pressing to-day upon our girls of every class in life. The doctor knows
how often and how earnestly he is called upon to remonstrate against
this growing evil. He is, of course, well enough aware that many sturdy
girls stand the strain, but he knows also that very many do not, and
that the brain, sick with multiplied studies and unwholesome home life,
plods on, doing poor work, until somebody wonders what is the matter
with that girl; or she is left to scramble through, or break down with
weak eyes, headaches, neuralgias, or what not. I am perfectly confident
that I shall be told here that girls ought to be able to study hard
between fourteen and eighteen years without injury, if boys can do it.
Practically, however, the boys of to-day are getting their toughest
education later and later in life, while girls leave school at the same
age as they did thirty years ago. It used to be common for boys to
enter college at fourteen: at present, eighteen is a usual age of
admission at Harvard or Yale. Now, let any one compare the scale of
studies for both sexes employed half a century ago with that of to-day.
He will find that its demands are vastly more exacting than they
were,--a difference fraught with no evil for men, who attack the graver
studies later in life, but most perilous for girls, who are still
expected to leave school at eighteen or earlier.[1]
[Footnote 1: Witness Richardson's heroine, who was "perfect mistress of
the four rules of arithmetic"!]
I firmly believe--and I am not alone in this opinion--that as concerns
the physical future of women they would do far better if the brain were
very lightly tasked and the school hours but three or four a day until
they reach the age of seventeen at least. Anything, indeed, were better
than loss of health; and if it be in any case a question of doubt, the
school should be unhesitatingly abandoned or its hours lessened, as at
least in part the source of very many of the nervous maladies with which
our women are troubled. I am almost ashamed to defend a position which
is held by many competent physicians, but an intelligent friend, who has
read this page, still asks me why it is that overwork of brain should be
so serious an evil to women at the age of womanly development. My best
reply would be the experience and opinions of those of us who are called
upon to see how many school-girls are suffering in health from
confinement, want of exercise at the time of day when they most incline
to it, bad ventilation,[1] and too steady occupation of mind. At no
other time of life is the nervous system so sensitive,--so irritable, I
might say,--and at no other are abundant fresh air and exercise so
important. To show more precisely how the growing girl is injured by the
causes just mentioned would lead me to speak of subjects unfit for full
discussion in these pages, but no thoughtful reader can be much at a
loss as to my meaning.
[Footnote 1: In the city where this is written there is, so far as I
know, not one private girls' school in a building planned for a
school-house. As a consequence, we hear endless complaints from young
ladies of overheated or chilly rooms. If the teacher be old, the room is
kept too warm; if she be young, and much afoot about her school, the
apartment is apt to be cold.]
The following remarks I owe to the experience of a friend,[1] a woman,
who kindly permits me to use them in full. They complete what
I have space to add as to the matter of education, and deserve to be
read with care by every parent and by every one concerned in our public
schools.
[Footnote 1: Miss Pendleton.]
"There can be no question that the health of growing girls is overtaxed;
but, in my opinion, this is a vice of the age, and not primarily of the
schools. I have found teachers more alive to it than parents or the
general public. Upon interrogating a class of forty girls, of ages
varying from twelve to fourteen, I found that more than half the number
were conscious of loss of sleep and nervous apprehension before
examinations; but I discovered, upon further inquiry, that nearly
one-half of this class received instruction in one or two branches
outside of the school curriculum, with the intention of qualifying to
become teachers. I could get no information as to appetite or diet; all
of the class, as the teacher informed me, being ashamed to give
information on questions of the table. In the opinion of this teacher,
nervousness and sleeplessness are somewhat due to studies and in-door
social amusements in addition to regular school work; but chiefly to
ignorance in the home as to the simplest rules of healthy living. Nearly
all the girls in this class drink a cup of tea before leaving home, eat
a sweet biscuit as they walk, hurried and late, to school, and nothing
else until they go home to their dinners at two o'clock. All their
brain-work in the school-room is done before eating any nourishing food.
The teacher realized the injurious effects of the present forcing
system, and suggested withdrawing the girls from school for one year
between the grammar- and high-school grades. When I asked whether a
better result would not be obtained by keeping the girls in school
during this additional year, but relieving the pressure of purely mental
work by the introduction throughout all the grades of branches in
household economy, she said this seemed to her ideal, but, she feared,
impracticable, not from the nature of schools, but from the nature of
boards.
"A Latin graduating class of seven girls, aged seventeen and eighteen
years, stated that they do their work without nervousness, restlessness,
or apprehension.
"This, with other statistics, would seem to bear out your theory that
after seventeen girls may study with much less risk to health.
