, if it can
be proved that two out of every five of these
wrecks to which he sadly points, were stranded
on another shore than that of a sustained course
of mental work, it will tend to quiet the alarm.

I do not wish to put out of sight the doctor's
explicit declaration that "our school methods
are not the sole causes of female weakness."
He admits that "an immense loss of female
power may be fairly charged " to certain delin-
quencies of dress and diet ; yet he as distinctly
adds that, " after the amplest allowance for
these, there remains a large margin of disease
unaccounted for ; " that " the grievous maladies

SEX AND EDUCA TION. 1 19

that torture a woman's earthly existence are
indirectly affected by food, clothes, and exer-
cise ; they are directly and largely affected by
the methods of education in our schools." Fur-
thermore, he makes no demand that girls shall
be as carefully protected from physical strain
and from mental excitement in their social life
at critical periods as he does that they shall be
protected from the excitements of study. A
paper that, after claiming to treat upon educa-
tion as " including the whole manner of life,"
declares the discussion of dress and similar
causes of female weakness is not within its
scope ; that mentions these casually as indirect
causes, and is silent concerning the social ex-
citements of girls, which every teacher feels to
be a fruitful source of disease, directing its
arguments mainly against their mental training,
— does not seem to me to be written wholly in
the interest of the girls. The writer leaves the
impression, and he means to leave the impres-
sion, that the regimen of the schools, if not the
sole cause, is the prime and direct cause of the

120 SEX AND EDUCATION.

ill-health of American women. When he gives
us statistics showing that the girls injured by
co-education or by separate identical education
outnumber the girls diseased by excessive muscle
work, excessive mental idleness, or excessive
social dissipation, it will not be necessary for
him to plead the poverty of Harvard College in
support of his theory.

By his logic the girls in fashionable private
schools, where the discipline is supposed to be
more lax, the course of study more flexible, and
the standard lower, should have better health
than the girls in the public schools. Is it true
that they have ?

Teachers of fashionable private schools for
girls in Boston to-day know that their pupils, so
far from studying harder than they themselves
did twenty-five years ago, study less. The hours
of the school session are fewer, and much less
time is granted for study out of school. They
know, too, that the absences excused by sick-
ness are far in excess of those of their own
school-days. Looking, therefore, for some other

SEX AND EDUCA TION. 1 2 1

cause than increased brain-work, for this de-
generacy in the health of girls, they easily find
it in the increased luxury and irregularity of
their home life.

Teachers of long experience testify that the
health of studious girls is better than that of the
lazy ones, because their minds are occupied hap-
pily, and being also regularly occupied acquire
a habit of concentration that is stability and
strength for mind and body. The involuntary
testimony of many a school-girl goes far to con-
firm this.

Sadder even than the bloodless skin and in-
tellectual face of the normal-school girl is the
not uncommon spectacle of the bloodless skin
and unintellectual face of the girl in our fash-
ionable private schools, whose mind has become
so enervated by parental indulgence, so demoral-
ized by constant social excitement, that, to use
her own words, " the sight of a book makes her
head ache."

If we could make it impossible for little girls
of eight to solemnize paper-doll weddings, from
6

122 SEX AND EDUCATION.

which the precocious guests, after refreshing
themselves with lobster salad and candies, roll
home in their carriages at ten at night ; if we
could prevent the participation of their older
sisters in private theatricals and the German,
during the regular school-work of the year ; if
the education of girls could be at least so far
identical with that of boys that we could oppose
common sense and physiological reasons to that
absurd dictum of society which now thrusts girls
of eighteen out of the school-room and into the
matrimonial market, while their brothers of the
same age are considered as mere lads and just
beginning their education ; if we could take care
that they are not overburdened with domestic
responsibility as their brothers never are, and,
instead of restricting their regular routine of
school-work to the period between eight and
eighteen, could extend it to the age of twenty-
four, like that of their college brothers who study
a profession, — the girls .would have the fair
chance which they now lack, both for physical
and mental development.

SEX AND EDUCA TION. \ 23

Meantime let the well girls, and there are
hundreds of them, though of course not within
the Doctor's range of vision, aim for the highest
intellectual culture, not deterred by the fear of
being stigmatized as agates.

Can any woman read this book without feeling
depressed, — crushed by this cosmic law of peri-
odicity which is to exempt her from nothing, but
only to debar her from a higher education ? For
the Doctor declares that "female operatives of
all sorts are likely to suffer less, and actually do
suffer less, from persistent work than female stu-
dents, . . . because the former work their brains
less." The regimen prescribed by the Doctor has
so few attractions, the reward he offers is so
paltry. We are to remember that " the glory of
the lily is one, and the glory of the oak another."
If we "pass middle life without the symmetry
and development that maternity gives," we are
taunted with the " hermaphroditic condition that
sometimes accompanies spinsterism." We are
not allowed to believe, with Alger, that "the
qualities of our soul and the fruitions of our life

124 SEX AND EDUCATION.

may be perfected in spite of the relative mutila-
tion in our lot." We are to "give girls a fair
chance for physical development at school, and
they will be able in after life, with reasonable
care of themselves, to answer the demands made
upon them." That is the summary.

Whether intentionally or not, this book pan-
ders to that sentiment of fashionable society
that declares it unnecessary for girls to know
any thing but to make themselves attractive ; and,
what is still more to be regretted, it will tend to
increase the selfishness and the imaginary in-
validism so prevalent among girls and women
who have nothing better in life to do than to
think of themselves.

The " wisely anxious " mothers do not need it ;
and the injudicious mothers, who wish to make
the schools responsible for their own constant
violation of the simplest hygienic laws in the
management of their daughters, confirmed in
their weakness by Dr. Clarke's leniency towards
their social sins, will eagerly seize upon it as a
weapon of attack.

SEX AND EDUCA TION. 1 2$

It is easy enough to make vague and arbitrary
assertions, and to point them with cruel gibes, —
far easier than to prove them false. It is easy
enough to meet sneer with sneer, and to animad-
vert upon such assertions with a certain piquancy.
But neither the assertion nor the animadversion
amounts to any thing without facts to support
it.

A physician of such standing and authority in
the community that we are compelled to listen
to him has made assertions which he has not
yet supported by statistics. It behooves the
earnest women, especially the faithful teachers,
to satisfy themselves at least whether these as-
sertions can be supported, — in order, if they can
be, to correct what is wrong in their present
methods, and, if they cannot be, to do their part
towards removing a false impression.

126 SEX AND EDUCATION.

VII.

BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS.

THE only really serious thing about Dr. Clarke's
book is the confusion of the author's ideas as to
the precise defining line between a work adapted
to popular instruction and a medical treatise.
An author who forgets in the drawing-room and
at the fireside that he is not in the lecture-room
of the medical school, has put himself beyond
the reach of knowing the real effect produced
by him upon either the drawing-room or the fire-
side. He may have done so with the deliberate
intention of a theorist who does not desire to be
answered ; he may have done so with the clear
conscience of a zealot who desires only to do
what presents itself to him as his duty. He has
undoubtedly done so, at least, with motives which
it were indelicate to call indelicate, whatever else
might be said of them ; but, all the same, he has

SEX AND EDUCATION. 12?

put himself beyond this reach. From the medi-
cal lecture-room alone can he be answered. Only
a physician can reply to " Sex in Education."

It is to be hoped that, among the physicians
whose professional rank may entitle them to a
hearing as broad as Dr. Clarke's, some one who
joins issue with him upon his principal physio-
logical theory, may find the leisure to remind us
what a blessed fact it is that doctors always dis-
agree. Without the least desire to undervalue
either the culture or the skill of the man from
whom we differ, a little inquiry into the effect
produced upon brother and sister physicians by
his essay will reveal the fact that its author is not
without sufficiently important opponents. " Sex
in Education " having once been written, another
essay, equally to the point, if a little more regard-
ful of the old-fashioned prejudices of non-medi-
cal society, should be written to mate it.

