standards of resistance apply no longer, and what once did not disturb
will now shake her to the centre. A time comes, however, when she will
do well to meet and relearn to bear calmly all the little emotional
trials of life. I know a nervous woman--and no coward, either--who for
months, and wisely, read no newspapers, and who asked another to open
and read all her letters and telegrams. The day came when she was able
to resume the habits of health, but for a long time the telegram at
least was a sore distress, and she could only meet it by a resolute
putting of herself in the attitude of tranquillity of which I have
spoken. To say more should be needless. For the nervous strong emotions
are bad or risky, and from violent mirth to anger all are to be
sedulously set aside. Calm of mind and quiet of body are what she most
needs to aid the more potent measures of the physician.
The woman in the situation I have described has probably a variety of
symptoms on which her condition causes her to dwell. A great many of
them are of little practical moment. If she is irresolute and weak, she
yields where she should not, and finds for inactivity or for fears ample
excuses in the state of her own feelings. An unwholesome crop of
disabilities grows out of these conditions. It then becomes the business
of her physician to tell her what is real, what is unreal, what must be
respected, what must be overcome or fought. She has acquired within
herself a host of enemies. Some are strong, some are feeble. The hour
for absolute trust has arrived, and she must now believe in her adviser,
or, if she cannot, she must acquire one in whom her belief will be
entire and unquestioning.
Let us take an illustration. Such a woman is apt enough to suffer from
vertigo or giddiness. "If I walk out," she says, "I become giddy. I am
rarely free from this unless I am in bed, and it terrifies me." You know
in this case that she is still strong enough to exercise in moderation.
You say, "Walk so much daily. When you fall we will think about
stopping. Talk to some one when you go out; have a friend with you, but
walk." She must believe you to succeed. This is a form of faith-cure
which has other illustrations. You tell her that she must disregard her
own feelings. She credits you with knowing, and so wins her fight.
There is a sense of fatigue which at some time she should learn to treat
with disrespect, especially when disuse of her powers has made their
exercise difficult, and yet when returning health makes it wise to
employ them. To think, and at last to feel sure that she cannot walk is
fatal. And above all, and at all times, close attention to her own
motions is a great evil. We cannot swallow a pill because we think of
what, as regards the larger morsels of food, we do automatically.
Moreover, attention intensifies fatigue. Walk a mile, carefully willing
each leg-motion, and you will be tired. The same evil results of
attention are observed in disease as regards other functions over which
we seem in health to be without direct power of control.
"Mind-cure," so called, has, in some shape, its legitimate sphere in the
hands of men who know their profession. It is not rare to find among
nervous women a few in whom you can cause a variety of odd symptoms by
pressing on a tender spine and suggesting to the woman that now she is
going to feel certain pains in breast, head, or limbs. Nervous women
have, more or less, a like capacity to create or intensify pains and
aches, but when a woman is assured that she only seems to have such
ailments she is apt, if she be one kind of woman, to be vexed. These
dreamed pains--I hardly know what else to call them--are, to her, real
enough. If she be another kind of woman, if she believes you, she sets
herself to disregard these aches and to escape their results by ceasing
to attend to them. You may call this mind-cure or what you will, but it
succeeds. Now and then you meet with cases in which, from sudden shock
or accident, a woman is led to manufacture a whole train of disabling
symptoms, and if in these instances you can convince her that she is
well and can walk, eat, etc., like others, you make one of those
singular cures which at times fall to the luck of mind-or faith-cures
when the patient has not had the happy fortune to meet with a physician
who is intelligent, sagacious as to character, and has the courage of
his opinions. I could relate many such cases if this were the place to
do so, but all I desire here is to win the well woman and the
nervously-sick woman to the side of the physician. If she flies from him
to seek aid from the ignorant fanatic, she may, in rare cases, get what
her trained adviser ought to give her and she be willing to use, while
in unskilful hands she runs sad risks of having her too morbid attention
riveted to her many symptoms; for to think too much about their
disorders is, on the whole, one of the worst things which can happen to
man or woman, and wholesome self-attention is difficult, nay,
impossible, to command without help from a personally-uninterested mind
outside of oneself.
