of the country does not lie in those amiable people who never drop the
smile from their lips, but in those who, on due provocation, get
thoroughly excited. Dust is settling on the country, and there is no
great excitement to shake it off. The cobwebs of economic interests are
being spun from point to point, and will finally hide the nation’s
ideals. Good-nature produces a great deal of self-content in the United
States, and those are not the worst friends of the country who wish it
might have “bad times” once more, so that this pleasant smile might
disappear, and the general indifference give place to a real agitation
of spirit. The affair with Spain brought nothing of the sort; there was
only enough anger to produce a pleasant prickling sensation, and the
easy victory strengthened in every way the national feeling of
contentment. There have been a few large disasters, due to somebody’s
neglect of duty, such as the burning of a Chicago theatre, which have
done something to stimulate the public conscience and to impress on
people how dangerous it is to let things go just as they will; but even
the disastrous accidents which result from this carelessness are quickly
forgotten.
The shadows are darkest where the spirit of social equality attempts
artificially to do away with those differences which properly exist in
school and family life. It may be partly a reaction against the
over-strict bringing up of former generations; but everywhere
pedagogical maxims seem senselessly aiming to carry over the idea of
equality from the great social world into the nursery. It has become a
dogma to avoid all constraint and, if possible, all punishment of
children, and to make every correction and rebuke by appealing to their
insight and good-will. Thus the whole education and schooling goes along
the line of least resistance; the child must follow all his own
inclinations. And this idea is nothing at bottom but a final consequence
of the recognition of social equality between all persons. To constrain
another person, even if he is a mere child, means to infringe his
personal liberty, to offer him an ethical affront, and so to accustom
him to a sort of dependence that appears to be at variance with the
American idea. Of course, the best people know that lack of discipline
is not freedom, and that no strength is cultivated in the child that has
always followed the line of least resistance and never experienced any
friction. But the mass of people thoughtlessly overlooks this, and is
content to see even in the family the respect of children for their
parents and elders sacrificed to this favourite dogma.
Nature happily corrects many of these evils. It may be sport, most of
all, which early in the child’s life introduces a severe discipline; and
here the American principle is saved, since the outwardly rigid
discipline which is enforced on every participant in the game is,
nevertheless, at every moment felt to be his own will. The boy has
himself sought out his comrades. If he had also chosen his parents there
would be nothing against their giving him a good, sound punishment
occasionally, instead of yielding indulgently to all his moods. If sport
and the severe competition of public life were not here to save, it
would be incomprehensible that such spoiled children should grow up into
a population which keeps itself so strictly organized. Lack of
discipline remains, however, in evidence wherever the constraint appears
to be artificial and not self-chosen. Where, for instance, the
discipline of the army sometimes leads to situations which apparently
contradict “sound common sense,” the free American will never forget
that the uniform is nothing but an external detail apart from his inner
self. And even the commanding general will resort to the publicity of
the press. In intellectual matters, all this is repeated in the lack of
respect shown in forming judgment; every one thinks himself competent to
decide all questions, and the most competent judgments of others are
often discounted, because every one thinks himself quite as good and
desires to assert himself, and feels in nowise called on to listen with
respect to the profounder knowledge, reasoning, or experience of
another.
We have so far said nothing of those whose self-assertion and claims to
equality are the most characteristic expression of American life—the
American women. We must not merely add a word about them at the end of
the chapter; they are, at least, a chapter by themselves. And many who
have studied American life would say that they are the entire story.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
_The Self-Assertion of Women_
It is said that the United States is the only country in which parents
are disappointed on the appearance of a boy baby, but will greet the
arrival of a girl with undisguised pleasure. Who will blame them? What,
after all, will a boy baby come to be? He will go to work early in life,
while his sisters are left to go on and on with their education. He may
work for a position in society, but it will be mainly in order to let
his wife play a rôle; he may amass property, but most of all in order to
provide bountifully for his daughter. He will have to stand all his life
that she may sit; will have to work early and late, in order that she
may shine. Is it really worth while to bring up a boy? But the little
princess in the cradle has, indeed, a right to look out on the world
with laughing eyes. She will enjoy all the privileges which nature
specially ordained for woman, and will reach out confidently, moreover,
for those things which nature designed peculiarly for man. No road is
closed to her; she can follow every inclination of her soul, and go
through life pampered and imperious. Will she marry? She may not care
to, but nobody will think if she does not that it is because she is not
able to realize any cherished desire. Will she be happy? Human destiny
is, after all, destiny; but so far as nature and society, material
blessings, and intellectual considerations can contribute toward a happy
life, then surely the young American woman is more favoured by fortune
than either man or woman in any other part of the world can hope to be.
