Hence, we must conclude that, while women's colleges have to a great extent solved the problem of special technical training, they have done as yet very little to solve the larger one of the proper education of woman. To assume that the latter question is settled, as is so often done, is disastrous. I have forced myself to go through many elaborate reports of 1 Physical Development of Women and Children, by Miss M. E. Allen. Am. Ass'n for Phys. Ed., April, 1890.
2 Forum, September, 1891. See also Bunge: Die zunehmende Unfahigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu stillen. Munchen, 1903, 32 S. Also President Harper's Decemial Report, p. XCIV., et seq.
63* THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE meetings where female education was discussed by those sup- posed to be competent, but as a rule, not without rare, striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with the same sterile and complacent artificiality that was so long the curse of woman's life. I deem it almost reprehensible that, save a few general statistics, the women's colleges have not only made no study themselves of the larger problems that impend, but have often maintained a repellent attitude toward others who wished to do so. No one that I know of connected with any of these institutions, where the richest material is going to waste, is making any serious and competent research on lines calculated to bring out the psycho-physiological differences be- tween the sexes, and those in authority are either conservative by constitution or else intimidated because public opinion is still liable to panics if discussion here becomes scientific and fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and the old habit of ignoring everything that pertains to sex in countenance.
Again, while I sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every opportunity which she can fill, and yield to none in appreciation of her ability, I insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college is that it is based upon the assumption, implied and often expressed, if not almost uni- versally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be trained to independence and self-support, and that matrimony and motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even urge, is thus best provided for. If these colleges are as the above statistics indicate, chiefly devoted to the training of those who do not marry, or if they are to educate for celibacy, this is right. These institutions may perhaps come to be train- ing stations of a new-old type, the agamic or even agenic woman, be she aunt, maid — old or young — nun, school-teacher, or bachelor woman. I recognize the very great debt the world owes to members of this very diverse class in the past. Some of them have illustrated the very highest ideals of self-sacri- fice, service,, and devotion in giving to mankind what was meant for husband and children. Some of them belong to the class of superfluous women, and others illustrate the noblest type of altruism and have impoverished the heredity of the world to its loss, as did the monks, who Leslie Stephens thinks contributed to bring about the Dark Ages, because they were ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION t>33 the best and most highly selected men of their age and, by withdrawing from the function of heredity and leaving no pos- terity, caused Europe to degenerate. Modern ideas and train- ing are now doing this, whether for racial weal or woe can not yet be determined, for many whom nature designed for model mothers.
The bachelor woman is an interesting illustration of Spen- cer's law of the inverse relation of individuation and genesis. The completely developed individual is always a terminal rep- resentative in her line of descent. She has taken up and util- ized in her own life all that was meant for her descendants, and has so overdrawn her account with heredity that, like every perfectly and completely developed individual, she is also completely sterile. This is the very apotheosis of selfish- ness from the standpoint of every biological ethics. While the complete man can do and sometimes does this, woman has a far greater and very peculiar power of overdrawing her reserves. First she loses mammary function, so that should she undertake maternity its functions are incompletely per- formed because she can not nurse, and this implies defective motherhood and leaves love of the child itself defective and maimed, for the mother who has never nursed can not love or be loved aright by her child. It crops out again in the abnormal or especially incomplete development of her off- spring, in the critical years of adolescence, although they may have been healthful before, and a less degree of it perhaps is seen in the diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one-child system. These wromen are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of the men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr, the university stu- dent, in Hauptmann's Lonely Lives, who alienated the young husband from his noble wife; they enjoy all the keen pleasures of intellectual activity; their very look, step, and bearing is free; their mentality makes them good fellows and compan- ionable in all the broad intellectual spheres; to converse with them is as charming and attractive for the best men as was Socrates's discourse with the accomplished hetsera; they are at home with the racket and on the golf links; they are splendid friends; their minds, in all their widening areas of contact, are as attractive as their bodies; and the world owes much and is 79 634 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE likely to owe far more to high Platonic friendships of this kind, These women are often in every way magnificent, only they are not mothers, and sometimes have very little wifehood in them, and to attempt to marry them to develop these functions is one of the unique and too frequent tragedies of modern- life and literature. Some, though by no means all, of them are functionally castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of child-bearing, and perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor the limitations of married life; they are incensed when- ever attention is called to the functions peculiar to their sex, and the careful consideration of problems of the monthly rest are thought " not fit for cultivated women."
