THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS
Equal opportunities of higher education now open--Brings new dangers to
women--Ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the sexes
should and do diverge--Different interests--Sex tension--Girls more
mature than boys at the same age--Radical psychic and physiological
differences between the sexes--The bachelor women--Needed
reconstruction--Food--Sleep--Regimen--Manners--Religion--Regularity--The
topics for a girls' curriculum--The eternal womanly.
The long battle of woman and her friends for equal educational and
other opportunities is essentially won all along the line. Her
academic achievements have forced conservative minds to admit that her
intellect is not inferior to that of man. The old cloistral seclusion
and exclusion is forever gone and new ideals are arising. It has been
a noble movement and is a necessary first stage of woman's
emancipation. The caricatured maidens "as beautiful as an angel but as
silly as a goose" who come from the kitchen to the husband's study to
ask how much is two times two, and are told it is four for a man and
three for a woman, and go back with a happy "Thank you, my dear";
those who love to be called baby, and appeal to instincts half
parental in their lovers and husbands; those who find all the sphere
they desire in a doll's house, like Nora's, and are content to be
men's pets; whose ideal is the clinging vine, and who take no interest
in the field where their husbands struggle, will perhaps soon survive
only as a diminishing remainder. Marriages do still occur where
woman's ignorance and helplessness seem to be the chief charm to men,
and may be happy, but such cases are no farther from the present ideal
and tendency on the one hand than on the other are those which consist
in intellectual partnerships, in which there is no segregation of
interests but which are devoted throughout to joint work or enjoyment.
A typical contemporary writer[1] thinks the question whether a girl
shall receive a college education is very like the same question for
boys. Even if the four K's, _Kirche, Kinder, Kuchen,_ and _Kleider_
(which may be translated by the four C's, _Church, Children, Cooking,_
and _Clothes_), are her vocation, college may help her. The best
training for a young woman is not the old college course that has
proven unfit for young men. Most college men look forward to a
professional training as few women do. The latter have often greater
sympathy, readiness of memory, patience with technic, skill in
literature and language, but lack originality, are not attracted by
unsolved problems, are less motor-minded; but their training is just
as serious and important as that of men. The best results are where
the sexes are brought closer together, because their separation
generally emphasizes for girls the technical training for the
profession of womanhood. With girls, literature and language take
precedence over science; expression stands higher than action; the
scholarship may be superior, but is not effective; the educated woman
"is likely to master technic rather than art; method, rather than
substance. She may know a good deal, but she can do nothing." In most
separate colleges for women, old traditions are more prevalent than in
colleges for men. In the annex system, she does not get the best of
the institution. By the coeducation method, "young men are more
earnest, better in manners and morals, and in all ways more civilized
than under monastic conditions. The women do more work in a more
natural way, with better perspective and with saner incentives than
when isolated from the influence of the society of men. There is less
silliness and folly where a man is not a novelty. In coeducational
institutions of high standards, frivolous conduct or scandals of any
form are rarely known. The responsibility for decorum is thrown from
the school to the woman, and the woman rises to the responsibility."
The character of college work has not been lowered but raised by
coeducation, despite the fact that most of the new, small, weak
colleges are coeducational. Social strain, Jordan thinks, is easily
regulated, and the dormitory system is on the whole best, because the
college atmosphere is highly prized. The reasons for the present
reaction against coeducation are ascribed partly to the dislike of the
idle boy to have girls excel him and see his failures, or because
rowdyish tendencies are checked by the presence of women. Some think
that girls do not help athletics; that men count for most because they
are more apt to be heard from later; but the most serious new argument
is the fear that woman's standards and amateurishness will take the
place of specialization. Women take up higher education because they
like it; men because their careers depend upon it. Hence their studies
are more objective and face the world as it is. In college the women
do as well as men, but not in the university. The half-educated woman
as a social factor has produced many soft lecture courses and cheap
books. This is an argument for the higher education of the sex.
Finally, Jordan insists that coeducation leads to marriage, and he
believes that its best basis is common interest and intellectual
friendship.
From the available data it seems, however, that the more scholastic
the education of women, the fewer children and the harder, more
dangerous, and more dreaded is parturition, and the less the ability
to nurse children. Not intelligence, but education by present man-made
ways, is inversely as fecundity. The sooner and the more clearly this
is recognized as a universal rule, not, of course, without many
notable and much vaunted exceptions, the better for our civilization.