I cannot leave this subject without a further word of solemn warning. In
my youth we had mesmerism with its cures, then we had and have
spiritualism with its like pretensions. From time to time we have had
faith-cures. They come and they go, and have no stable life. The evil
they do lives after them in the many mental wrecks they leave. When the
charlatan Newton was ordering every class of the sick to get well, I was
called upon to see case after case of the most calamitous results on
mind and body. Now and then he had the luck to meet some one who was
merely idea-sick,--a class of cases we know well. Then he made a cure
which would have been as easy to me as to him. I made much inquiry, but
could never find a case of organic disease with distinct tissue-changes
which he had cured. A man with hopeless rheumatic alterations of joints
was made to walk a few steps without crutches. This he did at sore cost
of pain, and then came to me to tell me his tale with a new set of
crutches, the healer having kept the old set as evidence of the cure.
And now we have the mind-cure, Christian science and the like,--a muddle
of mystical statements, backed by a medley of the many half-examined
facts, which show the influence of mental and moral states over certain
forms of disorder. The rarity of these makes them to be suspected.
Hardly any have the solid base of a thorough medical study, and we lose
sight of them at the moment of cure and learn nothing as to their
future.
The books on mind-cure are calculated to make much and serious evil. I
have read them with care, and have always risen from them with the sense
of confusion which one would have if desired to study a pattern from the
back of a piece of embroidery. There is, however, a class of minds which
delight in the fogs of mystery, and, when a book puzzles them, accept
this as evidence of depth of thought. I have been bewildered at times by
the positiveness and reasoning folly of the insane, and I think most
trained intelligences will feel that books like these mystical volumes
require an amount of care and thinking to avoid bewilderment of which
the mass of men and women are not possessed. In a few years they will be
the rarely read and dusty volumes, hid away in libraries, and consulted
only by those who undertake the sad task of writing the history of
credulity. Their creed will die with them, and what is best of it and
true will continue to be used by the thoughtful physician, as it has
been in all ages. But, meanwhile, it is doing much harm and little good.
Every neurologist sees already some of its consequences, and I, myself,
have over and over had to undo some of the evil it had done.
Our nervous woman is well. Slowly, very slowly, she has won flesh and
color, which means gain in quality and quantity of blood. By degrees,
too, she has been able to return to the habits and endurances of health.
And now she asks that other question, "I have daughters who are yet
young, but how shall I guard them against nervousness?" and again puts
forward this single complex symptom in disregard of the states of body
which usually accompany it, and are to us matters quite as grave. She
knows well that the mass of women are by physiological nature more
liable to be nervous than are men. It is a sad drawback in the face of
the duties of life, that a very little emotional disturbance will
suffice to overcome the woman as it does not do the man, and that the
same disease which makes him irritable makes her nervous. Says Romanes,
in an admirable and impartial article on the mental differences of men
and women, "She is pre-eminent for affection, sympathy, devotion,
self-denial, modesty, long-suffering or patience under pain,
disappointment, and adversity, for reverence, veneration, religious
feeling, and general morality." I accept his statement to add that these
very virtues do many of them lead to the automatic development of
emotion, which, in its excesses and its uncontrolled states, is the
parent of much of the nervousness not due to the enfeeblement of
disease.[5]
[Footnote 5: _Journal of Popular Science_, July, 1887.]