Is this advantage of hers also a gain to the family, to society, and the
nation?
It is not perfectly correct to speak of the American woman as a type—the
Southern girl is so different from the daughter of New England, the
women of California so different from those of Chicago, and the
different elements of population are so much more traceable in women
than in men. And yet one does get a characteristic picture of the
average woman. It may be too much influenced by the feminine figures
which move in the better circles to be a faithful average likeness.
Perhaps the young girl student has been too often the model, perhaps
there is a reminiscence of the Gibson girl; and nevertheless, one
discovers some general features of such youth in the fair women whose
hair has turned grey, and there is something common to the daughters of
distinguished families and the young women of the less favoured classes.
The American woman is a tall, trim figure, with erect and firm carriage;
she is a bit like the English girl, and yet very different. This latter
is a trifle stiff, while the American girl is decidedly graceful; the
lines of her figure are well moulded, and her appearance is always aided
by the perfect taste of her raiment. In the expression of her face there
is resolution and self-control, and with the resolution a subtle
mischievous expression which is both tactful and amiable. And with her
evident self-control there is a certain winsome mobility and seemingly
unreserved graciousness. The strength appears not to contradict the
grace, the determination not to be at variance with the playfulness; her
eyes and play of expression reveal the versatile spirit, fresh
enthusiasm, and easy wit; yet her forehead shows how earnestly she may
think and desire to be helpful in society, and how little contented
simply to flirt and to please men.
And then her expression may change so suddenly that one asks in vain
whether this energy was, perhaps, merely put on; was perhaps a whimsical
caprice; perhaps her intellectual versatility was merely an elegant
superficiality. Is she at bottom only in search of enjoyment? Is this
show of independence real moral self-assertion, and this decision real
courage, or does she emancipate herself merely out of ennui; is it a
search for excitement? And is her eagerness to reach out for everything
merely an effect of her environment which is ready to give everything?
But could this slim figure really be so wonderfully seductive, if her
eyes and features did not awaken doubt and unsolved questions; if
everything were clear, simple, and obvious? Woman is everywhere full of
contradictions; and if the American woman is different from all her
sisters, it is because the contradictions in her face and mien seem more
modern, more complex and unfathomable.
But it is vain to speak of the American woman without considering her
relations to her environment—the background, as it were, of her
existence, the customs and institutions under which she has grown up and
continues to live. We must speak of the education and schooling, the
studies and occupations of women, of their social and domestic position,
their influence, and their organized efforts; and then we shall be
better able critically to evaluate that in the American woman which is
good, and that which is perhaps ominous.
The life of the American girl is different from that of her European
sisters from the moment when she enters school. Public school
instruction is co-educational, without exception in the lower grades,
and usually in the upper. Of the six hundred and twenty-eight cities of
the country, five hundred and eighty-seven have public schools for boys
and girls together, from the primary to the most advanced classes; and
of those cities that remain, only thirteen, and all of them are in the
East, separate the boys and girls in every grade. In the country, boys
and girls are always together at school. In private schools in cities,
the instruction is more apt to be apart; but the public schools educate
91 per cent. of the youth—that is, about 7,700,000 boys and 7,600,000
girls.
Co-education has been adopted to a different extent in the different
states, and even in the different grades of school has not developed
equally. The instruction of boys and girls together has spread from the
elementary classes, and while the idea took the West by storm, it was
less immediately adopted by the conservative East. Practical exigencies,
and especially the matter of economy, have greatly affected this
development; and yet, on the whole, it has been favoured by principle.
There is no doubt that, quite apart from the expense, a return to
separate instruction for boys and girls would be regarded by the
majority of the people to-day as an unallowable step backward: there has
been considerable theoretical discussion of the matter; but the fact
remains that the nation regards the great experiment as successful. This
does not mean that the American thoughtlessly ignores sex differences in
education; he is aware that the bodily, moral, and intellectual strength
of the two sexes is different, and that their development proceeds along
different lines. But firstly, the American school system, as we have
seen, leaves in general great freedom in the selection of studies. The
girls may take more French, while the boys in the same class more often
study Latin; and many subjects are introduced in the curriculum
expressly for one or the other sex—such as sewing, cooking, and
type-writing for the girls, and carpentry for the boys.
It is said, moreover, that just as boys and girls eat the same food at
the family table, although it goes to make very different sorts of
bodies, so too the same intellectual nourishment will be digested in a
different way, and not work against the normal intellectual differences.