Meanwhile it remains possible for any of us
to say, in deprecation of the notion of woman-
hood advanced by Dr. Clarke, two things.

i. The physician is not the person whose

128 SEX AND EDUCATION.

judgment upon a matter involving the welfare
of women can possibly be final. His testimony,
worth what it may be worth, should seek and fall
into its proper place in the physical aspects of
such a question ; but it shall stay in its place.
It is but a link in a chain. It is only a tint in a
kaleidoscope. A question so intricate and shift-
ing as that which involves the exact position of
woman in the economy of a cursed world is not to
be settled by the most intimate acquaintance with
the proximate principles of the human frame, with
the proportions of the gray and white matter in the
brain, or with the transitional character of the
tissues and the exquisite machinery of the viscera.
The psychologist has yet his word to say. The
theologian has a reason to be heard. The politi-
cal economist might also add to experience knowl-
edge. The woman who is physically and intel-
lectually a living denial of every premise and of
every conclusion which Dr. Clarke has advanced,
has yet a right to an audience. Nor is he even
the man whose judgment as to the health of
women can be symmetrical. No clinical opinion,

SEX AND EDUCATION.

it will be remembered, bearing against the phys-
ical vigor of any^class of people, is or^ can be a
complete one. The physician knows sick women
almost only. Well women keep away from him,
and thank Heaven. If there be any well women
he is always in doubt. Thousands of women
will read that they are prevented by Nature's
eternal and irresistible laws from all sustained
activity of brain or body, but principally of brain,

with much the same emotion with which we

•.

might read a fiat gone forth from the Royal Col-
lege of Surgeons in London, that Americans
could not eat roast beef, since, their researches
into morbid American anatomy had developed
the fact that Americans had died of eating roast
beef,' as well as a peculiar structure of the Ameri-
can stomach, to which roast beef was poisonously
adapted. Thousands of women will not believe
what the author of " Sex in Education " tells
them, simply because they know better. Their
own unlearned experience stands to them in
refutation of his learned statements. They will
give him theory for theory. They can pile up
6* i

130 SEX AND EDUCATION.

for him illustration on illustration. Statistics
they have none ; but no statistics has he. They
and the Doctor are met on fair fight.

Many a woman who stands at the factory loom
eleven hours and a half a day, from year's end to
year's end, from the age of eight to the age of
forty-eight, knows better than he tells her. Every
lady lecturer in the land, who unites the most
exhausting kind of brain and body labor in her
own experience, day and night after day and
night, for the half of every year, and unites it
in defiance of Dr. Clarke's prognostications,
knows better. Every healthy woman physician
knows better ; and it is only the woman physi-
cian, after all, whose judgment can ever approach
the ultimate uses of the physicist's testimony to
these questions.

It should be said : 2. Almost every fact brought
forward by Dr. Clarke goes to illustrate the exact
opposite of his almost every conclusion in respect
to the effect of mental labor upon the female
physique. With the serene, not to say dogmatic
conviction of the physician whose own patients

SEX AND EDUCATION. 131

represent the world to him, he has copied for us
from his note-books a series of cases exemplify-
ing the remarkable unanimity with which girls,
after leaving school, break down in health. Over-
looking the blunder which he made about the
student from Vassar College, which has been so
carefully pointed out by Colonel Higginson (I
refer to Dr. Clarke's implicit and unhesitating
acceptance and publication of statements made
by the student, which the faculty of the college
have since altogether denied) ; not pausing to dis-
cuss the spirit which grasps at uninvestigated
testimony like this, — run the eye over his illus-
trations, and what have we ?

With an affluent accompaniment of office detail
so evidently necessary to the public discussion of
an educational topic, and so unlikely to attract a
purely irrelevant and unworthy attention to the
circulation of the essay that one cannot fail to
note the author's generosity in this particular, he
calls our consideration to his list of cases, argu*
ing detachedly, by the way, and ingeniously con-
structing for our benefit very much such a
syllogism as this.

132 SEX AND EDUCATION.

Sumption. — All women ought to be incapable
of sustained activity.

Subsumption. — Some women whom I have
known are incapable of sustained activity. Miss
X. became an invalid soon after leaving school.
Miss Y. was injured by gymnastic exercises, fell
under my care, and will never be well. Miss Z.
became an invalid soon after leaving school, and
being for some time under my treatment was
sent to an insane asylum.

Therefore,

Conclusion : All women are incapable of sus-
tained activity, but proved especially incapable of
sustained brain activity ; and, since it would cost
Harvard College several millions of dollars to
admit them, co-education is a chimera, and old
maids a monstrosity at which physicians may
sneer, and by which young women should take
warning.

Or, to put it in another form, more compactly,

As long as girls are in school they are (with
exceptions so rare that I have had great difficulty
in finding them) in excellent health.

SEX AND EDUCATION.

When girls leave school, they fall sick.

Therefore it is sustained study which injure
girls.

Here, now, is the point of fair dispute. Why
do girls so often become invalids within a few
years after leaving school ? The fact is a famil-
iar one. We needed no Dr. Clarke come from
their graves to tell us this. We are well accus-
tomed to the sight of a fresh young girl, a close
student, a fine achiever, " sustained " in mental
application, and as healthy in body as she is
vigorous and aspiring in brain, sinking, after a
period of out-of-school life, into an aching, ailing,
moping creature, aimless in the spirit and useless
in the flesh for any of life's higher purposes,
with which her young soul was filled and fired
a little while ago.

" You may be well enough now. Wait till
you are twenty four or five. That is the age
when girls break down." This is the doleful
prophecy of friends and physicians cast cold on
the warm hopes of our hard-working, ambitious
girls. " It is because you keep late hours, dance

134 SEX AND EDUCATION.

too much, eat indigestible food, or exercise too
little," says the hygienist " It is because you
wear corsets, long skirts, and chignons," says
the dress reformer. " It is because you are a
woman. Here is a mystery ! " says the dunce.
" It is because you study too much," says Dr.
Clarke.

Who of us has yet suggested and enforced the
suggestion of another reason more simple and
comprehensive than any of these, — more prob-
able, perhaps, than any which could be found
outside of the effects of female dress ?

Women sick because they study ? Does it
not look a little more as if women were sick
because they stopped studying ?

Worn out by intellectual activity ?

Let us suppose that they might be exhausted
by the change from intellectual activity to in-
tellectual inanition. Made invalids because they
go to school from fourteen to eighteen ? Let us
conceive that they might be made invalids be-
cause they left school at eighteen ! Let us draw
upon our imagination to the extent of inquiring

SEX AND EDUCATION. 135

whether the nineteenth-century girl — intense,
sensitive, and developing, like her age, nervously
and fast — might not be made an invalid by the
plunge from the " healing influences " of system-
atic brain exertion to the broken, jagged life
which awaits a girl whose "education is com-
pleted." Made an invalid by exchanging the
wholesome pursuit of sufficient and worthy aims
for the unrelieved routine of a dependent domes-
tic life, from which all aim has departed, or for

»

the whirl of false excitements and falser contents
which she calls society. Made an invalid by the
abrupt slide from " thinking," as poor Lamb had
it, " that life was going to be something," to the
discovery that it has " unaccountably fallen from
her before its time." Made an invalid by the
sad and subtle process by which a girl is first
inspired to the ideal of a life in which her per-
sonal culture has as honest and honorable a part
of her regard as (and as a part of) her personal
usefulness ; and then is left to find out that per-
sonal culture substantially stopped for her when
she tied the ribbon of her seminary diploma.

136 SEX A ND ED UCA TION.

Made an invalid by the prejudice that deprives
her of the stimulus which every human being
needs and finds in the pursuit of some one
especial avocation, and confines that avocation
for her to a marriage which she may never
effect, and which may never help the matter if
she does. Made an invalid by the change from
doing something to doing nothing. Made an
invalid by the difference between being happy
and being miserable. Made an invalid, in short,
for just the reasons (in whatever manner, the
manner being a secondary point) why a man
would be made an invalid if subjected to the
woman's life when the woman's education is
over. That wretched, mistaken life, that ner-
vous, emotive, aimless, and exhausting life which
women assume at the end of their school career
would have killed Dr. Clarke, had it been his
lot, quite too soon for his years and experience
to have matured into the writing of " Sex in
Education."

Girls know what I mean. Women who work
for women have some chance to read the mind

SEX AND EDUCATION. 137

of women on such points. We could produce
our own note-book over against the physician's,
and the contents of it would be pitiful to see.

The sense of perplexed disappointment, of
baffled intelligence, of unoccupied powers, of
blunted aspirations, which run through the con-
fidences of girls "left school," is enough to
create any illness which nervous wear and
misery can create. And the physician should
be the first man to recognize this fact, — not the
man to ignore or discredit it ; not the man to
use his professional culture to the neglect of
any obvious appeal to his professional candor ;
not the man to veil within a few slippery flat-
teries a wilful ignorance or an unmanly sneer.

Admitting what must be in justice said of
" Sex in Education," — that its author's pro-
fessional status demanded for his opinions, if
expressed in the proper way and in the proper
places, at least an intelligent hearing ; and
that he has called attention to some evils in the
training of very young girls which require,
whether by his means or by some other, a

133 SEX AND EDUCATION.

remedy ; and that he has made a sincere en-
deavor to point out these real and other imagi-
nary evils in a manner good, at least in his own
eyes, — the sneer remains.1 By it women will
remember him when the work which he under-
took to do shall be long forgotten. Through it
the whole character of that work is vitiated and
its influence marred. For it we may yet be
grateful, after all.

1 Any reader of the essay will recall its flings at women
who, either from subjective preference or objective pressure,
are debarred from marriage and maternity. These flings are
too disagreeable for pleasant quotation.

SEX AND EDUCATION. 139

VIII.

