of melancholia, the hurricane of morbid impulse, or the settled bad weather of moral perversion." Work is man's greatest enemy when he is worn out or fatigued. On this point he believes there is a growing consensus of opinion, although admitting that direct and trusty evidence is hard to obtain. Valuable, too, is the observation 1 that women are prone from their physical constitution and their lives to desire what they have not, and for that reason alone they particularly need absorbing occupations, and are spoiled by idleness and vacuity of mind, which makes them either lazy, phlegmatic, and un- ambitious, or else restless. Their education should not aim to cultivate the thinking powers alone or chiefly. Woman's work is all-round work, but friendship between men and women is a great power, and intellectual oneness increases all the fruitions of married life. Men are at fault because they do not realize this possibility and are prone to be less 'The Waste of Woman's Intellectual Force, by M. G. Van Rensselaer, M.D.
ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 579 interested in the minds than in the bodies of women. Love should be less haphazard and less purely sentimental, and happy marriages should be bulwarked by mental affinity, but this does not mean the higher education as now administered for women. Women are weaker in body and mind than men, but they can achieve great things even intellectually, and might take courage from examples like that of Darwin, who did much of his best work in years of such weakness that he could apply himself for only an hour or two a day. Some men, however, will perhaps always respond to the charm of weakness and even ignorance in women.
Edson l avers that if our race is to go on and up, no matter what our ideals, the animal basis must be kept pure and wholesome. From i88o-'9O the birth-rate in the United States decreased from 36 per thousand inhabitants to 30, and Billings thinks th« chief factor in this decline is the voluntary avoidance of child-bearing. From i875~'85 in Massachu- setts this decline was from 20.6 to 18.47. I*1 tne United States as a whole from i86o-'9O the birth-rate declined from 25.61 to 19.22. Many women are so exhausted before mar- riage that after bearing one or two children they become wrecks, and while there is perhaps a growing dread of partu- rition or of the bother of children, many of the best women feel that they have not stamina enough and are embarrassed to know what to do with their leisure. Perhaps there will have to be a " new rape of the Sabines," and if women do not improve, men will have recourse to emigrant wives, or healthy girls with stamina will have an advantage equal to that of pretty girls now.
Jankau 2 thinks that great suffering and even unhappy marriages are due to lack of knowledge of puberty and sex by teachers and youth, the essentials of which he seeks to supply in an illustrated 68-page book, which he would have the mother and not the father give to pubescent boys. In no way can she secure greater and more lasting gratitude than by very frankly stating normal facts and fully warning of dangers.
1 American Life and Physical Deterioration, by Cyrus Edson, M. D. North Am. Rev., October, 1893.
8 Anatomic, Physiologic und Hygiene des Geschlechtsreifen Sohnes. Miinchen, 580 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Every youth, he asserts, indulges at least once in self-abuse, and it depends on his heredity, character, training, and instruc- tion whether or not it becomes a confirmed habit. The symp- toms and progress of gonorrhea, syphilis, chancre and its three stages, modes of treatment and even of preventive methods to be employed in intercourse are described; but in every case and stage the young sufferer must turn to his mother, if he has one, and then without delay to the physician, and must not be despised but treated with sympathy and pity. The more the father has himself sinned and suffered, the more severe and the less compassionate a counselor will he be.
Prof. E. Hegar 1 advises definite instruction in sexual hy- giene for the pupils of the middle schools, based on demon- stration on the cadaver; this he thinks would solemnize all the teaching in both anatomy and physiology necessary for the proper regimen, and check morbid direction of curiosity. Dr. W. Stekel, of Vienna, would have children watched by day, and especially by night, for a few years, and thinks that the sexes should never be taught in the same classes. This, too, Hegar seems to approve.
To prevent the seeds of mischief in girls at this most pe- culiarly sensitive age, Dr. Playfair 2 says, in substance, we must constantly bear in mind the highly emotional and sensitive nervous organization which distinguishes woman from man and affects the nature and progress of every disease to which she is subject, and especially those of the reproductive functions. Regimen during the settled establishment of the great func- tion of menstruation determines whether she shall have stam- ina and powers of resistance, or perhaps, with the appearance of health, collapse to invalidism at every strain. The prime and alarming fault of the heads of high schools and colleges for girls is that they, consciously or unconsciously, assume the absolutely untenable theory that the sexual question is of secondary importance, and that there is little real distinction between girls and boys from fourteen to twenty. The dis- tinction caused by the menstrual functions, says Dr. Playfair, 1 Der Geschlechtstrieb: Eine socialmed. Studie, 1895.
