CO-EDUCATION.
"_Pistoc._ Where, then, should I take my place?
_1st Bacch._ Near myself, that, with a she wit, a he wit may
be reclining at our repast."--BACCHIDES OF PLAUTUS.
"The woman's-rights movement, with its conventions, its
speech-makings, its crudities, and eccentricities, is
nevertheless a part of a healthful and necessary movement of
the human race towards progress."--HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.
Guided by the laws of development which we have found physiology to
teach, and warned by the punishments, in the shape of weakness and
disease, which we have shown their infringement to bring about, and of
which our present methods of female education furnish innumerable
examples, it is not difficult to discern certain physiological
principles that limit and control the education, and, consequently,
the co-education of our youth. These principles we have learned to
be, three for the two sexes in common, and one for the peculiarities
of the female sex. The three common to both, the three to which both
are subjected, and for which wise methods of education will provide in
the case of both, are, 1st, a sufficient supply of appropriate
nutriment. This of course includes good air and good water and
sufficient warmth, as much as bread and butter; oxygen and sunlight,
as much as meat. 2d, Mental and physical work and regimen so
apportioned, that repair shall exceed waste, and a margin be left for
development. This includes out-of-door exercise and appropriate ways
of dressing, as much as the hours of study, and the number and sort of
studies. 3d, Sufficient sleep. This includes the best time for
sleeping, as well as the proper number of hours for sleep. It excludes
the "murdering of sleep," by late hours of study and the crowding of
studies, as much as by wine or tea or dissipation. All these guide and
limit the education of the two sexes very much alike. The principle
or condition peculiar to the female sex is the management of the
catamenial function, which, from the age of fourteen to nineteen,
includes the building of the reproductive apparatus. This imposes upon
women, and especially upon the young woman, a great care, a
corresponding duty, and compensating privileges. There is only a
feeble counterpart to it in the male organization; and, in his moral
constitution, there cannot be found the fine instincts and quick
perceptions that have their root in this mechanism, and correlate its
functions. This lends to her development and to all her work a
rhythmical or periodical order, which must be recognized and obeyed.
"In this recognition of the chronometry of organic process, there is
unquestionably great promise for the future; for it is plain that the
observance of time in the motions of organic molecules is as certain
and universal, if not as exact, as that of the heavenly bodies."[24]
Periodicity characterizes the female organization, and developes
feminine force. Persistence characterizes the male organization, and
develops masculine force. Education will draw the best out of each by
adjusting its methods to the periodicity of one and the persistence of
the other.
Before going farther, it is essential to acquire a definite notion of
what is meant, or, at least, of what we mean in this discussion, by
the term co-education. Following its etymology, _con-educare_, it
signifies to draw out together, or to unite in education; and this
union refers to the time and place, rather than to the methods and
kinds of education. In this sense any school or college may utilize
its buildings, apparatus, and instructors to give appropriate
education to the two sexes as well as to different ages of the same
sex. This is juxtaposition in education. When the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology teaches one class of young men chemistry, and
another class engineering, in the same building and at the same time,
it co-educates those two classes. In this sense it is possible that
many advantages might be obtained from the co-education of the sexes,
that would more than counterbalance the evils of crowding large
numbers of them together. This sort of co-education does not exclude
appropriate classification, nor compel the two sexes to follow the
same methods or the same regimen.
Another signification of co-education, and, as we apprehend, the one
in which it is commonly used, includes time, place, government,
methods, studies, and regimen. This is identical co-education. This
means, that boys and girls shall be taught the same things, at the
same time, in the same place, by the same faculty, with the same
methods, and under the same regimen. This admits age and proficiency,
but not sex, as a factor in classification. It is against the
co-education of the sexes, in this sense of identical co-education,
that physiology protests; and it is this identity of education, the
prominent characteristic of our American school-system, that has
produced the evils described in the clinical part of this essay, and
that threatens to push the degeneration of the female sex still
farther on. In these pages, co-education of the sexes is used in its
common acceptation of identical co-education.