DR. CLARKE'S book on '* Sex in Education "
should be read deliberately, thoughtfully, and in
a spirit of fairness, which seeks only to know
the real facts in the matter, and not to find
arguments for or against any special theory,
system, or hobby. Dr. Clarke is an eminent
physician. All forms of disease are not only
familiar to him, but are forced upon his atten-
tion : of course he sees the dark side of life,
and judges accordingly. His picture of the
condition of women is a terrible one, calculated
to excite deep anxiety in parents, and in young
women themselves : he sees in the future, if the
present system of education is continued, only
increasing invalidism, partial development, de-
formity, and the eventual failure of the Ameri-
can race. This alarming condition of affairs he

140 SEX AND EDUCATION.

attributes to various causes ; and among the
most powerful of these causes he reckons the
common system of continuous education for girls.
He calls it the boy's method, and means by it
not any special curriculum of study, or any share
in out-of-doors masculine plays or employments,
but simply regular study for five or six days of
every week. This, he thinks, is so grave an error,
so absolutely criminal a course, that he has given
to the world this book of warning, to stay, if he
can, this evil ; to save, if he can, American girls,
to enable them to become mothers ; for, he says,
" if these causes of evil — persistent education
chief among them — should continue for the
next half century, and increase in the same ratio
as they have for the last fifty years, it requires
no prophet to foretell that the wives who are to
be mothers in our republic must be drawn from
transatlantic homes. The sons of the New
World will have to react, on a magnificent
scale, the old story of unwived Rome and the
Sabines."

It is not education for women to which Dr.

•SEX AND EDUCA TION. 1 4 1

Clarke objects. He repeats emphatically that
they have a right to the best education and the
finest culture. He does not doubt their intellect-
ual ability ; but the essential thing in a good
education is complete development, so that
" boys may become men, and girls women, and
both have a fair chance to do and become their
best." Dr. Clarke's point is that the sustained
regularity of study which benefits a boy inevita-
bly harms a girl, prevents her from doing or be-
coming her best, and in a frightfully large pro-
portion of cases actually ruins her health, and
makes it impossible for her to nourish, and too
often impossible for her to bear, children. This
danger he discusses fully, and, as he says, with
great plainness of speech, and without ambiguity
of language or euphemism of expression. The
peril seems to him imminent, and he cries aloud
from his watch-tower of science and experience,
and his cry will be heard and heeded by thou-
sands. But there are other cries to be heard and
heeded ; there are other watchmen who do not
sleep at their posts, and who see brighter scenes

142 SEX AND EDUCATION.

and more hopeful signs, — watchmen who do not
disregard the enemy, but who see him and the
causes of his strength from another point of
view.

The defects in the present system of education
are so great that it is no wonder physicians can
hardly find words strong enough for denuncia-
tion of them, — especially great in the education
of girls. Children of both sexes have too many
studies ; they are crowded and hurried ; they do
very little really hard brain-work, but their brains
are bewildered ; they have a sort of mental indi-
gestion all the time ; and this kind of crowding
and driving is exciting and exhausting to the
nerves, and injurious to every portion of the
organism. Boys have some offset to it: they
have an easy dress, short hair, and can exercise
freely out of schools ; but that even their train-
ing is not the best is shown by the innumerable
invalids, imbeciles, and insane among men. With
girls, especially city girls, the matter is worse.
They cannot race and play and frolic on the
common or in the streets ; they wear tight boots,

SEX AND EDUCATION. 143

burdensome clothes, not tight but cumbersome
masses of their own or false hair on the head,
that should be cool and free ; they eat unwhole-
some food ; dance at hot parties ; saunter along
the pavements, with arms a la mode; go to danc-
ing school and skating parties without the faint-
est regard to physiology or to the plain rules of
health ; have music lessons and masters ; and in
too many cases lead a life of reckless waste that it
makes a grown person breathless to think of. No
wonder they break down, no wonder they have all
those miserable polysyllabic diseases that decently
trained women never heard of ; but we believe
that the class who have these diseases because of
" sustained regularity " in study is so small that
it should hardly be reckoned in the account, but
should be treated as exceptional, like the blind or
the physically deformed. It is almost impossible
for even a physician to discover in the case of
young invalids how much really hard and inju-
rious study has been done. The imprudences,
wilful or ignorant, of girls, are innumerable, and
only when driven to the last extreme will they

144 SEX AND EDUCATION.

confess them. If the evil resulting from bad
diet, late and irregular hours, improper clothing,
exposure to cold and dampness, hereditary weak-
ness, and exciting reading, could be eliminated,
we believe there would be no difficulty whatever
in raising a generation of strong and noble girls
under the system of " sustained regularity " of
study.

There is something to be said from the side of
health. All women are not sick, and the ex-
perience of health teaches that girls and boys
should have a very large margin for repair of
waste and for growth, — girls, perhaps, a larger
margin than boys, although we are by no means
sure of that. Nature is a wise worker, and dis-
tributes the repair and growth wherever it is
needed, to the dual organism of the boy or to the
tripartite one of the girl. With simple, healthful
habits of life, with proper diet, abundant sleep,
plenty of sunshine and play, and moderate, regu-
lar study, in school or out, girls, unless they .
inherited some disease, would stand a fair chance
for health, strength, and development as women.

SEX AND EDUCATION. 145

Indeed, we believe the sustained regularity of
moderate study to be better for the health of the
average girl than any periodicity of study. Girls
educated in this way, with wise regard to the
general principles of health, are not likely to
indulge in what Dr. Clarke calls cerebral pyro-
technics at school examinations ; but they are
likely to grow up intelligent women, with good
common sense, who, if fate throws them into the
whirl of city life, will set their faces against its
overwhelming excitements, and seek peaceful
hours at home as the weight and balance-wheel
of life ; and, if they live in the country, make
happy homes there. Many of them will be, as
women so educated now are, mothers and grand-
mothers ; some will probably be childless wives,
and some will never marry, but none of them
will ever deserve the bitter sneer with which Dr.
Clarke speaks of torsos and of the " hermaphro-
ditic condition that sometimes accompanies spin-
sterism."

If the ruinous work of women, their standing
in shops and at desks, could be stopped ; if chil-
7 J

146 SEX AND EDUCATION.

dren between ten and sixteen were not allowed
to serve in shops ; if no woman under twenty
were allowed to teach in a public school ; if girls
were taught obedience and truth-telling, and if
mothers were wisely anxious, — that is Dr. Clarke's
expression, and goes to the root of the matter, —
wisely anxious about their daughters, caring
for their health more than for their appearance,
for their permanent good more than their present
indulgence, looking after their reading and their
pleasures, guarding them from imprudence and
making them take care of their own health, there
would be no trouble about regular study. The
same causes that dry up the youth and strength
of young girls break down older ones, — constant
excitement and no real rest ; social excitement
at parties ; passionate excitement at operas and
theatres ; emotional excitement over highly
wrought novels and philanthropic work ; one
following close on the other, and all accompanied
by bodily fatigue and endless hurry. It is a sad
life to look at, in spite of the seeming beauty of
the garments of art, culture, and charity which

SEX AND EDUCATION. 147

it wears. If Dr. Clarke's warning will waken
people to their danger, and make them lead sim-
pler and easier lives ; if he can make them fol-
low the plainest rules of health ; if he can do
any thing toward keeping girls girls, instead
of having them forced, when they are hardly in
their teens, into diminutive fashionable women,
with a smattering of forty studies and a knowledge
of none, — he will be indeed a Good Physician,
and his aim will be won without taking girls out
of school or interfering with their regular work,
without even discussing the question of co-edu-
cation. . . .

The accounts of the training of German girls
given in the last chapter bear out these views.
To be sure, most of the German girls leave
school young, at about fifteen, and have lessons
at home. We know nothing of the regularity,
strictness, or requirements of these lessons or
lectures ; but we do know the work is regular,
and not periodical, for girls in average health,
and the health is taken care of. There is an
established kind of tradition, as there is in many

148 SEX AND EDUCATION.

families in this country, in regard to the regimen
for girls. Cold and exposure are avoided ; school-
girls never ride and never go to parties ; and, even
when school-days are over, girls do not go to
parties during the time when Dr. Clarke thinks
they ought not to go to school. Dr. Hagen
writes : " The health of the German girls is com-
monly good, except in the higher classes in the
great capitals, where the same obnoxious agencies
are to be found in Germany as in the whole world.
But here also there is a very strong exception, or,
better, a difference between America and Ger-
many, as German girls are never accustomed to
the free manners and modes of life of American
girls. As a rule, in Germany the " mother directs
the manner of living of the daughter entirely T
The italics are ours. Dr. Clarke adds to this
that "pleasant recreation for children of both
sexes, and abundance of it, is provided for them
all over Germany, — is regarded as necessity for
them, — is made a part of their daily life ; but
then it is open air, oxygen-surrounding, blood-
making, health-giving, innocent recreation, — not

SEX AND EDUCA TfON. 149

gas, furnaces, low necks, spinal trails, — the civil-
ized representatives of caudal appendages, — and
late hours."