It is important only for the instruction like the nourishment to be of
the best sort, and it is feared that the girls’ school would drop below
the level of the boys’ school if the two were to be made distinct. Equal
thoroughness is assured only by having one school. Opponents of the idea
affirm that this one school is virtually nothing but a boys’ school
after all, with girls merely in attendance, and that the school is not
sufficiently adapted to the make-up of the young girls.
The main point, however, lies not in the similarity of instruction, but
in the bringing together of boys and girls. It is true that the success
of expensive private schools in large cities proves that there is
considerable desire among parents to have their sons go to school with
boys and their daughters only with girls; but the nation, as a whole,
does not take this point of view, but believes that boys and girls,
growing up as they do together in the home and destined to live together
as adults, should become accustomed to one another during the formative
period of school instruction. The girls, it is said, are made stronger
by actually working with the boys; their seriousness is emphasized and
their energy developed, while the boys are refined by contact with the
gentler sex—induced to be courteous, and influenced toward æsthetic
things. And if theorists were actually to fear the opposite result—that
is, that the boys should be made weak and hysterical and the girls rough
and coarse—they would need only to look to practical experience, which
speaks unanimously to the contrary.
A still less well-grounded fear is that of those who wish to separate
the sexes especially during the adolescent period. So far as this
exceedingly complicated question admits of a brief summing up, the
nation finds that the sexual tension is decreased by the contact in the
school; the common intellectual labour, common ambitions, and the common
anxieties awaken comradeship and diminish all ideas of difference. Boys
and girls who daily and hourly hear one another recite their lessons,
and who write together at the black-board, are for one another no
objects of romantic longing or seductive mystery. Such a result may be
deplored from another point of view—namely, that for reasons not
connected with the school, such romanticism is desirable; but one must
admit that the discouragement of unripe passion in the years of
development means purer and healthier relations between the sexes, both
physically and mentally. All regrettable one-sidedness is done away
with. Just as in the stereoscope a normal perception of depth is brought
out by the combination of two flat pictures, so here the constant
combination of the masculine and feminine points of view results in a
normal feeling of reality.
Then, too, the school in this wise prepares the way for later social
intercourse. Boys and girls are brought together without special
supervision, innocently and as a matter of course, from the nursery to
early manhood and womanhood. It is only the artificial separation of the
two sexes, the American says, which produces that unsound condition of
the fancy that makes the relation of the sexes on the European Continent
so frivolous and dubious. The moral atmosphere of the United States is
undoubtedly much freer from unhealthful miasms. A cooler and less
sensual temperament contributes much to this, but the comradely
intercourse of boys and girls from the early school days to the time of
marriage is undoubtedly an equally purifying force. The small boy very
early feels himself the natural protector of his weaker playmate, and
the girl can always, whether in the nursery or as a young lady in her
mother’s parlour, receive her friends alone, even when her parents are
not at home. A little coquetry keeps alive a certain sense of
difference, always, but any least transgression is entirely precluded on
both sides. The boy profoundly respects his girl friend as he does his
own sister, and she could not be safer than in his protection. The
gallantry of the European is at bottom egotistic. It is kind in order to
win, and flatters in order to please; while the gallantry of the
American is not aimed to seduce, but to serve; it does not play with the
idea of male submission, but sincerely and truly gives the woman first
place.
The only logical consequence, when boys and girls enjoy not only
equivalent but absolutely equal school training, is that their further
education shall go on parallel. We have seen the peculiar position of
the American college; how it is almost incomparable with any German
institution, being a sort of intermediate member between the high school
and true university—the scene of a four-year intellectual activity,
resembling in some respects the German school, and in others the German
university. We have seen how the college removes the young man from the
parental influences from his eighteenth to twenty-second years, and
places him in a new, small, and academic world of special ideals which
is centred around some beautiful college yard. We have seen how two
things happen in these years; on the one hand, he is prepared for his
future occupation, especially if he is to enter a professional faculty
of the university, and on the other he receives a broad, humanitarian
training. We have seen also that these hundreds of colleges form a scale
of very small gradations, whose different steps are adapted to the
different social needs of various sections of the country; that the
better colleges are like a German Prima, with three or four semesters in
the philosophical faculty of a university, and that the inferior
colleges hardly reach the level of the Unterprima. In such an
institution, we have found the source of the best that is in American
intellectual life. Now this institution opens wide its doors to women.