"So far as I have observed, the strain or tear is chiefly in the case of
girls studying to become teachers. These girls often press forward too
rapidly for the purpose of becoming self-supporting at the age of
eighteen. The bait of a salary, and a good salary for one entering upon
a profession, lures them on; and a false sympathy in members of boards
and committees lends itself to this injurious cramming.
"Our own normal school,[1] which is doing a great, an indispensable,
work in preparing a trained body of faithful, intelligent teachers, has
succumbed to this injurious tendency. We have here the high and normal
grades merged into one, the period of adolescence stricken out of the
girl's school life, and many hundreds of girls hurried annually forward
beyond their physical or mental capacity, in advance of their physical
growth, for the sake of those who cannot afford to remain in school one
or two years longer. I say this notwithstanding the fact that this
school is, in my opinion, one of the most potent agencies for good in
the community."
[Footnote 1: Philadelphia.]
"Overpressure in school appears to me to be a disease of the body
politic from which this member suffers; but it also seems to me that
this vast school system is the most powerful agency for the correction
of the evil. In the case of girls, the first principle to be recognized
is that the education of women is a problem by itself; that, in all its
lower grades at all events, it is not to be laid down exactly upon the
lines of education for boys.
"The school system may be made a forceful agency for building up the
family, and the integrity of the home is without doubt the vital
question of the age.
"Edward Everett Hale, with his far spiritual sight, has discerned the
necessity for restoring home training, and advocates, to this end, short
school terms of a few weeks annually. It is probable that in the future
many school departments will be relegated to the home, but the homes are
not now prepared to assume these duties.
"When it was discovered that citizens must be prepared for their
political duties the schools were opened; but the means so far became
an end that even women were educated only in the directions which bear
upon public and not upon household economy. The words of Stein, that
'what we put into the schools will come out in the manhood of the nation
afterward,' cannot be too often quoted. Let branches in household
economy be connected with all the general as distinguished from
normal-school grades, and we not only relieve the girl immediately of
the strain of working with insufficient food, and of acquiring skill in
household duties in addition to the school curriculum, we not only
simplify and harmonize her work, but we send out in every case a woman
prepared to carry this new influence into all her future life, even if a
large number of these women should eventually pursue special or higher
technical branches; for we are women before we are teachers, lawyers,
physicians, etc., and if we are to add anything of distinctive value to
the world by entering upon the fields of work hitherto pre-empted by
men, it will be by the essential quality of this new feminine element.
"The strain in all work comes chiefly from lack of qualification by
training or nature for the work in hand,--tear in place of wear. The
schools can restore the ideal of quiet work. They have an immense
advantage in regularity, discipline, time. This vast system gives an
opportunity, such as no private schools offer, for ascertaining the
average work which is healthful for growing girls. It is quite possible
to ascertain, whether by women medical officers appointed to this end,
or by the teachers themselves, the physical capacity of each girl, and
to place her where this will not be exceeded. Girls trained in school
under such wise supervision would go out into life qualified to guard
the children of the future. The chief cause of overwork of children at
present is the ignorance of parents as to the injurious effects of
overwork, and of the signs of its influence.
"The first step toward the relief of over-pressure and false stimulus is
to discard the pernicious idea that it is the function of the normal
school to offer to every girl in the community the opportunity for
becoming a teacher. This unwholesome feature is the one distinctive
strain which must be removed from the system. It can be done provided
public and political sentiment approve. The normal school should be only
a device for securing the best possible body of teachers. It should be
technical.
"Every teacher knows that the average girl of seventeen has not reached
the physical, mental, or moral development necessary to enter upon this
severe and high professional course of studies, and that one year is
insufficient for such a course.
"Lengthen the time given to normal instruction,--make it two years; give
in this school instruction purely in the science of education; relegate
all general instruction to a good high school covering a term of four
years. In this as in all other progressive formative periods the way out
is ahead.
"It will be time enough to talk of doing away with a portion of the
girls' school year when the schools have fulfilled their high mission,
when they have sent out a large body of American women prepared, not for
a single profession, even the high feminine vocation of pedagogy, but
equipped for her highest, most general and congenial functions as the
source and centre of the home."
I am unwilling to leave this subject without a few words as to our
remedy, especially as concerns our public schools and normal schools for
girls. What seems to me to be needed most is what the woman would bring
into our school boards. Surely it is also possible for female teachers
to talk frankly to that class of girls who learn little of the demands
of health from uneducated or busy or careless mothers, and it would be
as easy, if school boards were what they should be, to insist on such
instruction, and to make sure that the claims of maturing womanhood are
considered and attended to. Should I be told that this is impracticable,
I reply that as high an authority as Samuel Eliot, of Massachusetts, has
shown in large schools that it is both possible and valuable. As
concerns the home life, it is also easy to get at the parents by annual
circulars enforcing good counsel as to some of the simplest hygienic
needs in the way of sleep, hours of study, light, and meals.