We repeat that Dr. Clarke does not oppose
the education of women : he only opposes the
present method of education. He says distinctly :
Let us remember that physiology confirms the
hope of the race by asserting that the loftiest
heights of intellectual and spiritual vision and
force are free to each sex, and accessible by each ;
but adds that each must climb in its own way,
and accept its own limitations, and, when this is
done, promises that each will find the doing of
it not to weaken or diminish, but to develop
power. His book is written with force and
with genuine earnestness and feeling, is full of
valuable instruction, and is both useful and sug-
gestive to those who will agree with the author,
— to those who oppose him, and to those like
ourselves who sympathize fully with his aim, but
who think that he has laid the emphasis of blame
wrongly. — Boston Daily Advertiser.

ISO SEX AND EDUCATION.

IX.

BY M. B. JACKSON.

IN this little book, which has attracted much
attention, there are many excellent things ; and
we thank Dr. Clarke for having written it, not so
much for what it contains as for the attention it
has drawn to the subject of which it treats.
Coming as it does from a physician, who stands
so high in the profession, and who is so much
esteemed in social life, it naturally attracts the
attention of many who are thinking upon the
subject of co-education. But we regret to find
that one who should be informed of the views of
the prominent advocates of co-education should
permit himself to talk of their wishing to make
women as nearly as possible like men, and of
women as wishing to become like men, and de-
spising those differences in themselves which dis-
tinguish the sexes, when in fact these are the

SEX AND EDUCA TION. 1 5 1

opprobriums of their opponents instead of argu-
ments to defeat the cause. On page 18 he says :

"It is said that Elina Carnaro, the accom-
plished professor of six languages, whose statue
adorns and honors Padua, was educated like a
boy. This means that she was initiated into and
mastered the studies that were considered to be
the peculiar dower of men. It does not mean
that her life was a man's life, her way of study a
man's way of study, or that in acquiring six
languages she ignored her own organization."

How the Doctor got this interpretation of
what is meant by Elina Carnaro's being edu-
cated like a boy he does not inform us, but no
woman would have thought that her life was
a man's life, her way of study a man's way of
study, or that in acquiring six languages she
would ignore her own organization. What wo-
men are now struggling for is not to be like
men, not to get their education by the same
mental processes as men, but to have the same
opportunities to use in a woman's way, and to
make the most of them in the methods their

152 SEX AND EDUCATION.

own intellect dictates ; not to have men lay out
the course of study for them, and oblige them to
follow their direction, instead of their own nat-
ural methods. They desire to be allowed to
choose the college or university that suits their
! wishes, and to enter any educational institution
as freely as men choose and enter theirs. Dr.
Clarke takes it for granted that, if boys and girls
are educated together, the girls must follow the
boys' method of getting their lessons, must
study as many hours as the boys, but must have
none of the physical exercises and plays that boys
have to strengthen their muscles, and, by draw-
ing off the nerve force from the brain, let it rest
and be refreshed in the same degree that the
boys' brains are. He ignores the fact that boys,
too, have a period of development, and often
require tender care during that period, as well as
girls. While boys are encouraged to be out of
doors, and to engage in active sports, without
the slightest intimation that there is any impro-
priety in it, girls are constantly checked if their
inclination leads them to desire active out-of-

SEX AND EDUCATION. ^3

door sports. They are told that they are hoy-
dens, that it is not proper for girls to play tag,
or coast, or run races, or to engage in any of the
activities that would render them physically
strong ; and so they, having much more sensi-
bility and more love of admiration than boys,
give up all amusements that are denounced as
unladylike, and take to crocheting or fancy
needlework, which in itself is sufficient to de-
bilitate them, and take the color from their
cheeks, without the strain of study imposed
upon them in the schools.

The Doctor takes for granted that women can-
not go through a college course with men with-
out overtaxing their brains, and then goes on to
show what a train of evils follows overtaxing the
brain. This is an easy way to manage the case,
and saves the trouble of proving that women
would be injured, and their nervous systems
broken down, by allowing them freedom to pur-
sue such a course of study as they might feel
able to master. It is really surprising to see
with what complacency the Doctor maps out a
7*

SEX AND EDUCATION.

course for women, assuming that he is a better
judge of what they can bear than they are them-
selves, and assuming that if allowed to decide
for themselves what they could bear they would
destroy themselves by excessive study ! This is
not exactly consistent with his admission of their
intellectual equality with men ; but women have
been long accustomed to being told that they
are the intellectual peers of men, and, in the
next breath, that they do not know what is best
for them, and that men are their natural protec-
tors and supporters, and that they should defer
all matters relating to their welfare to the better
judgment of men, who will take all the trouble
of such decisions from them and settle such ques-
tions in the way that will promote their great-
est happiness ! When the time comes that men
have so far mastered the plan of the universe as
to perceive that the Creator has endowed each
class of animals with its own peculiar method of
defence, and capable of choosing the way of life
most in harmony with its nature, and that man,
the highest in the grade of created beings, is also

SEX AND EDUCATION. 155

endowed with the power of seeing what will best
conserve his interest, and that he has not made
one-half of the race incapable of choosing wisely,
and therefore dependent upon the other half for
this information a great step will be taken in the
right direction, and equal freedom of action being
secured by the removal of all laws and customs
that limit women to narrower bounds than men
will give an opportunity to decide the question of
what women can do and will do, when allowed
free scope for all their powers.

The Doctor talks as if the Creator had made
man so perfectly that, without any special care
on his part, his whole nature would naturally
develop into a perfect and healthy human being,
prepared to fulfil all objects of his creation ; but
that He made woman so imperfectly that her
organism would not naturally develop into a per-
fectly healthy woman, fitted to fulfil the high
objects of her creation, unless men took charge
of her and directed what she must do and how
she must live.

Is not this impugning the wisdom of the Crea-

156 SEX AND EDUCATION.

tor in assuming that He left a being on whom
the welfare of the race greatly depends to the
poor care of erring mortals, instead of creating
her as He has man, so that she would naturally
grow into a perfect woman from the very nature
of her constitution ? We take no issue with the
Doctor in regard to the host of ills that women
are suffering from at this time in America ; but
they are certainly not to be charged to co-educa-
tion, for that has been so little tried that no con-
clusions can as yet be drawn from it.

So far as our observation goes, the number of
invalid women is greater in the class of fashion-
able women than in any other ; and they surely
do not overtax their brains in studies that com-
pose the college curriculum. The want of some
noble and engrossing subject of thought and
action is, in our opinion, a much more frequent
cause of ill-health than over-study, and next to
that, if not taking precedence of it, is the man-
ner in which women are clothed. The corsets
that confine the waists and abdomen as if in a
vice, preventing the action of the muscles and

SEX AND EDUCATION. 157

pressing down the contents of the abdomen, so
as to displace important organs ; the great weight
of skirts hanging on the abdominal muscles ; the
long skirts that fetter the limbs and prevent a
natural movement of them ; the thin boots that
expose the feet to cold and damp ; the high heels
that throw the body out of the perpendicular
line, so that a constant strain is imposed on the
muscles to keep the balance, — these are prolific
causes of invalidism. The late hours and con-
tinued excitements of parties and balls, the great
exposure to cold from changing the warm dresses
^ worn in winter for the thin party dresses for
evening, combined with the unwholesome diet
on such occasions, complete the destruction of
health, never robust on account of the failure to
give girls the out-of-door active exercises which
boys enjoy, while as yet there is no physiological
reason for their being shut up in the house, or
only taken out to walk dressed so finely that play
and exercise are out of the question.

There is still another case, which to my mind
is as clear as the overtaxing of brains is to Dr.

158 SEX AND EDUCATION.

Clarke's ; and that is the necessity for women to
go to physicians of the male sex when they need
advice for their peculiar diseases. The medical
colleges, refusing admission to women, kept them
out of the regular avenues for acquiring a medi-
cal education, and consequently the number of
educated women physicians was so small that
they could scarcely be mentioned as treating the
diseases of women ; and the result has been that
for a long period women have been treated by men
who, having no corresponding organs, could not
possibly understand their diseases, and they have
been left uncured, only palliated, and often made
worse by this great error. When women are
permitted to add the light of science and art to
their personal experiences and similar organiza-
tions, we may look for a healthier race of
women.

On page 54 he says : —

" This growing period or formative epoch ex-
tends from birth to the age of twenty or twenty-
five years. Its duration is shorter for a girl than
for a boy. She ripens quicker than he. In the

SEX AND EDUCATION. 159

four years from fourteen to eighteen, she accom-
plishes an amount of cell change and growth
which Nature does not require of a boy in less
than twice that number of years. It is obvious
that, to secure the best kind of growth during
this period and the best development at the end
of it, the waste of tissue produced by study,
work, and fashion must not be so great that
repair will only equal it. It is equally obvious
that a girl, upon whom Nature for a limited period
and for a definite purpose imposes so great a
physiological task, will not have as much power
left for the tasks of the school as the boy, of
whom Nature requires less at the correspond-
ing epoch. A margin must be left for growth.
The repair must be greater and better than the
waste."