For one, I plead with no whit less earnestness and conviction than any
of the feminists, and indeed with more fervor because on nearly all
their grounds and also on others, for the higher education of women,
and would welcome them to every opportunity available to men if they
can not do better; but I would open to their election another
education, which every competent judge would pronounce more favorable
to motherhood, under the influence of female principals who do not
publicly say that it is "not desirable" that women students should
study motherhood, because they do not know whether they will marry;
who encourage them to elect "no special subjects because they are
women," and who think infant psychology "foolish."
Various interesting experiments in coeducation are now being made in
England.[2] Some are whole-hearted and encourage the girls to do
almost everything that the boys do in both study and play. There are
girl prefects; cricket teams are formed sometimes of both sexes, but
often the sexes matched against each other; one play-yard, a dual
staff of teachers, and friendships between the boys and girls are not
tabooed, etc. In other schools the sexes meet perhaps in recitation
only, have separate rooms for study, entrances, play-grounds, and
their relations are otherwise restricted. The opinion of English
writers generally favors coeducation up to about the beginning of the
teens, and from there on views are more divided. It is admitted that,
if there is a very great preponderance of either sex over the other,
the latter is likely to lose its characteristic qualities, and
something of this occurs where the average age of one sex is
distinctly greater than that of the other. On the other hand, several
urge that, where age and numbers are equal, each sex is more inclined
to develop the best qualities peculiar to itself in the presence of
the other.
Some girls are no doubt far fitter for boys' studies and men's careers
than others. Coeducation, too, generally means far more assimilation
of girls' to boys' ways and work than conversely. Many people believe
that girls either gain or are more affected by coeducation, especially
in the upper grades, than boys. It is interesting, however, to observe
the differences that still persist. Certain games, like football and
boxing, girls can not play; they do not fight; they are not flogged or
caned as English boys are when their bad marks foot up beyond a
certain aggregate; girls are more prone to cliques; their punishments
must be in appeals to school sentiment, to which they are exceedingly
sensitive; it is hard for them to bear defeat in games with the same
dignity and unruffled temper as boys; it is harder for them to accept
the school standards of honor that condemn the tell-tale as a sneak,
although they soon learn this. They may be a little in danger of being
roughened by boyish ways and especially by the crude and unique
language, almost a dialect in itself, prevalent among schoolboys.
Girls are far more prone to overdo; boys are persistingly lazy and
idle. Girls are content to sit and have the subject-matter pumped into
them by recitations, etc., and to merely accept, while boys are more
inspired by being told to do things and make tests and experiments. In
this, girls are often quite at sea. One writer speaks of a certain
feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools
soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that singing classes
the voices of each sex are better in quality for the presence of the
other. In many topics of all kinds boys and girls are interested in
different aspects of the same theme, and therefore the work is
broadened. In manual training, girls excel in all artistic work; boys,
in carpentry. Girls can be made not only less noxiously sentimental
and impulsive, but their conduct tends to become more thoughtful; they
can be made to feel responsibility for bestowing their praise aright
and thus influencing the tone of the school. Calamitous as it world be
for the education of boys beyond a certain age to be entrusted
entirely or chiefly to women, it would be less so for that of girls to
be given entirely to men. Perhaps the great women teachers, whose life
and work have made them a power with girls comparable to that of
Arnold and Thring with boys, are dying out. Very likely economic
motives are too dominant for this problem to be settled on its merits
only. Finally, several writers mention the increased healthfulness of
moral tone. The vices that infest boys' schools, which Arnold thought
a quantity constantly changing with every class, are diminished.
Healthful thoughts of sex, less subterranean and base imaginings on
the one hand, and less gushy sentimentality on the other, are favored.
For either sex to be a copy of the other is to be weakened, and each
comes normally to respect more and to prefer its own sex.
Not to pursue this subject further here, it is probable that many of
the causes for the facts set forth are very different and some of them
almost diametrically opposite in the two sexes. Hard as it is _per
se_, it is after all a comparatively easy matter to educate boys. They
are less peculiarly responsive in mental tone to the physical and
psychic environment, tend more strongly and early to special
interests, and react more vigorously against the obnoxious elements of
their surroundings. This is truest of the higher education, and more
so in proportion as the tendencies of the age are toward special and
vocational training. Woman, as we saw, in every fiber of her soul and
body is a more generic creature than man, nearer to the race, and
demands more and more with advancing age an education that is
essentially liberal and humanistic. This is progressively hard when
the sexes differentiate in the higher grades. Moreover, nature decrees
that with advancing civilization the sexes shall not approximate, but
differentiate, and we shall probably be obliged to carry sex
distinctions, at least of method, into many if not most of the topics
of the higher education. Now that woman has by general consent
attained the right to the best that man has, she must seek a training
that fits her own nature as well or better. So long as she strives to
be manlike she will be inferior and a pinchbeck imitation, but she
must develop a new sphere that shall be like the rich field of the
cloth of gold for the best instincts of her nature.