Let us look for a moment at what identical co-education is. The law
has, or had, a maxim, that a man and his wife are one, and that the
one is the man. Modern American education has a maxim, that boys'
schools and girls' schools are one, and that the one is the boys'
school. Schools have been arranged, accordingly, to meet the
requirements of the masculine organization. Studies have been selected
that experience has proved to be appropriate to a boy's intellectual
development, and a regimen adopted, while pursuing them, appropriate
to his physical development. His school and college life, his methods
of study, recitations, exercises, and recreations, are ordered upon
the supposition, that, barring disease or infirmity, punctual
attendance upon the hours of recitation, and upon all other duties in
their season and order, may be required of him continuously, in spite
of ennui, inclement weather, or fatigue; that there is no week in the
month, or day in the week, or hour in the day, when it is a physical
necessity to relieve him from standing or from studying,--from
physical effort or mental labor; that the chapel-bell may safely call
him to morning prayer from New Year to Christmas, with the assurance,
that, if the going does not add to his stock of piety, it will not
diminish his stock of health; that he may be sent to the gymnasium and
the examination-hall, to the theatres of physical and intellectual
display at any time,--in short, that he develops health and strength,
blood and nerve, intellect and life, by a regular, uninterrupted, and
sustained course of work. And all this is justified both by experience
and physiology.
Obedient to the American educational maxim, that boys' schools and
girls' schools are one, and that the one is the boys' school, the
female schools have copied the methods which have grown out of the
requirements of the male organization. Schools for girls have been
modelled after schools for boys. Were it not for differences of dress
and figure, it would be impossible, even for an expert, after visiting
a high school for boys and one for girls, to tell which was arranged
for the male and which for the female organization. Our girls'
schools, whether public or private, have imposed upon their pupils a
boy's regimen; and it is now proposed, in some quarters, to carry this
principle still farther, by burdening girls, after they leave school,
with a quadrennium of masculine college regimen. And so girls are to
learn the alphabet in college, as they have learned it in the
grammar-school, just as boys do. This is grounded upon the supposition
that sustained regularity of action and attendance may be as safely
required of a girl as of a boy; that there is no physical necessity
for periodically relieving her from walking, standing, reciting, or
studying; that the chapel-bell may call her, as well as him, to a
daily morning walk, with a standing prayer at the end of it,
regardless of the danger that such exercises, by deranging the tides
of her organization, may add to her piety at the expense of her
blood; that she may work her brain over mathematics, botany,
chemistry, German, and the like, with equal and sustained force on
every day of the month, and so safely divert blood from the
reproductive apparatus to the head; in short, that she, like her
brother, develops health and strength, blood and nerve, intellect and
life, by a regular, uninterrupted, and sustained course of work. All
this is not justified, either by experience or physiology. The
gardener may plant, if he choose, the lily and the rose, the oak and
the vine, within the same enclosure; let the same soil nourish them,
the same air visit them, and the same sunshine warm and cheer them;
still, he trains each of them with a separate art, warding from each
its peculiar dangers, developing within each its peculiar powers, and
teaching each to put forth to the utmost its divine and peculiar gifts
of strength and beauty. Girls lose health, strength, blood, and nerve,
by a regimen that ignores the periodical tides and reproductive
apparatus of their organization. The mothers and instructors, the
homes and schools, of our country's daughters, would profit by
occasionally reading the old Levitical law. The race has not yet quite
outgrown the physiology of Moses.
Co-education, then, signifies in common acceptation identical
co-education. This identity of training is what many at the present
day seem to be praying for and working for. Appropriate education of
the two sexes, carried as far as possible, is a consummation most
devoutly to be desired; identical education of the two sexes is a
crime before God and humanity, that physiology protests against, and
that experience weeps over. Because the education of boys has met with
tolerable success, hitherto,--but only tolerable it must be
confessed,--in developing them into men, there are those who would
make girls grow into women by the same process. Because a gardener has
nursed an acorn till it grew into an oak, they would have him cradle a
grape in the same soil and way, and make it a vine. Identical
education, or identical co-education, of the sexes defrauds one sex or
the other, or perhaps both. It defies the Roman maxim, which
physiology has fully justified, _mens sana in corpore sano_. The
sustained regimen, regular recitation, erect posture, daily walk,
persistent exercise, and unintermitted labor that toughens a boy, and
makes a man of him, can only be partially applied to a girl. The
regimen of intermittance, periodicity of exercise and rest, work
three-fourths of each month, and remission, if not abstinence, the
other fourth, physiological interchange of the erect and reclining
posture, care of the reproductive system that is the cradle of the
race, all this, that toughens a girl and makes a woman of her, will
emasculate a lad. A combination of the two methods of education, a
compromise between them, would probably yield an average result,
excluding the best of both. It would give a fair chance neither to a
boy nor a girl. Of all compromises, such a physiological one is the
worst. It cultivates mediocrity, and cheats the future of its
rightful legacy of lofty manhood and womanhood. It emasculates boys,
stunts girls; makes semi-eunuchs of one sex, and agenes of the other.