The slow evolution of this type is probably inevitable as civilization advances, and their training is a noble function. Already it has produced minds of the greatest acumen who have made very valuable contributions to science, and far more is to be expected of them in the future. Indeed, it may be their noble function to lead their sex out into the higher, larger life, and the deeper sense of its true position and function, for which I plead. Hitherto woman has not been able to solve her own problems. While she has been more religious than man, there have been few great women preachers; while she has excelled in teaching young children, there have been few Pes- talozzis, or even Froebels; while her invalidism is a complex problem, she has turned to man in her diseases. This is due to the very intuitiveness and naivete of her nature. But now that her world is so rapidly widening, she is in danger of losing her cue. She must be studied objectively and labo- riously as we study children, and partly by men, because their sex must of necessity always remain objective and incommen- surate with regard to woman, and therefore more or less the- oretical. Again, in these days of intense new interest in feel- ings, emotions, and sentiments, when many a psychologist now envies and, like Schleiermacher, devoutly wishes he could be- come a woman, he can never really understand das Ewig- Weibliche, one of the two supreme oracles of guidance in life, because he is a man, and here the cultivated woman must ex- plore the nature of her sex as man can not and become its mouthpiece. In many of the new fields opening in biology since Darwin, in embryology, botany, the study of children, ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 635 animals, savages (teste ]\Iiss Fletcher), sociological investi- gation, to say nothing of all the vast body of work that re- quires painstaking detail, perseverance, and conscience, woman has superior ability, or her very sex gives her peculiar advan- tages where she is to lead and achieve great things in en- larging the kingdom of man. Perhaps, too, the present train- ing of women may in the end develop those who shall one day attain a true self-knowledge and lead in the next step of de- vising a scheme that shall fit woman's nature and needs.
For the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first of all distinctly and ostensively invert the present maxim, and educate primarily and chiefly for motherhood, assuming that, if that does not come single life can best take care of itself, be- cause it is less intricate and lower and its needs far more easily met. While girls may be trained with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of adolescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy between the sexes in high school, if not in college, tends to rub off the bloom and delicacy which can develop in each, and girls suffer in this respect, let us repeat, far more than boys. The familiar camaraderie that ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their in- stitutions we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Stael, the Misses Cobb, Martineau, Fuller, Bronte, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs. Browning, and while accepting and profiting by what they have done, and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and achievements, prospective mothers must not be allowed to forget a still larger class of ideal women, both in history and literature, from the Holy Mother to Beatrice Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who have inspired men to great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of noble mothers.
We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she can, from surreptitious or unworthy sources, what she most of all needs to know; must recognize that our present civilization is hard on woman and that she is not yet adjusted to her social environment; that as she was of old accused of having given man.the apple of knowledge of good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less 636 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE serious indictment of having given her the apple of intellec- tualism and encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense of health. We must recognize that riches are prob- ably harder on her, on the whole, than poverty, and that poor parents should not labor too hard to exempt her from its wholesome discipline. The expectancy of change so stamped upon her sex by heredity as she advances into maturity must not be perverted into uneasiness, or her soul sown with the tares of ambition or fired by intersexual competition and driven on, to quote Dr. R. T. Edes, " by a tireless sort of energy which is a compound of conscience, ambition, and de- sire to please, plus a peculiar female obstinacy." If she is bright, she must not be overworked in the school factory, studying in a way which parodies Hood's Song of the Shirt; and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by precep- tresses like an eminent lady principal,1 who thinks girls' weak- ness is usually imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for suggesting illness and for intimating that men will have to choose between a healthy animal and an educated in- valid for a wife.
Without specifying here details or curricula, the ideals that should be striven toward in the intermediate and collegiate education of adolescent girls with the proper presupposition of motherhood, and which are already just as practicable as Abbotsholme or L'Ecole des Roches, may be rudely indicated somewhat as follows.