With the intellectual differences between man and woman I have here
little to do. That there is difference, both quantitative and in a
measure qualitative, I believe, nor do I think any educational change in
generations of women will ever set her, as to certain mental and moral
qualifications, as an equal beside the man. It would be as impossible as
to make him morally and physically, by any educational or other
training, what the woman now is, his true superior in much that is as
high, and as valuable as any mental capacities he may possess; nor does
my creed involve for woman any refusal of the loftiest educational
attainments. I would only insist on selection and certain limitations as
to age of training and methods of work, concerning which I shall by and
by have something more to say. Neither would I forbid to her any
profession or mode of livelihood. This is a human right. I do not mean
to discuss it here either as citizen or physician; but, as man, I like
to state for my fellow-man that there are careers now sought and won and
followed by her which for him inevitably lessen her true attractiveness,
and to my mind make her less fit to be the "friendly lover and the
loving friend."[7] Æsthetic and other sacrifices in this direction are,
however, her business, not mine, and do not influence my practical
judgments as to what freedom to act is or should be hers in common with
men. For most men, when she seizes the apple, she drops the rose. I am a
little afraid that Mrs. Lynn Linton is right as to this, but it took
some courage to say what she said,[6] and she looks at the matter from a
more practical point of view, and deserves to be read at length rather
than quoted in fragments.
[Footnote 6: One would like to know how many women truly want the
suffrage, and how, when it was won, the earnest anti-tariff wife would
construe the marriage service in the face of the husband's belief in
high tariff. The indirect influence of women in politics is worth a
thought. We felt it sorely in 1861, and thence on to the war's end, and
to-day it is the woman who is making the general prohibition laws
probable. For ill or good she is still a power in the state.]
[Footnote 7: _Fortnightly_, 1886.]
I return to the subject. We want our young girl to be all that Romanes
says she is. We desire, too, that she shall be as thoroughly educated in
relation to her needs as her brothers, and that in so training her we
shall not forget that my ideal young person is to marry or not, and, at
all events, is to have a good deal of her life in her home with others,
and should have some resources for minor or self-culture and occupation
besides the larger ones which come of more distinctively intellectual
acquirements.
I turn now to the mother who asks this question, and say, "What of your
boys? Why are you not concerned as to them?" "Oh, boys are never
nervous. One couldn't stand that; but they never are. Girls are so
different." My answer is a long one. I wish I could think that it might
be so fresh and so attractive as to secure a hearing; but the preacher
goes on, Sunday after Sunday, saying over and over the same old truths,
and, like him, with some urgency within me to speak, I can only hope
that I may be able so to restate certain ancient verities as to win for
them a novel respect and a generous acceptation.
The strong animal is, as a rule, the least liable to damaging emotion
and its consequences. Train your girls physically, and, up to the age of
adolescence, as you train your boys. Too many mothers make haste to
recognize the sexual difference. To run, to climb, to swim, to ride, to
play violent games, ought to be as natural to the girl as to the boy.
All this is fast changing for us, and for the better. When I see young
girls sweating from a good row or the tennis-field, I know that it is
preventive medicine. I wish I saw how to widen these useful habits so as
to give like chances to the poor, and I trust the time will come when
the mechanic and the laborer shall insist on public play-grounds as the
right of his little ones.[8]
[Footnote 8: The demagogue urges his rights to much that he cannot have
in any conceivable form of society. Let him ask for free libraries, free
baths, free music, and, above all, free and ample play-grounds within
easy reach. I wonder that the rich who endow colleges do not ever think
of creating play-grounds. I wish I could open some large pockets by an
appeal to hearts at large.]
The tender mother, who hates dirt and loves neatness, and does not like
to hear her girls called tom-boys, may and does find it hard to
cultivate this free out-door life for her girls even when easy means
make the matter less difficult than it is for the caged dweller in
cities during a large portion or the whole of a year.
I may leave her to see that delicacy and modesty find place enough in
her educational trainings, but let her also make sure that her girls
have whatever chance she can afford to live out of doors, and to use the
sports which develop the muscles and give tone and vigor. Even in our
winters and in-doors, she can try to encourage active games such as
shuttlecock and graces. I know of homes where the girls put on the
gloves, and stand up with their brothers, and take gallantly the
harmless blows which are so valuable a training in endurance and
self-control.