Did it not occur to the Doctor's mind that
" Nature," or the Creator, in making woman,
took this state of things into account, and pro-
vided for it, by supplying the female organism
at this period with a power of more rapid cell
growth to meet this want, and that this same

l6o SEX AND EDUCATION.

power would be needed by the woman when
the great drain of reproducing the race was
made upon her system ? If such had not been
the case, women would succumb at once to the
great waste necessitated by child-bearing, and no
mother would live to have a second child. But
the Infinite Father knew how to make woman,
so that under ordinary circumstances she could
go on with her usual activities, and bear children
without injury to her health, and often with an
improvement of it. For, of our healthy women
at sixty or seventy years of age, nearly all have
been mothers, and most of them have had large
families.

When the Doctor says, "Two considerations
deserve to be mentioned in this connection : one
is, that no organ or function in plant, animal, or
human kind, can be properly regarded as a dis-
ability or source of weakness," — he states a
well-known fact ; but when he attempts to show
that one of the functions of woman is a great
disability, and necessarily incapacitates her from
the performance of usual duties two or three

SEX AND EDUCATION. 161

days out of every thirty, he directly contradicts
his first statement. Healthy women are able to
go on with their usual avocations at these times,
and only feeble or sickly ones require the rest
he speaks of. Those girls whose physical train-
ing has been such as to give them strong bodies
develop naturally and without suffering, just as
boys do, and find no necessity for dropping all
mental and physical labor two days in every
month. Neither men nor women can overtax
for a long time their mental or physical natures,
and remain well. There is one law for both, and
it is inflexible ; but is it necessary for man to ask
woman, or woman man, what either can bear
without injury ? Must not each be a law unto
himself ? Let women study physiology and
thoroughly understand their own bodies, and
they can be trusted to take care of them. Why
the Doctor supposes it necessary to co-education
that women should study like men, or should be
obliged to stand for recitations, I cannot imagine.
Are the rules of college inflexible, like the laws
of the Medes and Persians ? or are they made for

162 SEX AND EDUCATION.

the best good of the students ? If a class sits
during recitations, does it follow that their les-
sons will be less well learned ? If a girl can get
a lesson in an hour that requires a boy an hour
and a half to learn, will it be necessary for her
to study as many hours as the boy, to keep up
with him ? And does not every teacher of boys
and girls know that girls, as a rule, take less time
to commit their tasks than boys ? By the Doc-
tor's own showing, this is in analogy with the
processes in their physical frames ; for he says,
" In the four years, from fourteen to eighteen,
she accomplishes an amount of physiological cell
change and growth which Nature does not re-
quire of a boy in less than twice that number of
years." The trouble with the Doctor is, that he
has a pet theory that women must not do mental
or physical work during certain periods ; and so
he attributes all disease in women to failure in
securing this rest, whether it be want of devel-
opment of the ovaries, hemorrhages, or disease
of the brain !

But we would again thank him for his book,

SEX AND EDUCATION. 163

which is so suggestive that thinking women
cannot read it without seeing the necessity, for
reformation in many ways of the false ideas and
customs regarding woman's training, dressing,
and living ; and, having their attention called to
them, it is to be hoped they will make an earnest
effort to improve upon them.

1 64 SEX AND EDUCATION.

X,

BY PROFESSOR BASCOM.

THE following is an extract from a paper read
at the recent Massachusetts Teachers' Conven-
tion in Worcester : —

To the present point of composition in this
paper, I had not had the opportunity of a full
perusal of Dr. Clarke's work, entitled " Sex in
Education." I wish, therefore, to add a few
things directly bearing on it. The considera-
tion chiefly dwelt on by Dr. Clarke, that of
periodicity and continuity, respectively, in sex-
ual development, is one of great importance,
demanding earnest and thorough attention. His
work is able, candid, and fair. It is not, how-
ever, fair in its actual practical bearing on co-
education. The impression is made by it that
it presses peculiarly upon this point, and that
its general conclusions, if admitted, are well-nigh

SEX AND EDUCATION. 165

fatal to it. This is not true, and is hardly the
author's meaning.

In the first place, the general debility of
women, be it greater or less, is not due to co-
education in higher knowledge ; for such an
education has not existed among us to a de-
gree sufficient perceptibly to affect the general
constitution. It is due to an ignorance and
inattention to physiological law that have charac-
terized all our action in business, social, and
educational relations, in the former even more
than in the latter. Separate training, as that at
Mt. Holyoke, has been as deeply affected by it
as joint education, like that at Oberlin. The
point raised by Dr. Clarke bears on all our
action, not pre-eminently on one part of it, and
that hitherto a most insignificant part, the por-
tion expressed in conjoint higher education. To
give the hygienic considerations involved this
peculiar and limited application is illogical and
unfair. The reform called for will effect this
method in common with a hundred other things.
If the conclusions already reached by us in this

1 66 SEX AND EDUCATION.

paper are to be altered by the considerations
presented by Dr. Clarke, it must be by showing
that co-education is inconsistent with a proper
regard of the hygienic rules involved in sexual
development. The present debility of women
goes for nothing in the argument. This debility,
as due in given cases to a false training, goes
for nothing, since our inattention has been
general, and covers this field with many another.
We might as well argue against social inter-
course, since this, even oftener than lessons,
has been the provocation to excess. The only
real question, then, between Dr. Clarke and
co-education is this : Can co-education be so
altered as to respect, in both sexes, the laws
of development ? He himself practically con-
cedes that it can be. He only objects finally
and peremptorily to identical co-education ;
that is, to precisely the same tasks, at all times,
for all parties. To this we also object, as
unfitted for the best development of boys and
girls alike. The active and the inert, the bright
and the dull, cannot be harnessed together with-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 1 67

out loss on one side or the other. Our educa-
tion, in the interest of boys as well as of girls,
calls for more elasticity, less pressure, more
variable and proportionate stimulus. Construct
a method good for boys of all kinds, pliant to
their wants, keeping up with the best, and fall-
ing back to the poorest, and we shall have a
system sufficiently flexible to include girls, under
their own law of development.

Indeed, the rigidity of college courses is pre-
cisely that which needs modification ; and, if this
is to come with co-education, so much the better
for the joint discipline. The average girl, carry-
ing weight as she does in the laws of her con-
stitution, is not as far off from the average boy
as the stupid boy from the quick-witted one.
Unite these two well in one system, and that
system will have play enough to embrace girls
also advantageously. Our present difficulties
are due to bad education, not to co-education ;
to an ignorance of the laws of hygiene, not to
a knowledge of these and their witting violation.
Educate women more thoroughly, and they will

168 SEX AND EDUCATION.

be more cognizant and observant of these con-
ditions of success. As things now are, they
owe their disease to their ignorance : they are
not weak because they are wise, but weak be-
cause they are not wise.

The critical period, according to Dr. Clarke,
is found between the ages of fourteen and
eighteen. This is a period for the most part
prior, and may to advantage be always prior,
to that given to higher education, and one cov-
ered by the kind and accommodating provisions
of home. I have not the slightest doubt that,
if the general temper that is encouraged by Dr.
Clarke's essay, were left to shape a sexual cur-
riculum for women, it would issue in a feeble
intellectual mood, a proportionate diversion of
time, strength, and interest to society, — sure
to absorb unoccupied powers, heedless and
headstrong in its use of . them, — and thus ulti-
mately in strengthening the very evil warred
with. Society is more to be dreaded than edu-
cation. On the other hand, devote attention to
a complete elastic common curriculum, and the

SEX AND EDUCA TION. \ 69

tastes will be elevated, the judgment sobered,
the conditions of success made more apparent,
and ultimately that breadth and strength of
character reached which are sure to express
themselves in a wise mastery of natural law.
If we are bound to have a thoroughly flexible
and fit discipline for boys, in reaching it we
shall also furnish appropriate conditions for
girls, and all the reasons for co-education urged
by us will apply in full force. The transition
from a rigid to a pliant method will necessarily
take place slowly ; but we do well to remember
that the cast-iron mode is as firmly wrought into
separate as into conjoint education, and consti-
tutes no ground of choice between them. Both
are to be reformed, both are capable of reform,
and in the interests of all parties. Dr. Clarke's
criticism is destructive, not constructive. Let
him undertake to build up a curriculum, and
the advantage will at once pass to his oppo-
nents.

I/O SEX AND EDUCATION.

XI.

BY ABBY W. MAY.