First, the ideal institution for the training of girls from twelve or thirteen on into the twenties, when the period most favorable to motherhood begins, should be in the country in the midst of hills, the climbing of which is the best stimulus for heart and lungs, and tends to mental elevation and breadth of view. There should be water for boating, bathing, and skating, aquaria and aquatic life; gardens both for kitchen vegetables and horticulture; forests for their seclusion and religious awe; good roads, walks, and paths that tempt to walking and wheeling; playgrounds and space for golf and tennis, with large covered but unheated space favorable for recreations in weather really too bad for out-of-door life and ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 637 for those indisposed; and plenty of nooks that permit each to be alone with nature, for this develops inwardness, poise, and character, yet not too great remoteness from the city for a wise utilization of its advantages at intervals. All that can be called environment is even more important for girls than boys, significant as it is for the latter.
The first aim, which should dominate every item, peda- gogic method and matter, should be health — a momentous word that looms up beside holiness, to which it is etymolog- ically akin. The new hygiene of the last few years should be supreme and make these academic areas sacred to the cult of the goddess Hygeia. Only those who realize what advances have been made in health culture and know something of its vast new literature can realize all that this means. The health of woman is, as we have seen, if possible even more important for the welfare of die race than that of man, and the influence of her body upon her mind is, in a sense, greater, so that its needs should be supreme and primary. Foods should favor the completest digestion, so that metabolism be on the highest plane. The dietary should be abundant, plain, and varied, and cooked with all the refinements possible in the modern cook- ing-school, which should be one of its departments, with lim- ited use of rich foods or desserts and stimulating drinks, but with wholesome proximity to dairy and farm. Nutrition is the first law of health and happiness, the prime condition and creator of euphoria, and the appetite should be, as it always is if unperverted, like a kind of somatic conscience steadfastly pointing toward the true pole of needs.
Sleep should be regular, with a fixed retiring hour and curfew, on plain beds in rooms of scrupulous neatness re- served chiefly for it with every precaution for quiet, and, if possible, with \vindows more or less open the year round, and, like other rooms, never overheated. Bathing in modera- tion, and especially dress and toilet should be almost raised to fine arts and objects of constant suggestion. Each student should have three rooms, for bath, sleep, and study, respect- ively, and be responsible for their care, with every encourage- ment for expressing individual tastes, but with an all-domi- nant idea of simplicity, convenience, refinement, and elegance, without luxury. Girls need to go away from home a good 638 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE part of every year to escape the indiscretion and often the coddling of parents and to learn self-reliance, and a family dormitory system with but few, twelve to twenty, in each building, to escape nervous wear and distraction, to secure intimacy and acquaintance with one or more matrons or teachers and to ensure the most pedagogic dietetics, is sug- gested.
Exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special form. Swedish gymnastics should be abandoned or reduced to a min- imum of best points, because it is too severe and lays too little stress upon the rhythm element in forbidding music. Out-of- door walks and games should have precedence over all else. The principle sometimes advocated, that methods of physical training should apply to both boys and girls without regard to sex, and with all the ordinary appliances found in the men's gymnasia introduced, should be reversed and every possible adjustment made to sex. Free plays and games should always have precedence over indoor or uniform commando exercises. Boating and basket-ball should be allowed, but with the com- petition element sedulously reduced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the most prominent of indoor exercises. The dance cadences the soul; the stately minuet gives poise; the figure dances train the mind; and pantomime and dramatic features should be introduced and even specialties, if there are strong individual predispositions. The history of the dance, which has often been a mode of worship, a school of morals, and which is the root of the best that is in the drama, the best of all exercises and that could be again the heart of our whole educational system, should be exploited, and the dancing school and class rescued from its present degradation. No girl is educated who can not dance, although she need not know the ballroom in its modern form.1 Manners, a word too often relegated to the past as savor- ing of the primness of the ancient dame school or female seminary, are really minor or sometimes major morals. They can express everything in the whole range of the impulsive or emotional life. Now that we understand the primacy of movement over feeling, we can appreciate what a school of ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 639 bearing and repose in daily converse with others means. I would revive some of the ancient casuistry of details, but less the rules of the drawing-room, call and party, although these should not be neglected, than the deeper expressions of true ladyhood seen in an exquisite, tender and unselfish regard for the feelings of others. The ideal of compelling every one whom they meet to like them is a noble one, and the control of every automatism is not only a part of good breeding, but nervous health.
