(Return to Classics index)

I. Differences of the sexes in strength, mortality, brain, senses, agility, mental traits, crime, disposition, variability, conservation, progressive sexual divergence. II. Medical and biological views in other lands and in this country since Dr. E. H. Clarke. III. Health and its tests -- Danger of overdrawing reserves. IV. Marriage of educated women -- latest statistics or nubility rates of male and female colleges -- Comparisons and lessons. V. Fecundity in earlier generations in America -- Sterility in this and other countries, and its causes and stages -- Best age for parenthood in mother and in father -- Effects of over-nutrition and mental strain -- Statistics of children of graduates of girls' colleges compared with rate of reproduction of male graduates -- Dangers of late marriages and of only children -- Fertility as a test of civilization -- Individuation versus genesis -- Dominance of the instinct for marriage and motherhood in normal women and substitutes provided for it. VI. Education -- New English opinions -- Coeducation of various degrees -- Its advantages and dangers for both boys and girls -- The age of eighteen -- Changes to the dollish, disappointed, and devotee type -- Dangers of aping man-made education and of complacency -- Arrest in the first stages of a movement just begun -- Training for spinsterhood and self-support versus for maternity -- Hints and general outlines of a higher education for girls based on their nature and needs and not on convention or the demands of feminists -- Branches of such a curriculum -- Methods -- Hygiene.

I. The Biological and Anthropological Standpoint. -- Our modern knowledge of woman represents her as having characteristic differences from man in every organ and tissue, as conservative in body and mind, fulfilling the function of seeing to it that no acquired good be lost to mankind, as anabolic rather than katabolic, or disposed to assimilate or digest on a higher plane, as normally representing childhood and youth in the full meridian of its glory in all her dimensions and nature so that she is at the top of the human curve from which the higher super-man of the future is to evolve, while man is phylogenetically by comparison a trifle senile, if not decadent. Her sympathetic and ganglionic system is relatively to the cerebro-spinal more dominant. Her whole soul, conscious and [p. 562] unconscious, is best conceived as a magnificent organ of heredity, and to its laws all her psychic activities, if unperverted, are true. She is by nature more typical and a better representative of the race and less prone to specialization. Her peculiar organs, while constituting a far larger proportion of her body than those of man, are hidden and their psychic reverberations are dim, less-localized, more all-pervasive. She works by intuition and feeling; fear, anger, pity, love, and most of the emotions have a wider range and greater intensity. If she abandons her natural naïveté and takes up the burden of guiding and accounting for her life by consciousness, she is likely to lose more than she gains, according to the old saw that she who deliberates is lost. Secondary, tertiary, and quaternary sex qualities are developed far beyond her ken or that of science, in a way that the latter is only beginning to glimpse. While she needs tension that only the most advanced modern psychology sees to be sexual at root, we shall never know the true key to her nature until we understand, how the nest and the cradle are larger wombs; the home, a larger nest; the tribe, state, church, and school, larger homes and irradiations from it. Biological psychology already dreams of a new philosophy of sex which places the wife and mother at the heart of a new world and makes her the object of a new religion and almost of a new worship, that will give her reverent exemption from sex competition and reconsecrate her to the higher responsibilities of the human race, into the past and future of which the roots of her being penetrate; where the blind worship of mere mental illumination has no place; and where her real superiority to man will have free course and be glorified and the ideals of the old matriarchates again find embodiment in fit and due degree.

Patrick [1] has summarized the salient points of difference between men and women as follows: The latter are shorter and lighter save for a brief period at about thirteen, as we have shown in Chapter I. Her adult height to that of man is as about 16 to 17, and her weight as 9 to 10. Her form is rounder, she has more fat, more water, less muscle; her dyna-[p. 563]mometer strength foots up about two-thirds that of man; her trunk is relatively slightly longer; the pelvic bend makes her a little less erect; the head is less upright, and her gait slightly less steady; her plantar arch is flatter; her forefinger is relatively longer than the other three; the thyroid larger; the lung capacity relatively less; the blood has less red corpuscles; her bones a little less specific gravity; she is more anemic, and her pulse is faster. In the United States about 105 boys are born to 100 girls, but through life the male death-rate is higher, so that in nearly every land, after the first year or two, there are more females than males. She is more liable to whooping-cough, scarlet fever, phthisis, diphtheria, but resists diseases best and dies less often than man at nearly every age. