622 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE overborne by a keen interest in life, by a desire to know the world at first hand, while susceptibilities are at their height. The apple of intelligence has been plucked at perhaps a little too great cost of health. The purely mental has not been quite sufficiently kept back. The girl wishes to know a good deal more of the world and perfect her own personality, and would not marry, although every cell of her body and every uncon- scious impulse points to just that end. Soon, it may be in five or ten years or more, the complexion of ill health is seen in these notes, or else life has been adjusted to independence and self-support. Many of these bachelor women are mag- nificent in mind and body, but they lack wifehood and yet more — motherhood.
In fine, we should use these facts as a stimulus to ask more searchingly the question whether the present system of higher education for both sexes is not lacking in some very essential elements, and* if so what these are. Indeed, considering the facts that in our social system man makes the advances and that woman is by nature more prone than man to domesticity and parenthood, it is not impossible that men's colleges do more to unfit for these than do those for women. One cause may be moral. Ethics used to be taught as a practical power for life and reenforced by religious motives. Now it is theo- retical and speculative and too often led captive by metaphys- ical and epistemological speculations. Sometimes girls work or worry more over studies and ideals than is good for their constitution, and boys grow idle and indifferent, and this pro- verbially tends to bad habits. Perhaps fitting for college has been too hard at the critical age of about eighteen, and require- ments of honest, persevering work during college years too little enforced, or grown irksome by physiological reaction of lassitude from the strain of fitting and entering. Again, girls mature earlier than boys, and the latter who have been edu- cated with them tend to certain elements of maturity and completeness too early in life, and their growth period is shortened or its momentum lessened by an atmosphere of femininity. Something is clearly wrong, and more so here than we have at present any reason to think is the case among the academic male or female youth of other lands. To see and admit that there is an evil very real, deep, exceedingly difficult and com- ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 623 plex in its causes, but grave and demanding a careful recon- sideration of current educational ideas and practises, is the first step, and this every thoughtful and well-informed mind, I believe, must now take.
It is utterly impossible without injury to hold girls to the same standards of conduct, regularity, severe moral accounta- bility, and strenuous mental work that boys need. The priv- ileges and immunities of her sex are inveterate, and with these the American girl in the middle teens fairly tingles with a new-born consciousness. Already she occasionally asserts her- self in the public high school against a male teacher or prin- cipal who seeks to enforce discipline by methods boys respect in a way that suggests that the time is at hand when popu- larity with her sex will be as necessary in a successful teacher as it is in the pulpit. In these interesting cases where girl sentiment has macte itself felt in school it has generally carried parents, committeemen, the press, and public sentiment before it, and has already made a precious little list of martyrs whom, were I an educational pope, I would promptly canonize. The progressive feminization of secondary education works its subtle demoralization on the male teachers who remain. Public sentiment would sustain them in many in loco parentis exactions with boys which it disallows in mixed classes. It is hard, too, for male principals of schools with only female teachers not to suffer some deterioration in the moral tone of their virility and to lose in the power to cope successfully with men. Not only is this often confessed and deplored, but die incessant compromises the best male teachers of mixed classes must make with their pedagogic convictions in both teaching and discipline make the profession less attractive to manly men of large caliber and of sound fiber. Again, the recent rapid increase of girls, the percentage of which to popu- lation in high schools has in many communities doubled in but little more than a decade, almost necessarily involves a decline in the average quality of girls, perhaps as much greater for them as for boys as their increase has been greater. When but few were found in these institutions they were usually picked girls with superior tastes and ability, but now the aver- age girl of the rank and file is, despite advanced standards of admission, of an order natively lower. From this deteriora- 624 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE tion both boys and teachers suffer, even though the greatest good for the greatest number may be enhanced. Once more it is generally admitted that girls in good boarding-schools, where evenings, food, and regimen are controlled, are in better health than day pupils with social, church, and domestic duties and perhaps worries to which boys are less subject. This is the nascent stage of periodicity to the slow normalization of which, during' these few critical years, everything that inter- feres should yield. Some kind of tacit recognition of this is indispensable, but in mixed classes every form of such con- cession is baffling and demoralizing to boys.
The women who really achieve the higher culture should make it their " cause " or " mission " to work out the new humanistic or liberal education which the old college claimed to stand for and which now needs radical reconstruction to meet the demands of modern life. In science they should aim to restore the humanistic elements of its history, biography, its popular features at their best, and its applications in all the more non-technical fields, as described in Chapter XII, and feel responsibility not to let the moral, religious, and poetic aspects of nature be lost in utilities. Woman should be true to her generic nature and take her stand against all premature specialization, and when the Zeitgeist insists on an ad hoc training for occupative pursuits without waiting for broad foundations to be laid, she should resist all these influences that make for psychological precocity. Das Ewig-Weibliche is no iridescent fiction but a very definable reality, and means perennial youth. It means that woman at her best never out- grows adolescence as man does, but lingers in, magnifies and glorifies this culminating stage of life with its all-sided inter- ests, its convertibility of emotions, its enthusiasm, and zest for all that is good, beautiful, true, and heroic. This constitutes her freshness and charm, even in age, and makes her by nature more humanistic than man, more sympathetic and apprecia- tive. It is not chiefly the 70,000 superfluous American women of the last census, but representatives of every class and age in the four thousand women's clubs of this country that now find some leisure for general culture in all fields, and in which most of them no doubt surpass their husbands. Those who still say that men do not like women to be their mental su- ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 625 periors and that no man was ever won by the attraction of intellect, on the one hand, and those who urge that women really want husbands to be their intellectual superiors, both misapprehend. The male in all the orders of life is the agent of variation and tends by nature to expertness and specializa- tion, without which his individuality is incomplete. In his chosen line he would lead and be authoritative and rarely seeks partnership in it in marriage. This is no subjection, but woman instinctively respects and even reveres, and perhaps educated woman is coming to demand, it in the man of her whole-hearted choice. This granted, man was never more plastic to woman's great work of creating in him all the wide range of secondary sex qualities which constitute his essential manhood. In all this the pedagogic fathers we teach in the history of education are most of them about as luminous and obsolete as is patristics for the religious teacher, or as methods of other countries are coming to be in solving our own pecul- iar pedagogic problems. The relation of the academically trained sexes is faintly typified by that of the ideal college to the ideal university, professional or technical school. This is the harmony of counterparts and constitutes the best basis of psychic amphimixis. For the reinstallation of the humanistic college the time has come when cultivated woman ought to come forward and render vital aid. If she does so and helps to evolve a high school and an A. B. course that is truly liberal, it will not only fit her nature and needs far better than any- thing now existing, but young men at the humanistic stage of their own education will seek to profit by it, and she will thus repay her debt to man in the past by aiding him to de-univer- sitize the college and to rescue secondary education from its gravest dangers.
But even should all this be done, coeducation would by no means be thus justified. If adolescent boys normally pass through a generalized or even feminized stage of psychic de- velopment in which they are peculiarly plastic to the guidance of older women who have such rare insight into their nature, such infinite sympathy and patience with all the symp- toms of their storm and stress metamorphosis, when they seek everything by turns and nothing long, and if young, men will forever afterward understand woman's nature better for living 626 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE out more fully this stage of their lives and will fail to do so if it is abridged or dwarfed, it by no means follows that inti- mate daily and class-room association with girls of their own age is necessary or best. The danger of this is that the boy's instinct to assert his own manhood will thus be made prema- ture and excessive, that he will react against general culture in the capacity for which girls, who are older than boys at the same age, naturally excel them. Companionship and com- parisons incline him to take premature refuge in some one talent that emphasizes his psycho-sexual difference too soon. Again, he is farther from nubile maturity than the girl class- mate of his own age, and coeducation and marriage between them are prone to violate the important physiological law of disparity that requires the husband to be some years the wife's senior, both in their own interests as maturity begins to de- cline to age and in those of their offspring. Thus the young man with his years of restraint and probation ahead, and his inflammable desires, is best removed from the half-conscious cerebrations about wedlock, inevitably more insistent with con- stant girl companionship. If he resists this during all the years of his apprenticeship, he growrs more immune and inhibitive of it when its proper hour arrives, and perhaps becomes in soul a bachelor before his time. In this side of his nature he is forever incommensurate with and unintelligible to woman, be she even teacher, sister, or mother. Better some risk of gross thoughts and even acts, to which phylogeny and recapitulation so strongly incline him, than this subtle evira- tion. But if the boy is unduly repelled from the sphere of girls' interests, the girl is in some danger of being unduly drawn to his, and, as we saw above, of forgetting some of the ideals of her own sex. Riper in mind and body than her male classmate, and often excelling him in the capacity of acquisi- tion, nearer the age of her full maturity than he to his, he seems a little too crude and callow to fulfil the ideals of man- hood normal to her age which point to older and riper men. In all that makes sexual attraction best, a classmate of her own age is too undeveloped, and so she often suffers mute disenchantment, and even if engagement be dreamed of, it would be on her part with unconscious reservations if not with some conscious renunciation of ideals. Thus the boy is correct ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 627 in feeling himself understood and seen through by his girl classmates to a degree that is sometimes quite distasteful to him, while the girl finds herself misunderstood by and disap- pointed in men. Boys arrive at the humanistic stage of cul- ture later than girls and pass it sooner, and to find them already there and with their greater aptitude excelling him, is not an inviting situation, and so he is tempted to abridge or cut it out and to hasten on and be mature and professional before his time, for thus he gravitates toward his normal rela- tion to her sex of expert mastership on some bread- or fame- winning line. Of course, these influences are not patent, de- monstrable by experiment, or measurable by statistics, but I have come to believe that, like many other facts and laws, they have a reality and a dominance that is all-pervasive and in- eluctable, and that they will ultimately prevail over economic motives and traditions.
To be a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. The madonna conception expresses man's highest com- prehension of woman's real nature. Sexual relations are brief, but love and care of offspring are long. The elimination of maternity is one of the great calamities, if not diseases, of our age. Marholm l points out at length how art again to-day gives woman a waspish waist with no abdomen, as if to care- fully score away every trace of her mission; usually with no child in her arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated perhaps to entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading the artist who depicts her to a fashion-plate painter, perhaps with suggestions of the arts of toilet, cosmetics, and coquetry, as if to promote decadent reaction to decadent stimuli. As in the Munchausen tale, the wolf slowly ate the running nag from behind until he found himself in the harness, so in the dis- oriented woman the mistress, virtuous and otherwise, is slowly supplanting the mother. Please she must, even though she can not admire, and can so easily despise men who can not lead her, although she become thereby lax and vapid.
The more exhausted men become, whether by overwork, unnatural city life, alcohol, recrudescent polygamic inclina- tions, exclusive devotion to greed and pelf; whether they Psychology of Woman. London, 1899.
628 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE become weak, stooping, blear-eyed, bald-headed, bow-legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coarse, barbaric, and bestial, the more they lose the power to lead woman or to arouse her nature, which is essentially passive. Thus her perversions are his fault. Man, before he lost the soil and piety, was not only her protector and provider, but her priest. He not only sup- ported and defended, but inspired the souls of women, so ad- mirably calculated to receive and elaborate suggestions, but not to originate them. In their inmost soul even young girls often experience disenchantment, find men little and no he- roes, and so cease to revere and begin to think stupidly of them as they think coarsely of her. Sometimes the girlish con- ceptions of men are too romantic and exalted; often the in- timacy of school and college wear off a charm, while man must not forget that to-day he too often fails to realize the just and legitimate expectations and ideals of women. If women con- fide themselves, body and soul, less to him than he desires, it is not she, but he, who is often chiefly to blame. Indeed, in some psychic respects it seems as if in human society the proc- esses of subordinating the male to the female, carried so far in some of the animal species, had already begun. If he is not worshiped as formerly, it is because he is less worshipful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to excite and retain the great love of true, not to say great, women. Where marriage and maternity are of less supreme interest to an in- creasing number of women, there are various results, the chief of which are as follows: 1. Women grow dollish; sink more or less consciously to man's level; gratify his desires and even his selfish caprices, but exact in return luxury and display, growing vain as he grows sordid; thus, while submitting, conquering, and tyran- nizing over him, content with present worldly pleasure, un- mindful of the past, the future, or the above. This may react to intersexual antagonism until man comes to hate woman as a witch, or, as in the days of celibacy, consider sex a wile of the devil. Along these lines even the stage is beginning to represent the tragedies of life.
2. The disappointed woman in whom something is dying comes to assert her own ego and more or less consciously to make it an end, aiming to possess and realize herself fully ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 629 rather than to transmit. Despairing of herself as a woman, she asserts her lower rights in the place of her one great right to be loved. The desire for love may be transmuted into the desire for knowledge, or outer achievement become a suc- cedaneum for inner content. Failing to respect herself as a productive organism, she gives vent to personal ambitions; seeks independence; comes to know very plainly what she wants; perhaps becomes intellectually emancipated, and sub- stitutes science for religion, or the doctor for the priest, with the all-sided impressionability characteristic of her sex which, when cultivated, is so like an awakened child. She perhaps even affects mannish ways, unconsciously copying from those not most manly, or comes to feel that she has been robbed of something; competes with men, but sometimes where they are most sordid, brutish, and strongest; always expecting, but never finding, she turns successively to art, science, literature, and reforms; craves especially work that she can not do; and seeks stimuli for feelings which have never found their legiti- mate expression.