It were better not to educate girls at all between the ages of fourteen
and eighteen, unless it can be done with careful reference to their
bodily health. To-day, the American woman is, to speak plainly, too
often physically unfit for her duties as woman, and is perhaps of all
civilized females the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks
which tax so heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to
what nature asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain
herself under the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which
nowadays she is eager to share with the man?
While making these stringent criticisms, I am anxious not to be
misunderstood. The point which above all others I wish to make is this,
that owing chiefly to peculiarities of climate, our growing girls are
endowed with organizations so highly sensitive and impressionable that
we expose them to needless dangers when we attempt to overtax them
mentally. In any country the effects of such a course must be evil, but
in America I believe it to be most disastrous.
As I have spoken of climate in the broad sense as accountable for some
peculiarities of the health of our women, so also would I admit it as
one of the chief reasons why work among men results so frequently in
tear as well as wear. I believe that something in our country makes
intellectual work of all kinds harder to do than it is in Europe; and
since we do it with a terrible energy, the result shows in wear very
soon, and almost always in the way of tear also. Perhaps few persons who
look for evidence of this fact at our national career alone will be
willing to admit my proposition, but among the higher intellectual
workers, such as astronomers, physicists, and naturalists, I have
frequently heard this belief expressed, and by none so positively as
those who have lived on both continents. Since this paper was first
written I have been at some pains to learn directly from Europeans who
have come to reside in America how this question has been answered by
their experience. For obvious reasons, I do not name my witnesses, who
are numerous; but, although they vary somewhat in the proportion of the
effects which they ascribe to climate and to such domestic peculiarities
as the overheating of our houses, they are at one as regards the simple
fact that, for some reason, mental work is more exhausting here than in
Europe; while, as a rule, such Americans as have worked abroad are well
aware that in France and in England intellectual labor is less trying
than it is with us. A great physiologist, well known among us, long ago
expressed to me the same opinion; and one of the greatest of living
naturalists, who is honored alike on both continents, is positive that
brain-work is harder and more hurtful here than abroad, an opinion which
is shared by Oliver Wendell Holmes and other competent observers.
Certain it is that our thinkers of the classes named are apt to break
down with what the doctor knows as cerebral exhaustion,--a condition in
which the mental organs become more or less completely incapacitated for
labor,--and that this state of things is very much less common among the
savans of Europe. A share in the production of this evil may perhaps be
due to certain general habits of life which fall with equal weight of
mischief upon many classes of busy men, as I shall presently point out.
Still, these will not altogether account for the fact, nor is it to my
mind explained by any of the more obvious faults in our climate, nor yet
by our habits of life, such as furnace-warmed houses, hasty meals, bad
cooking, or neglect of exercise. Let a man live as he may, I believe he
will still discover that mental labor is with us more exhausting than we
could wish it to be. Why this is I cannot say, but it is not more
mysterious than the fact that agents which, as sedatives or excitants,
affect the great nerve-centres, do this very differently in different
climates. There is some evidence to show that this is also the case with
narcotics; and perhaps a partial explanation may be found in the manner
in which the excretions are controlled by external temperatures, as well
as by the fact which Dr. Brown-Séquard discovered, and which I have
frequently corroborated, that many poisons are retarded in their action
by placing the animal affected in a warm atmosphere.
It is possible to drink with safety in England quantities of wine which
here would be disagreeable in their first effect and perilous in their
ultimate results. The Cuban who takes coffee enormously at home, and
smokes endlessly, can do here neither the one nor the other to the same
degree. And so also the amount of excitation from work which the brain
will bear varies exceedingly with variations of climatic influences.
We are all of us familiar with the fact that physical work is more or
less exhausting in different climates, and as I am dealing, or about to
deal, with the work of business men, which involves a certain share of
corporal exertion, as well as with that of mere scholars, I must ask
leave to digress, in order to show that in this part of the country at
least the work of the body probably occasions more strain than in
Europe, and is followed by greater sense of fatigue.
The question is certainly a large one, and should include a
consideration of matters connected with food and stimulants, on which I
can but touch. I have carefully questioned a number of master-mechanics
who employ both foreigners and native Americans, and I am assured that
the British workman finds labor more trying here than at home; while
perhaps the eight-hour movement may be looked upon as an instinctive
expression of the main fact as regards our working class in general.