\_Extract from Annual Report of Committee on Work
of the New England IV omen1 s Club, read May 31,
I873-]

OUR programme for the year just closed occu-
pied itself with the question of women's fitness
for entering practical life, presented from several
points of view. At our first meeting, Miss Kel-
logg, in an able manner, set before us the views
of several of the most eminent scientific men on
the question of the relative capacity of women
for the highest education. The extracts Miss
Kellogg gave proved that there is a good deal
of difference of opinion among authorities ; but,
whatever may be the conclusion to-day of one
or another man, the great desideratum is that
the matter should be frankly discussed. Truth
will inevitably result sooner or later; and that
is what we chiefly desire, even when the lesson

SEX AND EDUCA TION. 1 7 1

of patience is bitterly hard. This valuable rt-
snm6 of the opinions of others was followed by
a highly interesting paper from Dr. Edward
H. Clarke, upon the health of women, as af-
fecting steady, persistent mental application.
Dr. Clarke — the skilful physician, the jealous
guardian of health, to whose notice comes daily
most distressing knowledge of the suffering
caused by a lack of it, especially among New
England women — made a strong plea for sav-
ing women from the over-pressure and false
methods of living, under which so many men,
as well as women, break down. The sad fact
of great physical weakness among our women is
beyond dispute. In that respect, there is no
room for difference of opinion; though we
thought Dr. Clarke did not sufficiently recognize
the gain which has been made in some respects
within the last few years. But the discussion
which followed the paper showed that the ma-
jority could not agree with Dr. Clarke, in charg-
ing much of the misery upon high education or
the co-education of the sexes. There are • many

172 SEX AND EDUCATION.

other deep and clear causes for it ; and too little
education, as carried up to any high plane, has
there been to charge it with so wide-spread an
evil. And, again, the statistics which have come
to notice are at least doubtful proofs of such
statements. On the contrary, they seem to
prove that mental training is not only good, but
requisite for physical health ; and why should it
not be so ? God has made women, as men, com-
pound creatures, with a fivefold nature; and it
cannot be that either side, physical, mental, moral,
affectional, or spiritual, can suffer loss without
injury to the whole. It is only in the harmoni-
ous development of all that each finds its own
perfection. The perfect woman must have a
sound body, a vigorous mind, a conscience quick,
and a heart large enough and true enough to
warm and sweeten the whole. Give her the
thorough training of all these, and crown her
with a spirit seeking the highest, and you have
a woman such as we conceive God meant her
to be. Who shall dare to say that mental cul-
ture must be kept on a poorer plane than the

- SEX AND EDUCATION. 173

very best there is, because of danger to a woman's
body, — a danger different in its nature from that
which men so often find in unwise mental effort ?
No one would plead for folly, as applied to the
training of either sex ; but that many women arc
feeble seems a poor reason for depriving those
who are strong of any advantage that the world
can afford them. Does he want it ? is the ques-
tion we ask in relation to men. Does she want
it ? would seem to be the only fair one to ask of
the other sex. For both sexes, lack of health
must often be practically an insurmountable bar-
rier. Why cannot all interested in this question
unite in holding up a high standard of health, in
themselves and for others, since no other obstacle
can long prevent women from having all the edu-
cational advantages they can use.

1/4 SEX AND EDUCATION.

XII.

BY MARIA A. ELMORE.

DR. CLARKE talks as though women in every
thing but college life had perfect liberty to
change at will their position from the erect to
the reclining; as though nothing else required
four weeks* labor in a month ; as though a regu-
lar, sustained, and uninterrupted course of work
was something of which they have never had any
experience ; and as though identical education of
the sexes was the only regimen that ignored the
periodic tides and reproductive apparatus of their
organization.

We would like to have Dr. Clarke inform us
what regimen there is that does not ignore
them ?

While but very few women are called by a
chapel-bell to a standing prayer, thousands and
tens of thousands in America are called by the

SEX AXD EDUCATIOX. 1/5

bell of " that university, which has a water-wheel
at the bottom," to all-day standing tasks at the
noisy loom, and this followed from half-past six
in the morning till half-past six at night, with the
intermission only of half, three-quarters, or the
whole of an hour at noon, throughout every
working-day in the year.

Has Dr. Clarke written a book on " Sex in
Manufacturing Establishments " ? If he hasn't,
he ought to.

Women stand behind the counter, obliged to
be at their post just such a time every morning,
and to wait on customers, if need be, the livelong
day. Are they excused from work every fourth
week ? Can they sit, stand, or recline at their
pleasure ? Are they exempted from tending to
the wants of their employers' patrons because
they feel indisposed ? Nay, in many instances
are they not required to be on their feet all the
time, even when there are no customers ?

Has Dr. Clarke written a book on " Sex in
Clerkships"?

Women have, year out and year in, busily plied

I / 6 SEX AND ED L/C A TfON.

the needle in tailors' and dressmakers' shops, hav-
ing no opportunity to change at will their position
from the sitting to the standing, walking, or re-
clining.

Has Dr. Clarke written a book on " Sex in
Workshops," or " Sex in Sewing " ?

School-teachers are expected to be in their
school-rooms promptly on the hour every school-
day in the year, ready to discharge their duties to
their pupils. Where is the school-board that ever
allowed its female teachers to take a week's vaca-
tion every month ? Where is that man who would
have a young woman teach in his ward or neigh-
borhood who should make application to him in
this wise : " Sir, I am very desirous of becoming
a teacher. I want a school, and will do all in my
power to bring it to a standard of high moral ex-
cellence and worth. But I must tell you that I
cannot teach for four consecutive weeks. I can
teach only three weeks at a time : the fourth I
must have to myself. Mighty and powerful de-
mands are then made upon my constitution, and
it requires all the strength and energy I can com-

SEX AND EDUCATION.

mand to meet them. To attempt at such times
to manage and instruct an unruly and rollicking
set of young urchins would derange the tides of
my organization, divert blood from the reproduc-
tive apparatus to my head, and consequently add
to my piety at the expense of my blood."

Women teach school under a regimen that
pays no more regard to their bodily organism
than to that of men. Yet in the face of this fact
Dr. Clarke tells us it is a sin under such a regi-
men to attend school as a pupil ! Are the duties
and responsibilities of a pupil so much more
arduous and exacting than those of a teacher
that a much more favorable regimen must be
prescribed for the former than for the latter ?

Imagine Miss Applicant, in quest of a situa-
tion to do housework, addressing mistress of the
house as follows : " You know, my dear woman,
that public opinion and sentiment have imposed
upon girls a boy's regimen ; that is, that girls
who go out to work are expected to work every
day of the month, just as boys do. Now this is
altogether wrong and contrary to the laws of
8« L

178 SEX AND EDUCATION.

nature. It is grounded on the supposition that
sustained regularity of action may be as safely
required of a girl as a boy ; that there is no
physical necessity for periodically relieving her
from standing, walking, cooking, or baking ; that
the striking of the clock may call her as well as
him to a daily morning walk with the baby, with
standing work at the end of it, regardless of the
danger that such exercise, by deranging the tide
of her organization, may add to her piety at the
expense of her blood ; that she may bother her
brain over bread, pies, cake, preserves, condi-
ments, and the like, with equal and sustained
force on every day of the month, thus diverting
blood from the reproductive apparatus to the
head ; in short, that she, like her brother, de-
velops health, strength, blood, and nerve by a
regular, uninterrupted, and sustained course of
work. All this is not justified either by expe-
rience or physiology. Girls lose all these by
doing housework all the time. By requiring a
girl to perform the same round of duties every
day of the month, you impose upon her a regi-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 1 79

men which ignores the periodical tides and repro-
ductive apparatus of her organization. Allow me
to tell you, dear madame, that work every fourth
week the same as the other three, lack of privi-
lege to change her position when she needs
change, persistent exercise and constant labor,
which you say any girl who works in your house-
hold will be subjected to, are wicked. It will do
very well for a boy ; it will toughen and make a
man of him ; but it can be only prejudicial to a
girl. Surely, ma'am, you can't expect girls to
work every week : they would become agenes
under such a regimen as that."

Would she be likely 'to secure the situation?
Is it the prerogative of those who go out to
housework, or who perform any kind of service
or labor, to suspend work every fourth week ?
Are not all women expected to do the bidding of
their employers, the same as men, however great
their disinclination ?

Does that regimen which men are ever pre-
scribing for woman, namely, marriage, grant her
one week's cessation from labor out of every

180 SEX AND EDUCATION.

four? Can a mother, when weary and over-
tasked, relinquish the work and care of her
family, and engage her thoughts upon nothing
save that of her own physical weaknesses, and
how to relieve them ?

No, women may work in the factory, in the
store, in the workshop, in the field, in the dining-
saloon, at the wash-tub, at the ironing-table, at
the sewing-machine, — do all these things, and
many more equally hard, from Monday morning
till Saturday night every week in the year ; may
wear their lives out toilTng for their children,
and doing the work for their families that their
husbands ought to do, ami nobody raises the arm
of opposition ; but just now, because there is a
possibility and even probability that in matters
of education women will be as honorably treated
as men, lo ! Dr. Clarke comes forth and tells us
it ought not to be so, because, forsooth, the peri-
odical tides and reproductive apparatus of her
organization will be ignored !

If there are any spheres of labor or of action
that have with earnest solicitude more carefully

SEX AND EDUCATION. l8l

and faithfully looked after the health of the girls
and women who every day repair within their
walls than have many of our seminaries of learn-
ing, we have yet to learn the fact.