Here, in truth, co-education is less prominent. The conservative
tendency of Eastern colleges has worked against the admission of women
into the better of them, and the advantages of colleges for none but
women are so well attested that the East at least will hardly make a
change, although the Middle and Western States look on it virtually as a
sin against inborn human rights, to establish colleges for anything but
the education of both sexes alike. It was easier to oppose mixed
education in the college sphere than in the school, because the common
elementary training was needed at the outset for both sexes, while the
demand for college training for women came up much later, when the
tradition of colleges for men was already well established. Harvard
College was already two hundred years old when, for the first time, an
American college as an experiment admitted women; this was Oberlin
College in Ohio, which began the movement in 1833. The first women’s
college was established, three years later, in Georgia—a pioneer
institution in the South.
But progress was slow. It was not until 1862 that the government gave
ten million acres of land for educational institutions; and then higher
institutions became much more numerous, especially in the West, and from
that time it was agreed that women should have equal privileges with men
in these new colleges. Since then co-education in college and university
has grown to be more and more the rule, except in the East. All state
colleges and universities are open to women, and also the endowed
universities—Brown, Chicago, Cornell, Leland Stanford, and the
University of Pennsylvania; some few others, as Yale, Columbia, and
Johns Hopkins, allow women to attend the graduate schools or the
professional faculties, but not the college. Statistics for all the
colleges in the country show that, in the year 1880, only 51 per cent.
were co-educational; in 1890 there were 65 per cent., and in 1900, 72
per cent. Practically, however, the most significant form of female
college education is not the co-educational, but one which creates a
special college paradise for young women, where there are no male
beguilements and distractions.
There are six principal institutions which have taken the lead in making
the college life of women the significant thing that it now is. Vassar
College was the first, established on the Hudson River in 1861; then
came Wellesley College, near Boston; Bryn Mawr, near Philadelphia; Smith
College, in Northampton; Radcliffe College, in Cambridge; Barnard, in
New York. There is a large number of similar institutions, as Holyoke,
Baltimore, and others in ever-diminishing series down to institutions
which are hardly distinguishable from girls’ high schools. The number of
girls attending strictly women’s colleges in the whole country, in 1900,
was 23,900; while in mixed colleges and in the collegiate departments of
universities there were 19,200 women students—just a quarter of the
total number of college students. It is notable here that the students
in women’s colleges since 1890 have increased by 700, and in mixed
colleges by 9,000. It may be mentioned, in passing, that there are
35,000 women students in normal schools.
The instruction in women’s colleges is mostly by women, who number
1,744—that is, about 71 per cent. of the instructors—while in mixed
colleges the 857 women are only 10 per cent. of the teaching staff. In
the leading co-educational universities, like Chicago, Ann Arbor, Leland
Stanford, Berkeley, and others, the women are almost wholly taught by
men. The leading women’s colleges pursue different policies. Wellesley
has almost exclusively women; Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and Smith have both;
Radcliffe and Barnard are peculiar, in that by their by-laws Radcliffe
is taught only by Harvard instructors, and Barnard only by instructors
in Columbia University. This identification with the teaching staffs of
Harvard and Columbia assures these two women’s colleges an especially
high intellectual level. And the same thing is accomplished, of course,
for women by their being admitted to full privileges in Chicago,
Stanford, and in the large state universities, such as Ann Arbor. But
one can realize the whole charm and poetry of women’s colleges only on a
visit to the quiet groves of Wellesley, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, or Smith.
In broad, handsomely kept parks there lie scattered about attractive
villas, monumental halls of instruction, club-houses and laboratories;
and here some thousand girls, seldom younger than eighteen nor older
than twenty-five, spend four happy years at work and play, apart from
all worldly cares. They row, play tennis and basket-ball, and go through
gymnastic exercises; and, as a result, every girl leaves college
fresher, healthier, and stronger than when she entered it. And the type
of pale, over-worked neurasthenic is unknown. These girls have their own
ambitions in this miniature world—their positions of honour, their
meetings, their clubs and social sets; in which, however, only
personality, talent, and temperament count, while wealth or parental
influence does not come in question. The life is happy; there are
dancing, theatrical performances, and innumerable other diversions from
the opening celebration in the fall to the festivities in June, when the
academic year closes. And the life is also earnest. There is no day
without its hours of conscientious labour in the lecture hall, the
library or study, whether this is in preparation for later teaching, for
professional life or, as is more often the case, solely for the
harmonious development of all the student’s faculties. One who looks on
these fresh young girls in their light costumes, the venerable English
mitre-caps on their heads, sitting in the alcoves of the library or
playing in the open air, or in their formal debates, in the seminary or
in the festive procession on class-day,—sees that here is a source of
the purest and subtlest idealism going out into American life.