The error which has led to the identical education of the two sexes,
and which prophecies their identical co-education in colleges and
universities, is not confined to technical education. It permeates
society. It is found in the home, the workshop, the factory, and in
all the ramifications of social life. The identity of boys and girls,
of men and women, is practically asserted out of the school as much as
in it, and it is theoretically proclaimed from the pulpit and the
rostrum. Woman seems to be looking up to man and his development, as
the goal and ideal of womanhood. The new gospel of female development
glorifies what she possesses in common with him, and tramples under
her feet, as a source of weakness and badge of inferiority, the
mechanism and functions peculiar to herself. In consequence of this
wide-spread error, largely the result of physiological ignorance,
girls are almost universally trained in masculine methods of living
and working as well as of studying. The notion is practically found
everywhere, that boys and girls are one, and that the boys make the
one. Girls, young ladies, to use the polite phrase, who are about
leaving or have left school for society, dissipation, or self-culture,
rarely permit any of Nature's periodical demands to interfere with
their morning calls, or evening promenades, or midnight dancing, or
sober study. Even the home draws the sacred mantle of modesty so
closely over the reproductive function as not only to cover but to
smother it. Sisters imitate brothers in persistent work at all times.
Female clerks in stores strive to emulate the males by unremitting
labor, seeking to develop feminine force by masculine methods. Female
operatives of all sorts, in factories and elsewhere, labor in the same
way; and, when the day is done, are as likely to dance half the night,
regardless of any pressure upon them of a peculiar function, as their
fashionable sisters in the polite world. All unite in pushing the
hateful thing out of sight and out of mind; and all are punished by
similar weakness, degeneration, and disease.
There are two reasons why female operatives of all sorts are likely to
suffer less, and actually do suffer less, from such persistent work,
than female students; why Jane in the factory can work more steadily
with the loom, than Jane in college with the dictionary; why the girl
who makes the bed can safely work more steadily the whole year
through, than her little mistress of sixteen who goes to school. The
first reason is, that the female operative, of whatever sort, has, as
a rule, passed through the first critical epoch of woman's life: she
has got fairly by it. In her case, as a rule, unfortunately there are
too many exceptions to it, the catamenia have been established; the
function is in good running order; the reproductive apparatus--the
engine within an engine--has been constructed, and she will not be
called upon to furnish force for building it again. The female
student, on the contrary, has got these tasks before her, and must
perform them while getting her education; for the period of female
sexual development coincides with the educational period. The same
five years of life must be given to both tasks. After the function is
normally established, and the apparatus made, woman can labor mentally
or physically, or both, with very much greater persistence and
intensity, than during the age of development. She still retains the
type of periodicity; and her best work, both as to quality and amount,
is accomplished when the order of her labor partakes of the rhythmic
order of her constitution. Still the fact remains, that she can do
more than before; her fibre has acquired toughness; the system is
consolidated; its fountains are less easily stirred. It should be
mentioned in this connection, what has been previously adverted to,
that the toughness and power of after life are largely in proportion
to the normality of sexual development. If there is error then, the
organization never fully recovers. This is an additional motive for a
strict physiological regimen during a girl's student life, and, just
so far, an argument against the identical co-education of the sexes.
The second reason why female operatives are less likely to suffer, and
actually do suffer less, than school-girls, from persistent work
straight through the year, is because the former work their brains
less. To use the language of Herbert Spencer, "That antagonism between
body and brain which we see in those, who, pushing brain-activity to
an extreme, enfeeble their bodies,"[25] does not often exist in female
operatives, any more than in male. On the contrary, they belong to the
class of those who, in the words of the same author, by "pushing
bodily activity to an extreme, make their brains inert."[26] Hence
they have stronger bodies, a reproductive apparatus more normally
constructed, and a catamenial function less readily disturbed by
effort, than their student sisters, who are not only younger than
they, but are trained to push "brain-activity to an extreme." Give
girls a fair chance for physical development at school, and they will
be able in after life, with reasonable care of themselves, to answer
the demands that may be made upon them.
The identical education of the sexes has borne the fruit which we have
pointed out. Their identical co-education will intensify the evils of
separate identical education; for it will introduce the element of
emulation, and it will introduce this element in its strongest form.
It is easy to frame a theoretical emulation, in which results only are
compared and tested, that would be healthy and invigorating; but such
theoretical competition of the sexes is not at all the sort of steady,
untiring, day-after-day competition that identical co-education
implies. It is one thing to put up a goal a long way off,--five or six
months or three or four years distant,--and tell boys and girls, each
in their own way, to strive for it, and quite a different thing to
put up the same goal, at the same distance, and oblige each sex to run
their race for it side by side on the same road, in daily competition
with each other, and with equal expenditure of force at all times.