So long as men are willing that women should
do all or any of the things herein specified, beside
the thousand and one things to which we have
no space to allude ; so long as men are filling
she should enter marriage, a regimen which im-
poses more duties, responsibilities, trials, burj
dens, cares, and sorrows than any other can,
which taxes health, strength, blood, and nerve
infinitely more than any thing else she can ever
do ; so long as they are willing that she should
endure the wear and tear of wifehood and mother-
hood, the severest and most trying ordeals through
which human beings are ever called to pass, and,
in comparison to the burdens which it inflicts
upon her physical organization, all others are of
a straw's weight ; so long as men are willing that
woman should act, work, labor, earn her living in
these various capacities, not one of which gives
her more opportunity to favor herself than it

1 82 SEX AND EDUCATION.

gives man, is it not insulting for a physician to
single out one individual phase of action, and
declare that it is a sin for woman to share equally
with man in the advantages it affords, because it
don't pay so much attention to the subject of
catamenia as he thinks it ought ?

Will Dr. Clarke please tell us why colleges, or
places of learning of any kind, should be denied
to woman on the ground that an insufficient
amount of deference is given to her physiologi-
cal nature, any more than other institutions
which overlook it entirely ?

SEX AND EDUCATION. 183

XIII.
BY A. C. GARLAND.

A VERY flattering notice of the volume bearing
the title " Sex in Education " having appeared in
the "Journal," one "ambitious woman," who is
not "fretting under the restraints which nature
imposes," but those arbitrary and unjust social
laws which have grown out of a false, partial,
and superficial view of nature's laws, and who is
not "meditating the dangerous experiment of
making herself a man," but has long claimed for
herself and other women the right of deciding
what constitutes womanhood, feels moved to
reply.

Not having read the book in question, we shall
simply attack the position of its admirer. We
find, first, a complaint that the "subject" of
woman's co-education with man "has been
treated as a matter purely of moral claim, not

1 84 SEX AND EDUCATION.

of natural capacity," by many. Those who have
claimed equal educational advantages for women
as a right have in nearly if not all cases done so
because of the following unanswerable reasons :
'While women are taxed for the support of higher
schools of instruction, they have a moral claim
on such institutions for the equal education of
both sexes. The statement of any author, that
" experience and careful observation have proved
that the higher education of women has been
detrimental to their health, is simply an assump-
tion of his own, which can be met by as deter-
mined and well-proven statements on the other
side. The fact is, that we cannot absolutely set-
tle the limits of woman's strength and endurance
by any experiments made and recorded so imper-
fectly as they must be at a time like the present,
when the majority of women who are educating
themselves thoroughly in public colleges are do-
ing so at the cost of home comforts, and under
a severe pressure resulting from poverty. There
was a time in the history of New England when
the great majority of young men who were study-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 1 85

ing for the Christian ministry were in such poor
health that sanctity and an earnest purpose
came to be associated in almost every person's
mind with a body just ready to fall a victim to
any disease, a cadaverous or " spiritual " face, and
a thin and wasted hand. Why was this ? Not
because the simple preparation of study injured
them, but because they could not afford the gen-
erous living and comfortable homes which the
body requires for its development, and their
necessities compelled them to work outside their
studies, while their student enthusiasm led them
to disregard many laws of health. For these
same reasons many a woman to-day fails in her
course, when so near the end that a few more
years would land her in competence and congenial
employment. The health of the young ladies
in Vassar College — where the curriculum is
quite as exhaustive and exhausting as the vari-
ous special courses at Harvard, to say the least —
is excellent, as statistics, not theories, show. In
the early history of Oberlin, the pioneer in higher
education of the sexes, we read the names of

1 86 SEX AND EDUCATION.

many women who, so far from being " wrecks,"
physically at least, have lived to bear healthy
children, have borne their full share of woman's
special duties, and, in addition, have made them-
selves famous in various departments of literary
and reformatory labor.

The recent census reports show that of all
classes of women most subject to insanity and
other diseases, the "farmers' wives" are most
afflicted. Does higher education do this work ?
Our observation, neither " professional " nor very
" extensive," but careful and fair, has shown more
healthful and strong women among the better
educated, even the intellectual, than in those
whose lives have been devoted exclusively to
the duties which their sex imposes on them. It
seems reasonable that the profession which calls
for most varied talent, demands most strength of
brain and body, is the most potent power for
good or evil which the world knows, that of
motherhood, should be freely accorded every ad-
vantage of physical, intellectual, and moral train-
ing which the State has it in its power to bestow.

SEX AND EDUCATION. l8;

But we insist upon it that no person who
cusses the educational problem of the
day, with an argument " based on the postulate
that woman finds her normal development in ful-
filling the functions of wife and mother, and that
any education which tends to unfit her for these
highest offices is not a boon, but a curse," is
worthy to be followed by just men or women.
Men and women are " normally developed " when,
and when only, they are rounded and broadened
by culture of body, mind, and heart, into a sym-
metrical character. We have no more right to
say that women shall be educated to be wives
and mothers than that men shall be educated to
be husbands and fathers ; and no more right to
say that a woman is not fulfilling her " highest "
office; who is laboring for the world in some
other sphere than that of wifehood or mother-
hood, than we have to declare a man abnormally
or imperfectly " developed " who has deemed it
best to live his life unmarried. Until men are
willing to discuss woman's education in the same
way they do that of their own sex, on the broad

1 88 SEX AND EDUCATION.

basis of individual need, individual taste and tal-
ent, arid the necessity of thorough mental train-
ing of all, in order to attain the highest results
to the country and the world ; until men are con-
vinced that the human being and its needs is
paramount in importance, and that sex, with all
its relations, is a secondary question, which must
settle itself and needs no legislation ; until, in
short, men comprehend that they are not the
guardians of woman, and have no right to force
her to education, or restrain her from the same
through any prudential considerations not ap-
plied equally to themselves, — every woman con-
scious of the facts that her soul is worth more
than her body, and her eternal relations are of
more importance than the temporal, will "per-
sistently " and reasonably demand that the final
decision in regard to her ability to endure mental
or physical strain, her power for study, and her
need for the same, shall rest with herself. In
spite of the author of " Sex in Education," we
have yet to see convincing proofs, based on facts
extensively gathered and compiled, of the un-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 189

healthfulness of student life for men or women,
boys or girls, when the laws of health, namely,
simple living, good food, abundant sleep, health-
ful clothing, and sufficient exercise in the open
air, are known and observed. We will only add
our wish that men would be as careful for the
health of women in other respects as they claim
to be in the matter of education ; and sum up all
we would like to say on this vexed question in
one sentence : That man or woman is best fitted
for his or her special relations who is most
thoroughly and harmoniously developed as an
individual.

TESTIMONY FROM COLLEGES.

DR. EDWARD H. CLARKE.

DEAR SIR, — Having held the office of Resi-
dent Physician in Vassar College since the school
opened, — September, 1 865, — it seems to me that
I have the right to make respectful but earnest
protest against the implied strictures upon the
hygienic teaching and practice of the institution,
which I find in the history of " Miss D.," page
79 of " Sex in Education."

I take it that the aim of your book is to show
parents and teachers the wrong they do women,
and so the race, by their systematic overtaxing
of the mental forces during the critical years of
girlhood, when the reproductive function is as-
serting itself, and when every thing that would
hinder its proper establishment should be care-
fully avoided. In that aim I bid you God-speed ;

SEX AND EDUCATION.

and it is because I feel so strongly on that point,
and have labored so zealously to make practical
application of this physiological principle, that
I regret that you should have taken as your most
elaborately discussed and aggravated case one
which so misrepresents the college that any
person who is at all acquainted with its rules
and management can hardly help having his
confidence in the book shaken. He would nat-
urally say, "This being so largely false, where
can I be sure of finding the truth?"

Vassar College does not receive students under
fifteen years of age, even for the first preparatory
class (there is a two years' preparatory course).
No student ever entered the freshman class
at fourteen.

At the beginning of every collegiate year the
students are carefully instructed regarding the
precautions which are periodically necessary for
them. They are positively forbidden to take
gymnastics at all during the first two days of
their period ; and, if there is the least tendency
toward menorrhagia, dysmenorrhoea, or other

SEX AND EDUCATION. IQ3

like irregularity, to forego those exercises en-
tirely. They are also forbidden to ride on horse-
back then ; and, moreover, are strongly advised
not to dance, nor run up and down stairs, nor do
any thing else that gives sudden and successive
(even though not violent) shocks to the trunk.
They are encouraged to go out of doors for quiet
walks, or drives, or boating, and to do whatever
they can to steady the nervous irritation, and to
help them to be patient with themselves through
the almost inevitable excitement or depression
that then supervenes.

That a student should faint again and again
in the gymnasium, and still be pushed to con-
tinue her exercises there, is a statement that
would not be made by any one who knows the
personal physical care that is had here, not only
by the Resident Physician, but by all the teach-
ers. It is a statement that will be believed by
none who has taken any pains to inform himself
of the methods of training adopted by Vassar
College.