5 Remarks on the Education and Training of Girls of the Easy Classes at about the Period of Puberty. Brit. Med. Journal, vol. ii, 1895, p. 1405 et seq.
ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 5$l is absolute and should be systematically attended to, while in fact the feeling of school-mistresses is directly antagonistic to every such admission. Their point of view is that there is no real difference; that w^hat is good for one sex is good for the other; or if there is a difference, it is a relict of an evil past where woman has been cruelly denied many advantages open to man, and that identity of opportunity and occupation will open a new and happy era, when such differences as remain will vanish. Why is it then that the most characteristic dis- eases of girls, anemia and chlorosis, associated with menstrual disturbances, are almost never seen in boys? Physical exer- cise out of doors should be required, for girls are often list- less; muscular activity is the best antidote to the sentimental- ism and morbid fancies so liable after puberty. For all school- girls, every form of corset should be absolutely forbidden. The first danger.signals should be carefully watched for, and when they appear everything should give w7ay till perfect health is restored. The recent expression of a female prin- cipal that if the function was in abeyance for a time in the teens, it was of no great consequence, for she had noticed that it came around all right afterward when the girls left school, it is feared represents a point of view far too com- mon, but which bodes the greatest danger for the future. The development of ideal lawn-tennis girls would be a bet- ter goal for modern institutions than scholars made at such a cost.
Taylor,1 who also bases his opinion on large experience, holds that school modesty often promotes habitual constipa- tion, and thinks the enfeeblement, lack of luster, debility, squeamishness about food, lack of interest in life, languid con- fidence and lack of incentive, clammy hands so common among pubescent girls, should be combated by romping, ball, beanbags, battledore, hoops, running, golf, tennis, bicycling, self-bathing in cold water, deep-breathing exercises once or twice a day, etc., rather than by systematic physical culture; that too early interest in the refinements of life arrests devel- opment and that nothing should be undertaken, especially at 1 Puberty in Girls and Certain of its Disturbances, by J. Madison Taylor, M. D. Pediatrics, July 15, 1896.
582 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE this age, by girls which can not be entered into with great heartiness and spontaneity. Interesting, too, are his sugges- tions on the psycho-pedagogy of flattery. Dr. Smith l states that " a very large per cent of females in every physician's practise are affected more or less by mental troubles, owing to menstrual disorders/' Henry T. Finck 2 insists that women attach far too much importance to politics; that their sphere is domestic, ninety- four out of every hundred marrying; that they control the all-determining first five years of a child's life and manners, which are almost as important as morals. One of the great functions of motherhood, he says, is to find husbands for daughters. The latter are often neglected, and vanity, which prompts American girls to dress like heiresses, produces, in his opinion, nearly as much unhappiness as whisky. In great cities superfine dressing opens pitfalls of temptation. He thinks the suffragists should take hold of solvable problems like that of servants and of gastronomy, until the kitchen is trans- formed into an art studio. They should develop the arts of entertainment, none of which are complete without a woman. Instead of becoming greedy money-makers, they should serve as an antidote to our extreme commercialism and politicism. Ten per cent more girls than boys are on the way to college in our high schools. Men's right to decide what women should be like is " inalienable and eternal." Men will con- tinue to make women what they want them to be by marrying those who correspond to their ideals; thus real womanly women are not doomed.
Max O'Rell denies that Paris is a paradise of women, but declares that if he could be born again and select his life, he would be born an American woman. The female is higher than the male and represents more nearly than he the type which man is approaching. Woman's virtues are of a much higher quality than those of the male. In ancient days the virtues most admired were masculine — courage and patriot- ism; but now, with Christianity, the female virtues of mod- 1 Menstruation and Some of its Effects upon the Normal Mentalization of Woman. M. M. Smith, M. D. Memphis Med. Month., August, 1896, p. 393. * Independent, May 30, 1-901.
ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION esty, charity, chastity, etc., take precedence. Finck agrees with Ruskin that there has never been " a loveliness so vari- ably refined, so modestly and kindly virtuous, so innocently fantastic, and so daintily pure as the present girl beauty of our British Isles/' who is " nothing but soul and tenderness." Heine's poem " Du bist wie eine Blume," where woman is likened to a flower, Finck says has been set to music nearly two hundred times, or more often than any poem in existence. This writer objects strongly to Miss I. H. Harper's statement that most women would gladly devote the years necessary to rearing two or three children, but object to giving up more time to this function. He thinks that sex in mind is no less marked than that in body and is steadily unfolding.