Identical co-education is racing in the latter way. The inevitable
results of it have been shown in some of the cases we have narrated.
The trial of it on a larger scale would only yield a larger number of
similar degenerations, weaknesses, and sacrifices of noble lives. Put
a boy and girl together upon the same course of study, with the same
lofty ideal before them, and hold up to their eyes the daily
incitements of comparative progress, and there will be awakened within
them a stimulus unknown before, and that separate study does not
excite. The unconscious fires that have their seat deep down in the
recesses of the sexual organization will flame up through every
tissue, permeate every vessel, burn every nerve, flash from the eye,
tingle in the brain, and work the whole machine at highest pressure.
There need not be, and generally will not be, any low or sensual
desire in all this elemental action. It is only making youth work over
the tasks of sober study with the wasting force of intense passion. Of
course such strenuous labor will yield brilliant, though temporary,
results. The fire is kept alive by the waste of the system, and soon
burns up its source. The first sex to suffer in this exhilarating and
costly competition must be, as experience shows it is, the one that
has the largest amount of force in readiness for immediate call; and
this is the female sex. At the age of development, Nature mobilizes
the forces of a girl's organization for the purpose of establishing a
function that shall endure for a generation, and for constructing an
apparatus that shall cradle and nurse a race. These mobilized forces,
which, at the technical educational period, the girl possesses and
controls largely in excess of the boy, under the passionate stimulus
of identical co-education, are turned from their divinely-appointed
field of operations, to the region of brain activity. The result is a
most brilliant show of cerebral pyrotechnics, and degenerations that
we have described.
That undue and disproportionate brain activity exerts a sterilizing
influence upon both sexes is alike a doctrine of physiology, and an
induction from experience. And both physiology and experience also
teach that this influence is more potent upon the female than upon the
male. The explanation of the latter fact--of the greater aptitude of
the female organization to become thus modified by excessive brain
activity--is probably to be found in the larger size, more complicated
relations, and more important functions, of the female reproductive
apparatus. This delicate and complex mechanism is liable to be aborted
or deranged by the withdrawal of force that is needed for its
construction and maintenance. It is, perhaps, idle to speculate upon
the prospective evil that would accrue to the human race, should such
an organic modification, introduced by abnormal education, be pushed
to its ultimate limit. But inasmuch as the subject is not only
germain to our inquiry, but has attracted the attention of a recent
writer, whose bold and philosophic speculations, clothed in forcible
language, have startled the best thought of the age, it may be well to
quote him briefly on this point. Referring to the fact, that, in our
modern civilization, the cultivated classes have smaller families than
the uncultivated ones, he says, "If the superior sections and
specimens of humanity are to lose, relatively, their procreative power
in virtue of, and in proportion to, that superiority, how is culture
or progress to be propagated so as to benefit the species as a whole,
and how are those gradually amended organizations from which we hope
so much to be secured? If, indeed, it were ignorance, stupidity, and
destitution, instead of mental and moral development, that were the
_sterilizing_ influences, then the improvement of the race would go on
swimmingly, and in an ever-accelerating ratio. But since the
conditions are exactly reversed, how should not an exactly opposite
direction be pursued? How should the race _not_ deteriorate, when
those who morally and physically are fitted to perpetuate it are
(relatively), by a law of physiology, those least likely to do
so?"[27] The answer to Mr. Greg's inquiry is obvious. If the culture
of the race moves on into the future in the same rut and by the same
methods that limit and direct it now; if the education of the sexes
remains identical, instead of being appropriate and special; and
especially if the intense and passionate stimulus of the identical
co-education of the sexes is added to their identical education,--then
the sterilizing influence of such a training, acting with tenfold more
force upon the female than upon the male, will go on, and the race
will be propagated from its inferior classes.[28] The stream of life
that is to flow into the future will be Celtic rather than American:
it will come from the collieries, and not from the peerage.
Fortunately, the reverse of this picture is equally possible. The race
holds its destinies in its own hands. The highest wisdom will secure
the survival and propagation of the fittest. Physiology teaches that
this result, the attainment of which our hopes prophecy, is to be
secured, not by an identical education, or an identical co-education
of the sexes, but by _a special and appropriate education, that shall
produce a just and harmonious development of every part_.