I am reminded as I write that what I say applies and must apply chiefly
to the leisure class; but in others there is a good deal of manual work
done of necessity, and, after all, the leisure class is one which is
rapidly increasing in America, and which needs, especially among its new
recruits, the very kind of advice I am now giving. Severer games, such
as cricket, which I see girls playing with their brothers, tennis,
fencing, and even boxing, have for both sexes moral values. They teach,
or some of them teach, endurance, contempt of little hurts, obedience to
laws, control of temper, in a word, much that under ordinary
circumstances growing girls do not get out of their gentler games. These
are worth some risks, and such as they are need not trouble seriously
the most careful mother. Neither need she fear for girls up to the age
of puberty that they are any more liable to serious damage than are her
boys.
When for her young daughters this time of change comes near, she may
rest assured that their thorough physical training will have good
results. Beyond this point it is hard to generalize, and, of course, the
more violent games, in which girl and boy are or may be as one, must
cease But each case must stand alone, and so be judged. There are plenty
of healthy girls who may continue to row, to ride, to swim, to walk as
before, but there are individual cases as to which advice is needed,
although, as to all girls, it should be the rule that at certain times
temperate exercise, lessened walks, and no dancing, riding, rowing,
skating, or swimming should be allowed. Girls feel these restrictions
less if they are so stringently taught from the outset as to become
habits, and this is all I care to say.
Once past the critical years, and there is no reason why the mass of
women should not live their own lives as men live theirs, except that
always, in my opinion, the prudent woman will at certain times save
herself. It is still true that even healthy women exercise too little.
Our climate makes walking unpleasant, and to get in a good sweat in
summer, or to wade through slush in winter, is hateful to the female
soul. The English reproach us with this defect, and rightly, but do not
estimate the difficulties of climate. Australian women walk little, and
the English dame who comes to this country to live soon succumbs to the
despotism of climate and abandons her habits of ample exercise afoot.
The in-door resources of women for chest and arm exertion are sadly few,
and I think it fortunate when they are so situated as to have to do
things in the household which exact vigorous use of the upper
extremities. Nothing is a better ally against nervousness or
irritability in any one than either out-door exercise or pretty violent
use of the muscles. I knew a nervously-inclined woman who told me that
when she was losing self-control she was accustomed to seek her own
room, and see how long she could keep up a shuttlecock without a
failure. As to weather, again, I should say the worse the weather the
better the exercise of a brisk walk; and my wise mother shall see that
her girls do not dawdle about in-doors, but get a good tramp under all
skies as a part of the habits of life. A sturdy struggle with a rough
day blows the irritability and nervousness of the hour out of any but
the truly sick, and I know as to some folks that the more they are out
of doors the better they are morally as well as physically.
My ideal mother has looked on and seen her daughters grow up to be
strong and vigorous. When the time came, she has not forgotten that she
has had and has to deal with one of her own sex. During the years of
their childhood she should understand, as concerns her girls, that to
differentiate too largely their moral lessons from those of their
brothers is unwise. Something as to this I have said in a former chapter
as concerns the training of invalid children. It applies also to the
well. The boy is taught self-control, repression of emotion, not to cry
when hurt. Teach your girls these things, and you will in the end assure
to them that habitual capacity to suffer moral and physical ill without
exterior show of emotion, which is so true an aid to the deeper interior
control which subdues emotion at its sources, or robs it of its power to
harm. Physical strength and an out-door life will make this lesson easy
and natural. Be certain that weakness of body fosters and excuses
emotional non-restraint, and that under long illness the most hardy man
may become as nervously foolish as a spoiled child. Crave, then, for
your girls strength and bodily power of endurance, and with this insist
that the boy's code of emotional control shall be also theirs. But to do
all this you must begin with them young, and not have to make each year
undo the failure of the last. A dog-trainer once told me that it was a
good thing to whip the smallest pups with a straw, and to teach them
good habits, or try to do so, from birth. He put it strongly; but be
sure that if we wish to build habits thoroughly into the mental and
physical structure of childhood, we shall do well to begin early. As
regards the out-door life, I shall have something more to say in another
place, for much is within the reach of the thoughtful, which, with
reasonable means, they can get for girls and women, and which yet they
do not get; and there are many ways in which also we can so train our
girls as to create for them constant and lasting bribes to be in the
air.