Prof. A. W. Small thinks that to train women to com- pete with men is like poison administered as a medicine, the evils being quite as bad as the disease. He doubts that on the whole women are better than men, because you can not compare things so different, and each have an equal right to do what they can do. The question of voting is merely one of social expediency. ' The distinctively social mission of college women is to counterpoise women." The latter is so absorbing that none exclusively devoted to it can lead rounded lives. Women must be stewardesses of the mysteries of ap- propriate human life, so that aspiration for its adornments be not arrested. Men are weak in spiritual elements which college women may enforce. She is too ready to surrender her leverage.
III. Health and its Tests. — In view of this consensus of professional opinion, let us turn to the question of the health of educated American women, which is the chief criterion of the value of all institutions which affect it. The first com- prehensive statistical investigation * on college women was made in 1882 and included 705 graduates of 12 colleges, who answered 40 questions of a circular. Of these, 44 per cent said they did not worry over studies, 60 per cent reported having had some disorder, and those who studied hard had bad health. Of the whole number, 239 abstained from phys- 1 Health Statistics of Women College Students, by Annie G. Howes. Boston, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE ical, 2 from mental labor, and 73 from both, during their periods. Of the 705, only 169 never had any trouble at these times, and of course more had been sickly during the age of first menstruation than in college.
Professor Dewey found that of 290 college girls,1 those who reported good health on entering college were 78.1 per cent; those during college, 74.9; those after graduation, 77.9. Again, 19.6 per cent reported deterioration of health during college; 44.4 per cent reported that they did not worry. In the period of pubescence, 53 per cent were troubled by pains, irregularity, etc.; during college life, 66 per cent, and after it, 64 per cent. Of those who entered college one or two years after the commencement of menstruation, 20.5 reported bad health; of those who entered from three to five years after, 17.7 per cent; of those who entered five years or more after, 15.4 per cent. Of those who entered at sixteen or less, 28 per cent lost in health and 17 per cent gained; of those who entered over-twenty, 18 per cent lost and 28.5 per cent gained. After graduation, 83 per cent reported good health and 17 per cent bad. Among female colleges 55 per cent reported abstinence from study or exercises during menstruation, and in coeducational colleges 25 per cent. In coeducational col- leges 33 per cent studied seriously, as did 26 in female col- leges. On the whole, Dewey concluded that one-third more break down from emotional strain in female colleges than in coeducational institutions.
A later investigator 2 found a far more hopeful state of things. Of over 200 college girls it was found that 57 per cent suffered no prostration; 29.8 per cent were free from pain; 72.7 per cent were regular; and that only 2.75 per cent dropped out from ill health as against 2.85 per cent of college boys from Amherst. Of the causes for the interruption of studies, nervous debility leads, and headaches and imperfect eyesight follow. Of the complaints of 1,000 students who consulted the author during her six years at Smith, 30.8 per cent were for catarrhal disorders, 17 for digestive, n for 1 Health and Sex in Higher Education, by John Dewey. Pop. Sci. Mo., 1886. 8 The Influence of College Life on Health, G. A. Preston, M. D. Communica- tions of Mass. Med. Soc., Boston, 1895, p. 167.
ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION menstrual, 8 for nervous, etc. Scanty was far more common than excessive flow, and this excess is greatest in the autumn, where most of the suppressions fall.1 Mrs. Sidgwick in England and Miss Hayes 2 in this country asked 32 and 42 questions respectively, the former addressed to 4 English and the latter to 12 American coeducational institutions. The results show7 that the Americans are better throughout, although it is possible that the 15 per cent of the English students and the 45 per cent of the American students, who did not answer the questionnaire, may have contained a large proportion of those who were ill. The American girls enter three and a half years younger than the English. The older worry more about personal and family matters. In the United States more improve than deteriorate during college, while the reverse seems true in England. We do not know whether a higher, average of health is implied in the desire to go to college. In the following Miss Hayes has shown the 1 Miss Preston describes typical cases of girls who ought not to go to college. One gave up her leisure for months to entrance conditions, and overwork brought overwhelming desire to systematize. Everything has its exact place, and if a caller moves it slightly, the discomfort is intense until she can replace it. If she writes a letter, she prefers a friend present so that she can have courage to seal it at once rather than look it over again and again to make sure that everything is just right. If not, she would be dissatisfied, tear it up, write another just as inac- curate, and so on. Every night she arranges a precise program for all the next day, and is miserable if it can not be carried out to the letter. She is obliged to make a bedtime review of even the trivialities of every day, striving to recall every word she has heard or spoken. This began as a memory drill, but is now an obsession. She also has to make lists of everything she has done or intends to do, and hoards these up for reference knowing it is very silly, but she just can not help it. All these habits are stronger just after a recitation or a visit. If she wakes at night, she must go through some painful routine; translations must be many times revised, and even then she made poor recitations. She was at last prevailed upon to give up study and quite recovered.