Let one remark be made here. It has been asserted that the chief
reason why the higher and educated classes have smaller families than
the lower and uneducated is, that the former criminally prevent or
destroy increase. The pulpit,[29] as well as the medical press, has
cried out against this enormity. That a disposition to do this thing
exists, and is often carried into effect, is not to be denied, and
cannot be too strongly condemned. On the other hand, it should be
proclaimed, to the credit and honor of our cultivated women, and as a
reproach to the identical education of the sexes, that many of them
bear in silence the accusation of self-tampering, who are denied the
oft-prayed-for trial, blessing, and responsibility of offspring. As a
matter of personal experience, my advice has been much more frequently
and earnestly sought by those of our best classes who desired to know
how to obtain, than by those who wished to escape, the offices of
maternity.
The experiment of the identical co-education of the sexes has been set
on foot by some of our Western colleges. It has not yet been tried
long enough to show much more than its first fruits, viz., its results
while the students are in college; and of these the only obvious ones
are increased emulation, and intellectual development and attainments.
The defects of the reproductive mechanism, and the friction of its
action, are not exhibited there; nor is there time or opportunity in
college for the evils which these defects entail to be exhibited.
President Magoun of Iowa College tells us, that, in the institution
over which he presides, "Forty-two young men and fifty-three young
ladies have pursued college courses;" and adds, "Nothing needs to be
said as to the control of the two sexes in the college. The young
ladies are placed under the supervision of a lady principal and
assistant as to deportment, and every thing besides recitations (in
which they are under the supervision of the same professors and other
teachers with the young men, reciting with them); and one simple rule
as to social intercourse governs every thing. The moral and religious
influences attending the arrangement have been most happy."[30] From
this it is evident that Iowa College is trying the identical
co-education of the sexes; and the president reports the happy moral
and religious results of the experiment, but leaves us ignorant of its
physiological results. It may never have occurred to him, that a class
of a hundred young ladies might graduate from Iowa College or Antioch
College or Michigan University, whose average health during their
college course had appeared to the president and faculty as good as
that of their male classmates who had made equal intellectual progress
with them, upon whom no scandal had dropped its venom, who might be
presented to the public on Commencement Day as specimens of as good
health as their uneducated sisters, with roses in their cheeks as
natural as those in their hands, the major part of whom might,
notwithstanding all this, have physical defects that a physiologist
could easily discover, and that would produce, sooner or later, more
or less of the sad results we have previously described. A
philanthropist and an intelligent observer, who has for a long time
taken an active part in promoting the best education of the sexes, and
who still holds some sort of official connection with a college
occupied with identical co-education, told the writer a few months
ago, that he had endeavored to trace the post-college history of the
female graduates of the institution he was interested in. His object
was to ascertain how their physique behaved under the stress,--the
wear and tear of woman's work in life. The conclusion that resulted
from his inquiry he formulated in the statement, that "the
co-education of the sexes is intellectually a success, physically a
failure." Another gentleman, more closely connected with a similar
institution of education than the person just referred to, has arrived
at a similar conclusion. Only a few female graduates of colleges have
consulted the writer professionally. All sought his advice two, three,
or more years after graduation; and, in all, the difficulties under
which they labored could be distinctly traced to their college order
of life and study, that is, to identical co-education. If physicians
who are living in the neighborhood of the present residences of these
graduates have been consulted by them in the same proportion with him,
the inference is inevitable, that the ratio of invalidism among female
college graduates is greater than even among the graduates of our
common, high, and normal schools. All such observations as these,
however, are only of value, at present, as indications of the drift of
identical co-education, not as proofs of its physical fruits, or of
their influence on mental force. Two or three generations, at least,
of the female college graduates of this sort of co-education must come
and go before any sufficient idea can be formed of the harvest it will
yield. The physiologist dreads to see the costly experiment tried. The
urgent reformer, who cares less for human suffering and human life
than for the trial of his theories, will regard the experiment with
equanimity if not with complacency.
If, then, the identical co-education of the sexes is condemned both by
physiology and experience, may it not be that their _special and
appropriate co-education_ would yield a better result than their
special and appropriate _separate_ education? This is a most important
question, and one difficult to resolve. The discussion of it must be
referred to those who are engaged in the practical work of
instruction, and the decision will rest with experience. Physiology
advocates, as we have seen, the special and appropriate education of
the sexes, and has only a single word to utter with regard to simple
co-education, or juxtaposition in education.
That word is with regard to the common belief in the danger of
improprieties and scandal as a part of co-education. There is some
danger in this respect; but not a serious or unavoidable one.
Doubtless there would be occasional lapses in a double-sexed college;
and so there are outside of schoolhouses and seminaries of learning.