Divergence is most marked and sudden in the pubescent period--in the
early teens. At this age, by almost world-wide consent, boys and girls
separate for a time, and lead their lives during this most critical
period more or less apart, at least for a few years, until the ferment
of mind and body which results in maturity of functions then born and
culminating in nubility, has done its work. The family and the home
abundantly recognize this tendency. At twelve or fourteen, brothers
and sisters develop a life more independent of each other than before.
Their home occupations differ as do their plays, games, tastes.
History, anthropology, and sociology, a well as home life, abundantly
illustrate this. This is normal and biological. What our schools and
other institutions should do, is not to obliterate these differences
but to make boys more manly and girls more womanly. We should respect
the law of sexual differences, and not forget that motherhood is a
very different thing from fatherhood. Neither sex should copy nor set
patterns to the other, but all parts should be played harmoniously and
clearly in the great sex symphony.
I have here less to say against coeducation in college, still less in
university grades after the maturity which comes at eighteen or twenty
has been achieved; but it is high time to ask ourselves whether the
theory and practise of identical coeducation, especially in the high
school, which has lately been carried to a greater extreme in this
country than the rest of the world recognizes, has not brought certain
grave dangers, and whether it does not interfere with the natural
differentiations seen everywhere else. I recognize, of course, the
great argument of economy. Indeed, we should save money and effort
could we unite churches of not too diverse creeds. We could thus give
better preaching, music, improve the edifice, etc. I am by no means
ready to advocate the radical abolition of coeducation, but we can
already sum up in a rough, brief way our account of profit and loss
with it. On the one hand, no doubt each sex develops some of its own
best qualities best in the presence of the other, but the question
still remains, how much, when, and in what way, identical coeducation
secures this end?
As has been said, girls and boys are often interested in different
aspects of the same topic, and this may have a tendency to broaden the
view-point of both and bring it into sympathy with that of the other,
but the question still remains whether one be not too much attracted
to the sphere of the other, especially girls to that of boys. No doubt
some girls become a little less gushy, their conduct more thoughtful,
and their sense of responsibility greater; for one of woman's great
functions, which is that of bestowing praise aright, is increased.
There is also much evidence that certain boys' vices are mitigated;
they are made more urbane and their thoughts of sex made more
healthful. In some respects boys are stimulated to good scholarship by
girls, who in many schools and topics excel them. We should ask,
however, What is nature's way at this stage of life? Whether boys, in
order to be well virified later, ought not to be so boisterous and
even rough as to be at times unfit companions for girls; or whether,
on the other hand, girls to be best matured ought not to have their
sentimental periods of instability, especially when we venture to
raise the question, whether for a girl in the early teens, when her
health for her whole life depends upon normalizing the lunar month,
there is not something unhygienic, unnatural, not to say a little
monstrous, in school associations with boys when she must suppress and
conceal her feelings and instinctive promptings at those times which
suggest withdrawing, to let nature do its beautiful work of
inflorescence. It is a sacred time of reverent exemption from the hard
struggle of existence in the world and from mental effort in the
school. Medical specialists, many of the best of whom now insist that
through this period she should be, as it were, "turned out to grass,"
or should lie fallow, so far as intellectual efforts go, one-fourth
the time, no doubt often go too far, but their unanimous voice should
not entirely be disregarded.
It is not this, however, that I have chiefly in mind here, but the
effects of too familiar relations and, especially, of the identical
work, treatment, and environment of the modern school.
We have now at least eight good and independent statistical studies
which show that the ideals of boys from ten years on are almost always
those of their own sex, while girls' ideals are increasingly of the
opposite sex, or those of men. That the ideals of pubescent girls are
not found in the great and noble women of the world or in their
literature, but more and more in men, suggests a divorce between the
ideals adopted and the line of life best suited to the interests of
the race. We are not furnished in our public schools with adequate
womanly ideals in history or literature. The new love of freedom which
women have lately felt inclines girls to abandon the home for the
office. "It surely can hardly be called an ideal education for women
that permits eighteen out of one hundred college girls to state boldly
that they would rather be men than women." More than one-half of the
schoolgirls in these censuses choose male ideals, as if those of
femininity are disintegrating. A recent writer,[3] in view of this
fact, states that "unless there is a change of trend, we shall soon
have a female sex without a female character." In the progressive
numerical feminization of our schools most teachers, perhaps naturally
and necessarily, have more or less masculine ideals, and this does not
encourage the development of those that constitute the glory of
womanhood. "At every age from eight to sixteen, girls named from three
to twenty more ideals than boys." "These facts indicate a condition of
diffused interests and lack of clear-cut purposes and a need of
integration."