The question of education is a more difficult one to handle. In
childhood I do not see that our wise mother need be anxious; but there
comes a day when her girl is entering womanhood, when she will have to
think of it. I have dealt with this question so fully of late that I
have little here to add.[9] Our public schools are so organized that
there is small place or excuse for indulgence, although, under wise
management, this has been shown to be possible.[10] But there is a vast
and growing class which is so situated that the mother can more largely
control the studies and hours of her girls than can the parents of those
who frequent our municipal schools.
[Footnote 9: "Wear and Tear," 6th ed., 1887.]
[Footnote 10: Ibid., p. 54.]
A great change is on her child. Let her watch its evolution, and not
with such apparent watchfulness as shall suggest the perils she is to
look out for. We are all organized with a certain capital of
nerve-force, and we cannot spend it with equal recklessness in all
directions. If the girl bears well her gathering work,--that is, as one
could wish,--we may let her alone, except that the wise mother will
insist on lighter tasks and some rest of body at the time when nature is
making her largest claim upon the vital powers. The least sign of
physical failure should ring a graver alarm, and make the mother insist,
at every cost, upon absence of lessons and reasonable repose. The matter
is simple, and I have no more to say.
I am dealing now so entirely with the moral and physical aspects of a
woman's life, and so distinctly from the medical point of view, that I
do not feel called upon to discuss, in all its aspects, the mooted
question of the values and the perils of the higher education. At one
time it was not open to women at all. Now it is within her reach. Our
girl is well, and has passed, happily, over her time of development.
Will the larger education which she so often craves subject her to risks
such as are not present to the man,--risks of broken health and of its
consequences? I wish to speak with care to the mother called upon to
decide this grave question. I most honestly believe that the woman is
the better in mind and morals for the larger training, better if she
marries, and far better and happier if it chances that she does not. If
we take the mass of girls, even of mature age, and give them the
training commonly given to men, they run, I think, grave risks of being
injured by it, and in larger proportion than do their brothers. Where it
seems for other reasons desirable, it should be, I think, a question of
individual selection. The majority of healthy young women ought to be
able to bear the strain. Once in a female college, the woman goes on,
and it is my own experience that, on the whole, she exhibits a far
larger list of disastrous results from such work than do young men. If
she be in the least degree nervous or not well, I, for one, should
resolutely say no to all such claims; for let us bear in mind that the
higher education is rarely to be used as men use it, to some definite
end, and is therefore not, on the whole, so essential to her as to him.
Few women mean it as a way towards medicine, or even the upper ranks of
teaching; and if they do, the least doubt as to health ought to make us
especially unwilling to start an unseaworthy or uninsurable vessel upon
an ocean of perilous possibilities. I wish that every woman could attain
to the best that men have. I wish for her whatever in the loftiest
training helps to make her as mother more capable, as wife more helpful;
but I would on no account let the healthiest woman thus task her brain
until she is at least nineteen. If she is to marry, and this puts it off
until twenty-three, I consider that a gain not counted by the advocates
of the higher education. I leave to others to survey the broad question
of whether or not it will be well for the community that the mass of
women should have a collegiate training. It is a wide and wrathful
question, and has of late been very well discussed in Romanes's paper,
and by Mrs. Lynn Linton. I think the conclusions of the former, on the
whole, are just; but now, whatever be my views as to the larger
interests of the commonwealth and the future mothers of our race, I must
not forget that I am giving, or trying to give, what I may call
individualized advice, from the physician's view, as to what is wisest.