Even the church and the clergy are not exempt from reproach in such
things. There are sects, professing to commingle religion and love,
who illustrate the dangers of juxtaposition even in things holy. "No
physiologist can well doubt that the holy kiss of love in such cases
owes all its warmth to the sexual feeling which consciously or
unconsciously inspires it, or that the mystical union of the sexes
lies very close to a union that is nowise mystical, when it does not
lead to madness."[31] There is less, or certainly no more danger in
having the sexes unite at the repasts of knowledge, than, as Plautus
bluntly puts it, having he wits and she wits recline at the repasts of
fashion. Isolation is more likely to breed pruriency than commingling
to provoke indulgence. The virtue of the cloister and the cell
scarcely deserves the name. A girl has her honor in her own keeping.
If she can be trusted with boys and men at the lecture-room and in
church, she can be trusted with them at school and in college. Jean
Paul says, "To insure modesty, I would advise the education of the
sexes together; for two boys will preserve twelve girls, or two girls
twelve boys, innocent amidst winks, jokes, and improprieties, merely
by that instinctive sense which is the forerunner of matured modesty.
But I will guarantee nothing in a school where girls are alone
together, and still less when boys are." A certain amount of
juxta-position is an advantage to each sex. More than a certain amount
is an evil to both. Instinct and common sense can be safely left to
draw the line of demarcation. At the same time it is well to remember
that juxtaposition may be carried too far. Temptations enough beset
the young, without adding to them. Let learning and purity go hand in
hand.
There are two considerations appertaining to this subject, which,
although they do not belong to the physiology of the matter, deserve
to be mentioned in this connection. One amounts to a practical
prohibition, for the present at least, of the experiment of the
special and appropriate co-education of the sexes; and the other is an
inherent difficulty in the experiment itself. The former can be
removed whenever those who heartily believe in the success of the
experiment choose to get rid of it; and the latter by patient and
intelligent effort.
The present practical prohibition of the experiment is the poverty of
our colleges. Identical co-education can be easily tried with the
existing organization of collegiate instruction. This has been tried,
and is still going on in separate and double-sexed schools of all
sorts, and has failed. Special and appropriate co-education requires
in many ways, not in all, re-arrangement of the organization of
instruction; and this will cost money and a good deal of it. Harvard
College, for example, rich as it is supposed to be, whose banner, to
use Mr. Higginson's illustration, is the red flag that the bulls of
female reform are just now pitching into,--Harvard College could not
undertake the task of special and appropriate co-education, in such a
way as to give the two sexes a fair chance, which means the _best_
chance, and the only chance it ought to give or will ever give,
without an endowment, additional to its present resources, of from one
to two millions of dollars; and it probably would require the larger
rather than the smaller sum. And this I say advisedly. By which I
mean, not with the advice and consent of the president and fellows of
the college, but as an opinion founded on nearly twenty years'
personal acquaintance, as an instructor in one of the departments of
the university, with the organization of instruction in it, and upon
the demands which physiology teaches the special and appropriate
education of girls would make upon it. To make boys half-girls, and
girls half-boys, can never be the legitimate function of any college.
But such a result, the natural child of identical co-education, is
sure to follow the training of a college that has not the pecuniary
means to prevent it. This obstacle is of course a removable one. It
is only necessary for those who wish to get it out of the way to put
their hands in their pockets, and produce a couple of millions. The
offer of such a sum, conditioned upon the liberal education of women,
might influence even a body as soulless as the corporation of Harvard
College is sometimes represented to be.
The inherent difficulty in the experiment of special and appropriate
co-education is the difficulty of adjusting, in the same institution,
the methods of instruction to the physiological needs of each sex; to
the persistent type of one, and the periodical type of the other; to
the demand for a margin in metamorphosis of tissue, beyond what study
causes, for general growth in one sex, and to a larger margin in the
other sex, that shall permit not only general growth, but also the
construction of the reproductive apparatus. This difficulty can only
be removed by patient and intelligent effort. The first step in the
direction of removing it is to see plainly what errors or dangers lie
in the way. These, or some of them, we have endeavored to point out.
"Nothing is so conducive to a right appreciation of the truth as a
right appreciation of the error by which it is surrounded."[32] When
we have acquired a belief of the facts concerning the identical
education, the identical co-education, the appropriate education, and
the appropriate co-education of the sexes, we shall be in a condition
to draw just conclusions from them.
The intimate connection of mind and brain, the correlation of mental
power and cerebral metamorphosis, explains and justifies the
physiologist's demand, that in the education of girls, as well as of
boys, the machinery and methods of instruction shall be carefully
adjusted to their organization. If it were possible, they should be
adjusted to the organization of each individual. None doubt the
importance of age, acquirement, idiosyncrasy, and probable career in
life, as factors in classification. Sex goes deeper than any or all of
these. To neglect this is to neglect the chief factor of the problem.