Regularity should be another all-pervading norm. In the main, even though he may have " played his sex symphony too harshly," E. H. Clarke was right. Periodicity, perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos, celebrates its highest triumphs in woman's life. For years everything must give way to its thorough and settled establishment. In the monthly Sabbaths of rest, the ideal school should revert to the meaning of the word leisure. The paradise of stated rest should be revisited, idleness be actively cultivated; reverie, in which the soul, which needs these seasons of withdrawal for its own development, expatiates over the whole life of the race, should be provided for and encouraged in every legitimate way, for in rest the whole momentum of heredity is felt in ways most favorable to full and complete development. Then woman should realize that to be is greater than to do; should step reverently aside from her daily routine and let Lord Nature work. In this time of sensitiveness and perturbation, when anemia and chlorosis are so peculiarly immanent to her sex, remission of toil should not only be permitted, but required; and yet the greatest individual liberty should be allowed to adjust itself to the vast diversities of individual constitutional needs. (See Chapter VII on this point.) The cottage home, which should take the place of the dormitory, should always have special interest and attractions for these seasons.
There should always be some personal instruction at these seasons during earlier adolescent years. I have glanced over nearly a score of books and pamphlets that are especially written for girls; while all are well meant and far better than the ordinary modes by which girls acquire knowledge of their own nature if left to themselves, they are, like books for boys, far too prolix, and most are too scientific and plain and direct.
640 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Moreover, no two girls need just the same instruction, and to leave it to reading is too indirect and causes the mind to dwell on it for too long periods. Best of all is individual instruction at the time, concise, practical, and never, especially in the early years, without a certain mystic and religious tone which should pervade all and make everything sacred. This should not be given by male physicians — and indeed most female doctors would make it too professional, and the maiden teacher must forever lack reverence for it — but it should come from one whose soul and body are full of wifehood and motherhood and who is old enough to know and is not without the necessary technical knowledge.
Another principle should be to broaden by retarding; to keep the purely mental back and by every method to bring the intuitions to the front; appeals to tact and taste should be incessant; a purely intellectual man is no doubt biologically a deformity, but a purely intellectual woman is far more so. Bookishness is probably a bad sign in a girl; it suggests arti- ficiality, pedantry, the lugging of dead knowledge. Mere learning is not the ideal, and prodigies of scholarship are al- ways morbid. The rule should be to keep nothing that is not to become practical; to open no brain tracts which are not to be highways for the daily traffic of thought and conduct; not to overburden the soul with the impedimenta of libraries and records of what is afar off in time or zest, and always to follow truly the guidance of normal and spontaneous interests wisely interpreted.
Religion will always hold as prominent a place in woman's life as politics does in man's, and adolescence is still more its seedtime with girls than with boys. Its roots are the senti- ment of awe and reverence, and it is the great agent in the world for transforming life from its earlier selfish to its only really mature form of altruism. The tales of the heroes of virtue, duty, devotion, and self-sacrifice from the Old Testa- ment come naturally first; then perhaps the prophets para- phrased as in the pedagogic triumph of Kent and Saunders's little series; and when adolescence is at its height then the chief stress of religious instruction should be laid upon Jesus's life and work. (See this topic in Chapter XV.) He should be taught first humanly, and only later when the limitations ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 64* of manhood seem exhausted should his deity be adduced as a welcome surplusage. The supernatural is a reflex of the heart; each sustains and neither can exist without the other. If the transcendent and supernal had no objective existence, we should have to invent and teach them, or dwarf the life of feeling and sentiment. Whatever else religion is, there- fore, it is the supremest poetry of the soul, reflecting like nothing else all that is deepest, most generic and racial in it. Theology should be reduced to a minimum, but nothing denied where wanted. Paul and his works and ways should be for the most part deferred until after eighteen. The juvenile as well as the cyclone revivalist should be very carefully ex- cluded, and yet in every springtime, when nature is recreated, service and teaching should gently encourage the revival and even the regeneration of all the religious instincts. The mis- sion recruiter should be allowed to do his work outside these halls, and everything in the way of infection and all that brings religion into conflict with good taste and good sense should be excluded, while esthetics should supplement, reen- force, and go hand in hand with piety. Religion is in its infancy, and woman, who has sustained it in the past, must be the chief agent in its further and higher development. Or- thodoxies and all narrowness should forever give place to cor- dial hospitality toward every serious view, which should be met by the method of greater sympathy rather than that of criticism.