Mrs. Craigie Declares It Makes Girls
Overbearing and Converts Boys
Into Dandies or Weaklings.
Mrs. Craigie, better known to the literary world as John Oliver Hobbes, is
an American woman who has spent many years in England. On her recent visit
to her native land she gave her impressions of English life. Her keen
observation, deepened and intensified by her life on two continents, and
her wide and close association with great thinkers, lend weight to any
subject upon which she expresses her opinions. She finds but two
objections to coeducation: one is its effect on the boys, and the other on
the girls.
Coeducation, she says, is not so dangerous to the working
classes as to those of higher rank. The English working
classes are a very sane lot, and, besides, the sexes seem
better balanced among them than in the higher classes. In
the board schools it may serve well enough, but in the
higher classes coeducation is impossible. It is not only the
girls that are to be considered. Coeducation not only makes
English girls tomboys, overbearing and feverish in the
pursuit of their masculine schoolmates, but it also has a
very bad effect upon the boys. The boys, being inevitably
outnumbered, five to one, either become silly little
dandies, ruling a feminine court, or are tyrannized over by
the girls until their spirits are broken and their ambition
destroyed. All they care for is comfort.
It is dreadful that young boys should be cowed in this way
and become submissive to their girl schoolmates, and yet
even sturdy boys must bow to superior numbers, and twenty
weak and sickly girls may tyrannize over four or five boys.
Mrs. Craigie's view seems to harmonize with that of Dr. G. Stanley Hall,
president of Clark University, and one of America's greatest educators. In
discussing higher education in this country, he says it reduces the rate
of both marriage and offspring, so that barely three-fourths of our male
graduates and only about half of our female graduates marry, and those who
do so, marry late and have few children. In an article contributed to
MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE, he says:
Recent studies show that a large per cent of girls actually
wish they were boys. Their ideals grow masculine, and we
seem slowly to be developing a female sex without a female
character. So far have the actions against the old restraint
gone that feminists still regard every effort to
differentiate as endangering a relapse to old conditions.
Again, the rapid feminization of our schools encourages
women teachers to give their own masculine traits and ideals
free rein.
Once more, girls' manners are roughened, and they do not
develop pride in distinctively feminine qualities, or the
grace and charm of their young womanhood, or lack a little
respect for their sex. Girls have much responsibility in
bestowing the stimulus of their approval aright. It is said
that association with boys makes high-school girls less
poetic, impulsive, romantic, their conduct more thoughtful,
but I maintain, women teachers to the contrary
notwithstanding, that this is unfortunate; that something is
wrong with the girl in the middle teens who is not gushy or
sentimental, at least at times.
So it is said that the presence of girls is humanizing for
boys, but there is something wrong with the boy at this age
who can truly be called a perfect gentleman. I do not like
to urge that he should be a little rowdy or barbaric, but
vigor must not be sacrificed to primness, and masculinity at
this age does not normally take a high polish. Nature impels
boys to get away, in certain respects, from girls and women,
whoever they are. Some suffer subtle eviration, while others
react, with coarseness toward femininity, if held in too
close quarters with girls.