Rightly interpreted and followed, it will yield the grandest results.
Disregarded, it will balk the best methods of teaching and the genius
of the best teachers. Sex is not concerned with studies as such.
These, for any thing that appears to the contrary physiologically, may
be the same for the intellectual development of females as of males;
but, as we have seen, it is largely concerned about an appropriate way
of pursuing them. Girls will have a fair chance, and women the largest
freedom and greatest power, now that legal hinderances are removed,
and all bars let down, when they are taught to develop and are willing
to respect their own organization. How to bring about this development
and insure this respect, in a double-sexed college, is one of the
problems of co-education.
It does not come within the scope of this essay to speculate upon the
ways--the regimen, methods of instruction, and other details of
college life,--by which the inherent difficulties of co-education may
be obviated. Here tentative and judicious experiment is better than
speculation. It would seem to be the part of wisdom, however, to make
the simplest and least costly experiment first; that is, to discard
the identical separate education of girls as boys, and to ascertain
what their appropriate separate education is, and what it will
accomplish. Aided by the light of such an experiment, it would be
comparatively easy to solve the more difficult problem of the
appropriate co-education of the sexes.
It may be well to mention two or three details, which are so important
that no system of _appropriate_ female education, separate or mixed,
can neglect them. They have been implied throughout the whole of the
present discussion, but not distinctly enunciated. One is, that during
the period of rapid development, that is, from fourteen to
eighteen,[33] a girl should not study as many hours a day as a boy.
"In most of our schools," says a distinguished physiological authority
previously quoted, "the hours are too many for both boys and girls.
From a quarter of nine or nine, until half-past two, is with us
(Philadelphia schools for girls) the common schooltime in private
seminaries. The usual recess is twenty minutes or half an hour, and it
is not filled by enforced exercise. In certain schools,--would it were
the rule,--ten minutes' recess is given after every hour. To these
hours, we must add the time spent in study out of school. This, for
some reason, nearly always exceeds the time stated by teachers to be
necessary; and most girls between the age of thirteen and seventeen
thus expend two or three hours. Does any physician believe that it is
good for a growing girl to be so occupied seven or eight hours a day?
or that it is right for her to use her brains as long a time as the
mechanic employs his muscles? But this is only a part of the evil. The
multiplicity of studies, the number of teachers,--each eager to get
the most he can out of his pupil,--the severer drill of our day, and
the greater intensity of application demanded, produce effects on the
growing brain, which, in a vast number of cases, can be only
disastrous. Even in girls of from fourteen to eighteen, such as crowd
the normal school in Philadelphia, this sort of tension and this
variety of study occasion an amount of ill-health which is sadly
familiar to many physicians."[34]
Experience teaches that a healthy and growing boy may spend six hours
of force daily upon his studies, and leave sufficient margin for
physical growth. A girl cannot spend more than four, or, in
occasional instances, five hours of force daily upon her studies, and
leave sufficient margin for the general physical growth that she must
make in common with a boy, and also for constructing a reproductive
apparatus. If she puts as much force into her brain education as a
boy, the brain or the special apparatus will suffer. Appropriate
education and appropriate co-education must adjust their methods and
regimen to this law.
Another detail is, that, during every fourth week, there should be a
remission, and sometimes an intermission, of both study and exercise.
Some individuals require, at that time, a complete intermission from
mental and physical effort for a single day; others for two or three
days; others require only a remission, and can do half work safely for
two or three days, and their usual work after that. The diminished
labor, which shall give Nature an opportunity to accomplish her
special periodical task and growth, is a physiological necessity for
all, however robust they may seem to be. The apportionment of study
and exercise to individual needs cannot be decided by general rules,
nor can the decision of it be safely left to the pupil's caprice or
ambition. Each case must be decided upon its own merits. The
organization of studies and instruction must be flexible enough to
admit of the periodical and temporary absence of each pupil, without
loss of rank, or necessity of making up work, from recitation, and
exercise of all sorts. The periodical type of woman's way of work must
be harmonized with the persistent type of man's way of work in any
successful plan of co-education.
