To be a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. The madonna conception expresses man's highest comprehension 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 calam- ities, if not diseases, of our age. Marholm ^ points out at length how art again to-day gives w^oman a waspish waist with no abdomen, as if to carefully score away every trace of her mission; usually with no child in her arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated per- haps to entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading the artist who depicts her to a fashion-plate painter, per- haps 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 w^olf slowly ate the running nag from behind until he found himself in the harness, so in the disoriented 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 over- work, unnatural city life, alcohol, recrudescent poly- gamic inclinations, exclusive devotion to greed and pelf; 1 The Psychology of Woman. Translated by G. A. Etchison. Richards, London, 1899.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE whether they become weak, stooping, blear-eyed, bald- headed, bow-legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coarse, bar- baric, 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, be- fore he lost the soil and piety, was not only her protector and provider, but her priest. He not only supported and defended, but inspired the souls of women, so admir- ably calculated to receive and elaborate suggestions, but not to originate them. In their inmost souls even young girls often experience disenchantment, find men little and no heroes, and so cease to revere and begin to think stupidly of them as they think coarsely of her. Some- times the girlish conceptions of men are too romantic and exalted; often the intimacy of school and college wear oif 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 confide 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 processes 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 worship- ful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to ex- cite and retain the great love of true, not to say great, women. Where marriage and maternity are of less su- preme interest to an increasing 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, conquer- ing, and tyrannizing over him, content with present THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS worldly pleasure, unmindful 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 con- sciously to make it an end, aiming to possess and realize herself fully rather than to transmit. Despairing of her- self 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 outward achievement become a substitute for inner content. Failing to respect herself as a productive or- ganism, she gives vent to personal ambitions; seeks inde- pendence; comes to know very plainly what she wants; perhaps becomes intellectually emancipated, and substi- tutes 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, subordi- nates self; goes beyond personal happiness; adopts the motto of self-immolation; enters a life of service, denial, and perhaps mortification, like the Countess Schimmel- YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE mann; and perhaps becomes a devotee, a saint, and, if need be, a martyr, but all witli modesty, humility, and with a shrinking from publicity.
In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good environment 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 susceptibil- ities and their insights the keenest, tension at its highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprout- ing everywhere with the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. Some such — Stella Klive, ]\Iary 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, a justification, and then alone will they realize that life is governed 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 enable 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 unrealized 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 THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS twenties with American girls, along with rapidly in- creasing development of capacity there is also observable the beginnings of loss and deterioration. Unless mar- riage comes there is lassitude, subtle symptoms of inva- lidism, 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 morn- ing 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 passion- ately 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 Platonic pairing-off relations with some one. There is a little more affectation, play- ing 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 who will perhaps find, lose, and seek again. Her temper is modified; there is a slight stagnation of soul; a craving for work or travel; a love of children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or else aversion to them; an analysis of psychic processes until they are weakened and insight becomes too clear; a sense of responsibility without an object; a slight gen- eral malaise and a sense that society is a false " mar- garine " affair; revolt against those that insist that in her child the real value of a woman is revealed. There are alternations between excessive self-respect which de- mands something almost like adoration of the other sex and self-distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the sexes generally.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 educa- tion for girls, when, after all, little has actually yet been won save only the right and opportunity to begin recon- structions, so that now, for the first time in history, methods and matter could be radically transformed to fit the nature and needs of girls. Now most female fac- ulties, 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 possi- ble with a servility which is often abject and with rarely ever a thought of any adjustment, save the most super- ficial, to sex. It is the easiest, and therefore the most common, view typically expressed by the female head of a very successful institution,^ who 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 gymnasia." 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 de- velopment 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 ^ was right in saying that woman's education has all the perplexities of that 1 Physical Development of Women and Children. By Miss M. E. Allen, American Association for Physical Education, April, 1890.
2 A Review of the Higher Education of Women. Forum, September, 1891, vol. 12, pp. 25-40. See also G. von Bunge: Die zunehmende Un- fahigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu stillen. Miinchen, Reinhardt, 1903, 3d ed. Also President Harper's Decennial Report, pp. xciv-cxi.
I THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS of man, and many more, still more difficult and intricate, of its own.
Hence, we must conclude that, while women's col- leges 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 meetings where female educa- tion was discussed by those supposed to be competent; but as a rule, not without rare, striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with the same sterile and com- placent 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 between the sexes, and those in authority are either conservative by constitu- tion 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, w^hile 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 universally acknowledged, that girls should YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 training stations of a new-old type, the agamic or even agenic woman, be she aunt, maid — old or young — nun, school-teacher, or bach- elor 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-sacrifice, 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 im- poverished 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 the best and most highly selected men of their age and, by withdraw- ing from the function of heredity and leaving no pos- terity, caused Europe to degenerate. Modern ideas and training 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 Spencer's law of the inverse relation of individuation and genesis. The completely developed individual is always a terminal representative in her line of descent. She has taken up and utilized 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 selfishness from the THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS standpoint of every biological ethics. While the com- plete man can do and sometimes does this, woman has a far greater and very peculiar power of overdrawing her reserves. First she loses mammary functions, so that should she undertake maternity its functions are incom- pletely performed 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 offspring, in the critical years of adolescence, although they may have been health- ful before, and a less degree of it perhaps is seen in the diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one- child system. These women are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of the men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr, the university student, 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 companionable in all the broad intel- lectual spheres; to converse with them is as charming and attractive for the best men as was Socrates 's discourse with the accomplished hetar^e; they are at home with the racquet 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 likely to owe far more to high Platonic friendships of this kind. These women are often in every way mag- nificent, 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.
YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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 great- est 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 li»fe, 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 preachars; while she has excelled in teaching young children, there have been few Pestalozzis, 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 laboriously as we study children, and partly by men, because their sex must of necessity always remain objective and incommensurate with regard to woman, and therefore more or less theoretical. Again, in these days of intense new interest in feelings, 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- Weihliche,^ one of the two supreme oracles of guidance 1 The eternal womanly.
THE EDUCATION OP GIRLS in life, because he is a man; and here the cultivated woman must explore 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, animals, savages (witness Miss Fletcher), sociological investigation, to say nothing of all the vast body of work that requires painstaking detail, perseverance, and conscience, woman has supe- rior 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 training of women may in the end develop those who shall one day attain a true self-knowledge and lead in the next step of devising 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, assum- ing that, if that does not come, single life can best take care of itself, because 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 ado- lescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy be- tween 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 comradeship that ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their institutions, 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 YOUTH: ITS EDUCATION, REGIMEN, AND HYGIENE 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.