Another student of nervous debility, in love with an intimate girl friend as morbid and nervous as she, had cervical and spinal pressures, twitchings in the right arm, indigestion, etc. She stopped study a year and was greatly improved. Another delicate girl student living at home was subject to strange fears, had always to count the steps upstairs and feared terrible things if the last one was an odd number and had to go back and end with an even one. When away from home, she was always alarmed at the ringing of a door-bell or a knock, fearing ill tidings from home.
9 Health of Woman Students in England, by Alice Hayes. Education, Janu- 70 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE relative healthfulness of these women on entering, during, and after college.
GOOD, EXCELLENT HEALTH.
FAIR.
POOR, BAD, DEAD.
On entrance.
Am.
Eng.
During college Present health From this it appears that maiden students are slightly healthier than their married sisters. It should not be for- gotten, however, that the above numbers are too few for general conclusions; that the mode of determining general healthfulness was unsatisfactory; that perhaps often the home- staying sisters bore additional burdens and, it may be, added to the support of their collegiate sisters, although on the other hand the physically feebler may often have gone to college.
Dr. Mary P. Jacobi insists " there is nothing in the nature of menstruation to imply the necessity or even the desirability of rest for a woman whose menstruation is really normal," and advises college girls never to pursue a course of study that can not be kept up during this period. Graduates, it is urged, ought to have superior health, and female colleges should not admit invalids. She coincides with Miss Hayes that there is nothing at all in university education especially injurious to the constitution of women or involving a greater strain than they can ordinarily bear without injury, so that they often pass through college without its affecting their health either way. Colleges probably tend to check rather than favor hysteria. Mental training disciplines the feeling and increases the will power, and sometimes transforms a weak, sentimental girl into an honest, healthy woman. Many claim to be better during their college course than at entrance upon it. This is ascribed partly to change of climate, but more to the influences of interesting employment, freedom from petty home cares, congenial companionship, and learning how to take care of their health. Surprisingly different are the results of Dr.
ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION Engelmanir s 1 study of 4,873 cases of school and college girls. He found irregularity in about 50 per cent and far more are retarded. His table is as follows: GROUP.
NUMBER.
CLASS.
PERCENTAGE OF SUFFERERS.
During school or college.
Before entering.
State Norm. School.. State Norm. School.. Norm. Sch. of Gym..
Norm. Sch., City College ( Less hrs. gym.. ( More hrs. gym. Freshman.
« ii « Normal School, City..
« ( Senior The highest per cent in the above table is for one higher institution of learning. Probably all discomforts were con- sidered, but " the figures are correct, as this investigation was made with the utmost care by one of the medical officers of the institution." The more exacting the work or study, the higher the per cent. This agrees with Kennedy, who found 78 per cent of sufferers in a Worcester high school,2 and with Dr. Boismont, who found 77 per cent in Paris in 1842. The trouble seems worst in the middle classes where parents wish their girls to advance beyond their own standards.
Engelmann urges that " progress of surgery and reduction of mortality have been considered too much and woman and her morbidity too little." Prevention, which is now the watch- word, must be based on a study of conditions which interfere 1 The American Girl of To-day. President's Address, Am. Gyn. Soc., Wash- * Fed. Sem., vol. iii, June, 1896, p. 469.
588 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE with a healthy performance of the f runic function during the great waves of sexual life. " Many a young life is battered and forever crippled in the breakers of puberty; if it cross these unharmed and is not dashed to pieces on the rock of childbirth, it may still ground on the ever-recurring shallows of menstruation, and, lastly, upon the final bar of the meno- pause ere protection is found in the unruffled waters of the harbor beyond the reach of sexual storms." He holds mental stimulus to be the chief cause of sexual precocity in girls. He finds from the census of 1890 there were 32,751 young women in American colleges and 341,736 in secondary educational institutions, and it is these, he thinks, who preeminently need attention, although there are about 1,000,000 more between fifteen and twenty who are working for wages. The effects of mental strain in schoolgirls are most seen in increased fre- quency of menstruation. In college the freshman year is marked by most irregularity, and change of surroundings al- most always delays the courses, often amounting to amenor- rhea for two or three months. Schrader found this in 57 per cent of his 114 cases. Dr. Wood writes that it is surprising how quickly college life affects this function. Debility, on the other hand, shortens the intervals and increases the pain and amount of the flowr. Examinations, Engelmann thinks, are " more deleterious to functional health than any other one cause in college life."