The keen eye and rapid hand of gain, of what Jouffroy calls
self-interest well understood, is sometimes quicker than the brain and
will of philanthropy to discern and inaugurate reform. An illustration
of this statement, and a practical recognition of the physiological
method of woman's work, lately came under my observation. There is an
establishment in Boston, owned and carried on by a man, in which ten
or a dozen girls are constantly employed. Each of them is given and
required to take a vacation of three days every fourth week. It is
scarcely necessary to say that their sanitary condition is
exceptionally good, and that the aggregate yearly amount of work which
the owner obtains is greater than when persistent attendance and labor
was required. I have never heard of any female school, public or
private, in which any such plan has been adopted; nor is it likely
that any similar plan will be adopted so long as the community
entertain the conviction that a boy's education and a girl's education
should be the same, and that the same means the boy's. What is known
in England as the Ten-hour Act, which Mr. Mundella and Sir John
Lubbock have recently carried through Parliament, is a step in a
similar direction. It is an act providing for the special protection
of women against over-work. It does not recognize, and probably was
not intended to recognize, the periodical type of woman's
organization. It is founded on the fact, however, which law has been
so slow to acknowledge, that the male and female organization are not
identical.[35]
This is not the place for the discussion of these details, and
therefore we will not dwell upon them. Our object is rather to show
good and imperative reason why they should be discussed by others; to
show how faulty and pregnant of ill the education of American girls
has been and is, and to demonstrate the truth, that the progress and
development of the race depend upon the appropriate, and not upon the
identical education of the sexes. Little good will be done in this
direction, however, by any advice or argument, by whatever facts
supported, or by whatever authority presented, unless the women of our
country are themselves convinced of the evils that they have been
educated into, and out of which they are determined to educate their
daughters. They must breed in them the lofty spirit Wallenstein bade
his be of:--
"Leave now the puny wish, the girlish feeling,
Oh, thrust it far behind thee! Give thou proof
Thou'rt the daughter of the Mighty,--his
Who where he moves creates the wonderful.
Meet and disarm necessity by choice."
SCHILLER: _The Piccolomini_, act iii. 8.
(_Coleridge's Translation._)
FOOTNOTES:
[24] Body and Mind. Op. cit., p. 178.
[25] The Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer, chap. 13.
[26] The Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer, chap. 13.
[27] Enigmas of Life. Op. cit., by W.R. Greg, p. 142.
[28] It is a fact not to be lost sight of, says Dr. J.C. Toner of
Washington, that the proportion between the number of American
children under fifteen years of age, and the number of American women
between the child-bearing ages of fifteen and fifty, is declining
steadily. In 1830, there were to every 1,000 marriageable women, 1,952
children under fifteen years of age. Ten years later, there were
1,863, or 89 less children to every thousand women than in 1830. In
1850, this number had declined to 1,720; in 1860, to 1,666; and in
1870, to 1,568. The total decline in the forty years was 384, or about
20 per cent of the whole proportional number in 1830, a generation
ago. The United-States census of 1870 shows that there is, in the city
of New York, but one child under fifteen years of age, to each
thousand nubile women, when there ought to be three; and the same is
true of our other large cities.--_The Nation_, Aug. 28, 1873, p. 145.
[29] Vid. a pamphlet by the Rev. Dr. Todd.
[30] The New Englander, July, 1873. Art., Iowa College.
[31] Body and Mind. Op. cit., p. 85.
[32] Use of the Ophthalmoscope. By T.C. Allbutt. London. P. 5.
[33] Some physiologists consider that the period of growth extends to
a later age than this. Dr. Anstie fixes the limit at twenty five. He
says, "The central nervous system is more slow in reaching its fullest
development; and the brain, especially, is many years later in
acquiring its maximum of organic consistency and functional
power."--_Neuralgia, Op. cit._, by F.E. ANSTIE, p. 20.
[34] Wear and Tear. Op. cit., p. 33-4.
[35] It is a curious commentary on the present aspect of the "woman
question" to see many who honestly advocate the elevation and
enfranchisement of woman, oppose any movement or law that recognizes
Nature's fundamental distinction of sex. There are those who insist
upon the traditional fallacy that man and woman are identical, and
that the identity is confined to the man, with the energy of
infatuation. It appears from the Spectator, that Mr. and Mrs. Fawcett
strongly object to the Ten-hour Act, on the ground that it
discriminates unfairly against women as compared with men. Upon this
the Spectator justly remarks, that the true question for an objector
to the bill to consider is not one of abstract principle, but this:
"Is the restraint proposed so great as really to diminish the average
productiveness of woman's labor, or, by _increasing its efficacy_, to
maintain its level, or even improve it in spite of the hours lost?
What is the length of labor beyond which an average woman's
constitution is overtaxed and deteriorated, and within which,
therefore, the law ought to keep them in spite of their relations, and
sometimes in spite of themselves."--_Vid. Spectator_, London, June 14,
1873.