It is possible that a student began here to
9 M

194 SEX AND EDUCATION.

menstruate healthily, and ended her course a
victim of dysmenorrhcea ; but does it give " a fair
chance for the girls " to argue therefrom that the
functional disturbance was the result of too severe
or continued study ? Do you know that she pur-
sued a healthful regimen in every other respect ?
As an offset to this side of the story, I can give
you a hundred cases -in which dysmenorrhcea of
long standing and aggravated character has been
cured here, — cured mainly, as I believe, by patient
persistence in the regular habits of mental and
physical life that here obtain.

We do not attempt to cut down the work of
each girl every fourth week, but we do mean so
to regulate the work of the whole time that the
end of no day shall find her overtaxed, even if
that day has borne the added periodic burden.
It is our aim so to combine opportunity for seri-
ous mental activity with physical training and
individual freedom from tiresome restraint or
hint of espionage, that vigor of head and heart
and body will be the happy result. As a rule,

SEX AND EDUCATION. 1 95

we succeed ; the success varying of course with
the stuff we have to work with.

The average age of the graduates of Vassar
College is twenty-one and a half.

Too young, I grant you ; and we hope to
improve on it as the years go, and knowledge,
physiological and otherwise liberal, increases.

Eighteen is young enough for any woman to
begin this course. At that age, with average
endowment of mind and body, she pursues it
with gladness and ends it with rejoicing, as can
be proved by a goodly number of Vassar's
alumnae.

Hoping that your sense of justice will suggest
methods by which the erroneous impressions that
your book conveys concerning Vassar College
may be, as far as possible, corrected,
Lam, sir,

Respectfully yours,

ALIDA C. AVERY.

VASSAR COLLEGE, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.,
Nov. 4, 1873.

196

SEX AND EDUCATION.

ANTIOCH COLLEGE.

Individual.

Year of
Graduation.

o

No. of
Children.

Health.

Remarks.

i

1857

Married

3

Not living

Died 1874.

2

t

n

i

Good

Taught ii years. Now in

Indiana.

3

„

>j

2

„

Has taught ever since gradu-

ating. Now in Ohio.

4

1858

»

2

Very good

Taught five years. Now in
Ohio.

s

N

^

6

Good

Has taught school. Slight

jronchial trouble.

6

1859

99

3

w

7

"

3

Uncertain

Has taught school.

8

>l

Good

Taught thirteen years, till
married in 1872.

9

)y

2 or 3

No recent intelligence.

10

1860

Single

n

Health good as far as known.
Taught some years. Now in

England.

ii

12

13

14

H

Married
Single

Married

2
I

Very good

Taught three years.
Has taught school.
Physician in Missouri.
Has taught school.

IS

„

Single

„ „

Constantly a teacher, except

•

two years in Europe.

16

Married

}j

Minister in Connecticut.

17

1861

Good

Lately married.
Taught three years. Journal-

ist in Ohio.

18
19

1862

;;

I
I

Not living

Has taught school.
Died of hereditary consump-

tion.

20

21

J

»

I
I

"Good*

22

99

y,

2

Very good

Resides in Ohio.

23

2

99 99

Resides in Vermont.

24

2

Resides in New York.

M

})

"Good

Lately married.

26

99

3

Has taught school.

27

1863

„

2

Very good

Taught four years, till mar-

ried.

28
29

1864
1866

Married

3

Not good

Taught one year.
Troubled with scrofula, dat-

ing back earlier than her schod
days. Practises medicine in

Missouri.

^

(*

SEX AND EDUCATION.

'97

| Individual. J

Year of
Graduation.

s m

If
r

No. of
Children.

Health.

Remarks.

30

1868

Single

Very good

Has just returned from three
years in Europe, where she took

99

Married

T

Good

lone pedestrian journeys.
Has taught school and is

teaching now.

32

2

99

Taught three years.

33

1869

Single

»

Taught constantly and is

teaching now.

34

1870

Married

Not living

Died in 1871.

35

M

H

I

Good

Has taught school in Mis-

•

souri.

36
37

1871

Single

I

Unknown

Taught one year.
Came to college in delicate
health, which improved while

there. The youngest woman

38

.872

j.

Not living

who ever graduated at Antioch.
Died 1873 of hereditary con-

sumption. •

39

„

n

Fair

Teaching in Massachusetts.

40

1873

M

Good

41

"

"

ti

All the time I was at Antioch College I never
heard of a young lady in the college requiring a
physician's advice. Among the seven girls in
my class I never remember an instance of ill-
ness : they were always at recitations, and
always had their lessons. I spent four years at
Antioch, — two at the theological school ; and I
have been over ten years a settled pastor, and
I never yet was absent from an engagement or
suspended labor on account of sickness. When

1 98 SEX A ND ED UCA TION.

in Kansas, I spoke every day from the first of
July to the fifth of November, besides travelling
to my appointments each day, some days giving
two lectures and preaching Sundays, making in
all two hundred and five speeches, averaging
more than an hour in length, and came home
just as well as I went ; and this moment I am as
well as ever, and could walk ten miles in a day
with ease. To me such statements as Dr. Clarke's
seem absurd, and contrary to everybody's ex-
perience. . . .

The ill-health of the women of our time is not
due to study or regularity in study : it is due to
the want of regularity, and want of aim and pur-
pose, and want of discipline. If you should take
the whole number of women in this country who
have graduated from a regular college with men,
and place them side by side with the same num-
ber of women who have not had that course of
study, select them where you will, the college
graduates will be stronger in mind and body,
able to endure more and work harder than
the others. This I am sure of, as I am ac-

SEX AND EDUCATION. 199

quainted with many of the somewhat small
number of women graduates ; and I know some-
thing of other women, having belonged to vari-
ous female seminaries at different times. — Rev.
Olympia Brown.

MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY.

ABOUT eighty of the students are of the sex
which some call " weaker," but which here, at any
rate, is shown to be equal in endurance, in cour-
age, in perseverance, in devotion to study, and
in cheerful confidence, to the strong and stalwart
men. The health of the women who are here
now is in almost every instance excellent. I am
assured by intelligent ladies in all the depart-
ments that there is not a single instance of
sickness which has come from over-study, or
from any cause connected with the routine of
the college life. In one or two cases, the incon-
venience of a weak constitution, of weak eyes

200 SEX AND EDUCATION.

and sensitive nerves, has been felt ; and one of
the most vigorous of the sisters has been con-
fined to her chamber for some weeks by a
sprained ankle. But it is the unanimous testi-
mony, as I learn, of the ladies who are studying
law, and medicine, and science, and the arts, in
the class-rooms, and lecture-rooms, and library,
and laboratory, that their health was never
better, that they have had no attacks of malady,
and that they ask for no indulgence on account
of their sex. Most of them, indeed, are out of
their teens, and beyond the age to which the
warnings of Dr. Clarke's book apply. But,
of the twenty or more whom I personally know,
not one complains ; and they look to be in better
health than the average of young women.

Some say that it is too soon to pronounce
upon the success of the experiment of co-educa-
tion here ; but, if the opinion of the women
themselves, and of the teachers who teach them,
is to be accepted, the experiment in the present
season is as successful physically as it is intel-
lectually. The women are as strong and hearty

SEX AND EDUCATION. 2OI

to all appearance, and have not found their sex
an obstacle to their activity and comfort in
study. — Rev. C. H. Brigtiam, in Christian Reg-
ister.

LOMBARD UNIVERSITY.

THE testimony from Lombard University,
Galesburg, Illinois, is as follows : —

The whole number of graduates is sixty-nine
men and forty-five women, of whom twenty-
eight of the women have graduated during the
last six years. There have been no permanent
invalids. Nine men and three women have died.
Twenty of the women have married, eleven of
whom are mothers. The president, who had
been here eighteen years, thinks — and, so far as
I know, his opinion is the opinion of all who have
been connected with the institution — that the
women are as healthy as the men. It frequently
happens that girls improve in health after coming
here ; and I have heard two or three of them

9*

202 SEX AND EDUCATION.

say, after graduating and returning home, that
they should be stronger if they could come back
and again have regular work and a definite aim.

OBERLIN.
FROM Oberlin, Professor Fairchild says : —

A breaking down in health does not appear to
be more frequent with women than with men.
We have not observed a more frequent inter-
ruption of study on this account, nor do our
statistics show a greater draft upon the vital
forces in the case of those who have completed
the full college course. Out of eighty-four who
have graduated since 1841, seven have died, a
proportion of one in twelve. Of three hundred
and sixty-eight young men who have graduated
in the same time, thirty-four are dead, or a little
more than one in eleven. Of these thirty-four
young men, six fell in the war ; and, leaving out
those, the proportion of deaths remains one in
thirteen. Taking the whole number of graduates,

SEX AND EDUCATION. 203

omitting the theological department, we find the
proportion of deaths one in nine and a half ; of
ladies, one in twelve, and this in spite of the
lower average expectation of life for women, as
indicated in Life Insurance Tables.

Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Son.

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