On the basis of a long study, Celia D. Mosher, M. D.,1 prints some interesting preliminary conclusions concerning menstruation, that a rhythmic fall of blood pressure at defi- nite intervals occurs in both men and women. Along with this, subjective observation of the sense of well-being shows concomitant variations, the sense of maximum efficiency of the individual, corresponding to the time when the pressure is high, and lessened efficiency to the periods of low pressure, the latter in both sexes being a period of increased suscepti- bility. If symptoms of any kind appear, they should come at the point of least resistance, or lo\v pressure. This is true of digestive disturbances, catarrh, etc. The author believes 1 Normal Menstruation and Some of the Factors Modifying it. Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, April, May, June, 1901, p. 178, ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 589 that the tradition that women must suffer and be incapacitated at these times tends to increase the sense of lessened efficiency, especially in women without education and without absorbing- occupations. Much, usually ascribed to dysmenorrhea, is really a coincident functional disturbance of other organs, induced perhaps by the favoring condition of lowered gen- eral blood pressure occurring near the periods.
A college girl or graduate confronted with a questionnaire knows well that if she confesses pain or ill health, it may con- tribute to increase the prejudice against the cause of educa- tion which she has dearly at heart, and normally is as reluc- tant to confess illness as a boy is to confess muscular weak- ness. The latter, however, can be tested, while there is no good criterion of health, which more perhaps than anything else in the world is especially dependent on subjective and un- controllable factors. Every psychologist knows that pain is hard to gauge and harder yet to remember, and that general euphoria and disphoria are more matters of disposition, en- vironment, habit of control, time of the month, etc., than of true symptomatic value. Again, confession of real illness is the last thing a normal girl will make. It means the abandon- ment of hope and life prospects, and is usually concealed even to herself as long as possible. Hence I attach very slight value to questionnaire returns in this field, and therefore think it more probable that the doctor's objective and personal tests and opinions are nearer the truth. If so, we must reluctantly conclude that it is, to say the very least, not yet proven that the higher education of women is not injurious to their health.
But even if she is personally as well or even better than man, the question is not settled, for she is far more liable than he to overdraw her reproductive power and consume in good looks, activity of mind and body, and other augmentations of her individuality, energy meant for the altruism of home and of posterity. The danger of this subtle process, so attract- ively masked and insidiously disguised from both the victim and her friends, is probably far greater and more common than any form of measurable deterioration. Almost the only indexes we have of this change are found in marriage-rates and natality, and if we apply these tests higher education for women must be more severely judged.
59° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE IV. Nubility of Educated Women. — Mrs. Howes found about one-fourth and Dewey concluded that 23 per cent of the graduates of women's colleges marry; 21 per cent go into the professions; 28 per cent of coeducation girls marry, and 12 per cent go into the professions. From coeducational colleges 48 per cent teach as against 42 from the women's colleges.
The editor of the Overland Monthly 1 found from the reg- ister of the year 1890, including 1,078 names of the New Eng- land coeducational colleges, that 24.7 were married as against 14.8 of the graduates of the women's colleges. In New York, of the graduates of the preceding twelve years, these percent- ages were 25.7 and 20.6 respectively, and of all coeducational colleges 34.8 were married as against 22.9 of the women's colleges. If middle-aged women are excluded and the survey limited to the graduates of the eight years preceding i889,2 the New England female colleges showed 1 1 per cent married, coeducational colleges 26 per cent, the New York female col- leges 15.1 per cent, and the Western coeducational colleges 36 per cent. Dewey3 makes 26 per cent of the graduates of twelve American collegiate institutions at an average age of twenty-seven and six years out of college married, and 74 per cent single. Dr. Smith 4 gathered statistics from 343 col- lege-bred and married women from thirty colleges and from their sisters, cousins, and friends otherwise trained, in order to compare equal social classes. Before 23 she found the number of non-college women married in proportion to married grad- uates as 30 to 8 per cent; from 23 to 32 as 64 to 83 per cent;