When we turn to boys the case is different. In most public high
schools girls preponderate, especially in the upper classes, and in
many of them the boys that remain are practically in a girls' school,
sometimes taught chiefly, if not solely, by women teachers at an age
when strong men should be in control more than at any other period of
life. Boys need a different discipline and moral regimen and
atmosphere. They also need a different method of work. Girls excel
them in learning and memorization, accepting studies upon suggestion
or authority, but are often quite at sea when set to make tests and
experiments that give individuality and a chance for self-expression,
which is one of the best things in boyhood. Girls preponderate in our
overgrown high school Latin and algebra, because custom and tradition
and, perhaps, advice incline them to it. They preponderate in English
and history classes more often, let us hope, from inner inclination.
The boy sooner grows restless in a curriculum where form takes
precedence over content. He revolts at much method with meager matter.
He craves utility, and when all these instincts are denied, without
knowing what is the matter, he drops out of school, when with robust
tone and with a truly boy life, such as prevails at Harrow, Eton, and
Rugby, he would have fought it through and have done well. This
feminization of the school spirit, discipline, and personnel is bad
for boys. Of course, on the whole, perhaps, they are made more
gentlemanly, more at ease, their manners improved, and all this to a
woman teacher seems excellent, but something is the matter with the
boy in early teens who can be truly called "a perfect gentleman." That
should come later, when the brute and animal element have had
opportunity to work themselves off in a healthful normal way. They
still have football to themselves, and are the majority perhaps in
chemistry, and sometimes in physics, but there is danger of a settled
eviration. The segregation, which even some of our schools are now
attempting, is always in some degree necessary for full and complete
development. Just as the boys' language is apt to creep into that of
the girl, so girls' interests, ways, standards and tastes, which are
crude at this age, sometimes attract boys out of their orbit. While
some differences are emphasized by contact, others are compromised.
Boys tend to grow content with mechanical, memorized work and,
excelling on the lines of girls' qualities, fail to develop those of
their own. There is a little charm and bloom rubbed off the ideal of
girlhood by close contact, and boyhood seems less ideal to girls at
close range. In place of the mystic attraction of the other sex that
has inspired so much that is best in the world, familiar comradeship
brings a little disenchantment. The impulse to be at one's best in the
presence of the other sex prows lax and sex tension remits, and each
comes to feel itself seen through, so that there is less motive to
indulge in the ideal conduct which such motives inspire, because the
call for it is incessant. This disillusioning weakens the motivation
to marriage sometimes on both sides, when girls grow careless in their
dress and too negligent in their manners, one of the best schools of
woman's morals; and when boys lose all restraints which the presence
of girls usually enforces, there is a subtle deterioration. Thus, I
believe, although of course it is impossible to prove, that this is
one of the factors of a decreasing percentage of marriage among
educated young men and women.
At eighteen or twenty the girl normally reaches a stage of first
maturity when her ideas of life are amazingly keen and true; when, if
her body is developed, she can endure a great deal; when she is
nearest, perhaps, the ideal of feminine beauty and perfection. Of this
we saw illustrations in Chapter VIII. In our environment, however,
there is a little danger that this age once well past there will
slowly arise a slight sense of aimlessness or lassitude, unrest,
uneasiness, as if one were almost unconsciously feeling along the wall
for a door to which the key was not at hand. Thus some lose their
bloom and, yielding to the great danger of young womanhood, slowly
lapse to a anxious state of expectancy, or desire something not within
their reach, and so the diathesis of restlessness slowly supervenes.
The best thing about college life for girls is, perhaps, that it
postpones this incipient disappointment; but it is a little pathetic
to me to read, as I have lately done, the class letters of hundreds of
girl graduates, out of college one, two, or three years, turning a
little to art, music, travel, teaching, charity work, one after the
other, or trying to find something to which they can devote
themselves, some cause, movement, occupation, where their capacity for
altruism and self-sacrifice can find a field. The tension is almost
imperceptible, perhaps quite unconscious. It is everywhere overborne
by a keen interest in life, by a desire to know the world at first
hand, while susceptibilities are at their height. The apple of
intelligence has been plucked at perhaps a little too great cost of
health. The purely mental has not been quite sufficiently kept back.