A distinguished English scholar informs me that since he has resided
among us the same complaints, as to the depressing effects of physical
labor in America, have come to him from skilled English mechanics. What
share change of diet and the like may have in the matter I have not
space to discuss.[1]
[Footnote 1: The new emigrant suffers in a high degree from the same
evils as to cookery which affect only less severely the mass of our
people, and this, no doubt, helps to enfeeble him. The frying-pan has, I
fear, a better right to be called our national emblem than the eagle,
and I grieve to say it reigns supreme west of the Alleghanies. I well
remember that a party of friends about to camp out were unable to buy a
gridiron in two Western towns, each numbering over four thousand eaters
of fried meats.]
Although, from what I have seen, I should judge that overtasked men of
science are especially liable to the trouble which I have called
cerebral exhaustion, all classes of men who use the brain severely, and
who have also--and this is important--seasons of excessive anxiety or of
grave responsibility, are subject to the same form of disease; and this
I presume is why we meet with numerous instances of nervous exhaustion
among merchants and manufacturers. The lawyer and clergyman offer
examples, but I do not remember to have seen many bad cases among
physicians. Dismissing the easy jest which the latter statement will
surely suggest, the reason for this we may presently encounter.
My note-books seem to show that manufacturers and certain classes of
railway officials are the most liable to suffer from neural exhaustion.
Next to these come merchants in general, brokers, etc.; then less
frequently clergymen; still less often lawyers; and more rarely doctors;
while distressing cases are apt to occur among the overschooled young of
both sexes.
The worst instances to be met with are among young men suddenly cast
into business positions involving weighty responsibility. I can recall
several cases of men under or just over twenty-one who have lost health
while attempting to carry the responsibilities of great manufactories.
Excited and stimulated by the pride of such a charge, they have worked
with a certain exaltation of brain, and, achieving success, have been
stricken down in the moment of triumph. This too frequent practice of
immature men going into business, especially with borrowed capital, is a
serious evil. The same person, gradually trained to naturally and
slowly increasing burdens, would have been sure of healthy success. In
individual cases I have found it so often vain to remonstrate or to
point out the various habits which collectively act for mischief on our
business class that I may well despair of doing good by a mere general
statement. As I have noted them, connected with cases of overwork, they
are these: late hours of work, irregular meals bolted in haste away from
home, the want of holidays and of pursuits outside of business, and the
consequent practice of carrying home, as the only subject of talk, the
cares and successes of the counting-house and the stock-board. Most of
these evil habits require no comment. What, indeed, can be said? The man
who has worked hard all day, and lunched or dined hastily, comes home or
goes to the club to converse--save the mark!--about goods and stocks.
Holidays, except in summer, he knows not, and it is then thought time
enough taken from work if the man sleeps in the country and comes into a
hot city daily, or at the best has a week or two at the sea-shore. This
incessant monotony tells in the end. Men have confessed to me that for
twenty years they had worked every day, often travelling at night or on
Sundays to save time, and that in all this period they had not taken one
day for play. These are extreme instances, but they are also in a
measure representative of a frightfully general social evil.
Is it any wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men? There
comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they
get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and
just as they are thinking, "Now we will stop and enjoy ourselves," the
brain, which, slave-like, never murmurs until it breaks out into open
insurrection, suddenly refuses to work, and the mischief is done. There
are therefore two periods of existence especially prone to those
troubles,--one when the mind is maturing; another at the turning-point
of life, when the brain has attained its fullest power, and has left
behind it accomplished the larger part of its best enterprise and most
active labor.
I am disposed to think that the variety of work done by lawyers, their
long summer holiday, their more general cultivation, their usual tastes
for literary or other objects out of their business walks, may, to some
extent, save them, as well as the fact that they can rarely be subject
to the sudden and fearful responsibilities of business men. Moreover,
like the doctor, the lawyer gets his weight upon him slowly, and is
thirty at least before it can be heavy enough to task him severely. The
business man's only limitation is need of money, and few young
mercantile men will hesitate to enter trade on their own account if they
can command capital. With the doctor, as with the lawyer, a long
intellectual education, a slowly-increasing strain, and responsibilities
of gradual growth tend, with his out-door life, to save him from the
form of disease I have been alluding to. This element of open-air life,
I suspect, has a share in protecting men who in many respects lead a
most unhealthy existence. The doctor, who is supposed to get a large
share of exercise, in reality gets very little after he grows too busy
to walk, and has then only the incidental exposure to out-of-door air.
When this is associated with a fair share of physical exertion, it is an
immense safeguard against the ills of anxiety and too much brain-work.
For these reasons I do not doubt that the effects of our great civil
war were far more severely felt by the Secretary of War and President
Lincoln than by Grant or Sherman.