3. Another type, truer to woman's nature, subordinates self; goes beyond personal happiness; adopts the motto of self- immolation; enters a life of service, denial, and perhaps morti- fication, like the Countess Schimmelmann; and perhaps be- comes a devotee, a saint, and, if need be, a martyr, but all with modesty, humility, and with a shrinking from publicity.
In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good en- vironment of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the above-mentioned peculiar stage of first maturity, when they see the world at first hand, when the senses are at their very best, their susceptibilities and their in- sights the keenest, tension at its highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. Some such — Stella Klive, Mary MacLane, Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff — have been veritable spies upon woman's nature; have revealed the characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in which everything is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least unity, aim, or purpose. By and by perhaps they will see in all their scrappy past, if not order and coherence, 63° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE a justification, and then alone will they realize that life is gov- erned by motives deeper than those which are conscious or even personal. This is the age when, if ever, no girl should be compelled. It is the experiences of this age, never entirely obliterated in women, that enables them to take adolescent boys seriously, as men can rarely do, in whom these experiences are more limited in range though no less intense. It is this stage in woman which is most unintelligible to man and even un- realized to herself. It is the echoes from it that make vast numbers of mothers pursue the various branches of culture, often half secretly, to maintain their position with their college sons and daughters, with their husbands, or with society.
But in a very few years, I believe even in the early twenties with American girls, along with rapidly increasing develop- ment of capacity there is also observable the beginnings of loss and deterioration. Unless marriage comes there is lassitude, subtle symptoms of invalidism, the germs of a rather aimless dissatisfaction with life, a little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain forms of self-pampering, the resolution to be happy, though at too great cost; and thus the clear air of morning begins to haze over and unconsciously she begins to grope. By thirty, she is perhaps goaded into more or less sourness; has developed more petty self-indulgences; has come to feel a right to happiness almost as passionately as the men of the French Revolution and as the women in their late movement for enfranchisement felt for liberty. Very likely she has turned to other women and entered into innocent Pla- tonic pairing-off relations with some one. There is a little more affectation, playing a role, and interest in dress and appearance is either less or more specialized and definite. Perhaps she has already begun to be a seeker \vho will perhaps find, lose, and seek again. Her temper is modified; there is a slight stagna- tion of soul; a craving for work or travel; a love of children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or else aversion to them; pn analysis of. psychic processes until they are weakened and insight becomes too clear;' a sense of responsibility without an object; a slight general malaise and a sense that society is a false " margarine " affair; revolt against those that insist that in her child the real value of a w^oman is revealed. There are alternations between excessive self-respect which demands something almost like adoration of the other sex and self- ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 631 distrust, with, it may be. many dreameries about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the sexes generally.
A new danger, the greatest in the history of her sex, now impends, viz., arrest, complacency, and a sense of finality in the most perilous first stage of higher education for girls, when, after all, little has actually yet been won save only the right and opportunity to begin reconstructions, so that now for the first time in history methods and matter could be rad- ically transformed to fit the nature and needs of girls. Now most female faculties, trustees, and students are content to ape the newest departures in some one or more male institutions as far as their means or obvious limitations make possible with a servility which is often abject and with rarely ever a thought of any adjustment, save the most superficial, to sex. It is the easiest, and therefore the most common, view typically ex- pressed by the ferrfale head of a very successful institution,1 wrho was " early convinced in my teaching experience that the methods for mental development for boys and girls applied equally without regard to sex, and I have carried the same thought when I began to develop the physical, and filled my gymnasium with the ordinary appliances used in men's gym- nasia." There is no sex in mind or in science, it is said, but it might as well be urged that there is no age and hence that all methods adapted to teaching at different stages of develop- ment may be ignored. That woman can do many things as well as man does not prove that she ought to do the same things, or that man-made ways are the best for her. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer 2 was right in saying that woman's education has all the perplexities of that of man, and many more, still more difficult and intricate, of its own.