The girl wishes to know a good deal more of the world and perfect her
own personality, and would not marry, although every cell of her body
and every unconscious impulse points to just that end. Soon, it may be
in five or ten years or more, the complexion of ill health is in these
notes, or else life has been adjusted to independence and
self-support. Many of these bachelor women are magnificent in mind and
body, but they lack wifehood and yet more--motherhood.
In fine, we should use these facts as a stimulus to ask more
searchingly the question whether the present system of higher
education for both sexes is not lacking in some very essential
elements, and if so what these are. Indeed, considering the facts that
in our social system man makes the advances and that woman is by
nature more prone than man to domesticity and parenthood, it is not
impossible that men's colleges do more to unfit for these than do
those for women. One cause may be moral. Ethics used to be taught as a
practical power for life and reënforced by religious motives. Now it
is theoretical and speculative and too often led captive by
metaphysical and epistemological speculations. Sometimes girls work or
worry more over studies and ideals than is good for their
constitution, and boys grow idle and indifferent, and this
proverbially tends to bad habits. Perhaps fitting for college has been
too hard at the critical age of about eighteen, and requirements of
honest, persevering work during college years too little enforced, or
grown irksome by physiological reaction of lassitude from the strain
of fitting and entering. Again, girls mature earlier than boys; and
the latter who have been educated with them tend to certain elements
of maturity and completeness too early in life, and their growth
period is shortened or its momentum lessened by an atmosphere of
femininity. Something is clearly wrong, and more so here than we have
at present any reason to think is the case among the academic male or
female youth of other lands. To see and admit that there is an evil
very real, deep, exceedingly difficult and complex in its causes, but
grave and demanding a careful reconsideration of current educational
ideas and practises, is the first step; and this every thoughtful and
well-informed mind, I believe, must now take.
It is utterly impossible without injury to hold girls to the same
standards of conduct, regularity, severe moral accountability, and
strenuous mental work that boys need. The privileges and immunities of
her sex are inveterate, and with these the American girl in the middle
teens fairly tingles with a new-born consciousness. Already she
occasionally asserts herself in the public high school against a male
teacher or principal who seeks to enforce discipline by methods boys
respect, in a way that suggests that the time is at hand when
popularity with her sex will be as necessary in a successful teacher
as it is in the pulpit. In these interesting oases where girl
sentiment has made itself felt in school it has generally carried
parents, committeemen, the press, and public sentiment before it, and
has already made a precious little list of martyrs whom, were I an
educational pope, I would promptly canonize. The progressive
feminization of secondary education works its subtle demoralization on
the male teachers who remain. Public sentiment would sustain them in
many parental exactions with boys which it disallows in mixed classes.
It is hard, too, for male principals of schools with only female
teachers not to suffer some deterioration in the moral tone of their
virility and to lose in the power to cope successfully with men. Not
only is this often confessed and deplored, but the incessant
compromises the best male teachers of mixed classes must make with
their pedagogic convictions in both teaching and discipline make the
profession less attractive to manly men of large caliber and of sound
fiber. Again, the recent rapid increase of girls, the percentage of
which to population in high schools has in many communities doubled in
but little more than a decade, almost necessarily involves a decline
in the average quality of girls, perhaps as much greater for them as
compared with boys as their increase has been greater. When but few
were found in these institutions they were usually picked girls with
superior tastes and ability, but now the average girl of the rank and
file is, despite advanced standard, of admission, of an order natively
lower. From this deterioration both boys and teachers suffer, even
though the greatest good for the greatest number may be enhanced. Once
more, it is generally admitted that girls in good boarding-schools,
where evenings, food, and regimen are controlled, are in better health
than day pupils with social, church, and domestic duties and perhaps
worries to which boys are less subject. This is the nascent stage of
periodicity to the slow normalization of which, during these few
critical years, everything that interferes should yield. Some kind of
tacit recognition of this is indispensable, but in mixed classes every
form of such concession is baffling and demoralizing to boys.
The women who really achieve the higher culture should make it their
"cause" or "mission" to work out the new humanistic or liberal
education which the old college claimed to stand for and which now
needs radical reconstruction to meet the demands of modern life. In
science they should aim to restore the humanistic elements of its
history, biography, its popular features at their best, and its
applications in all the more non-technical fields, as described in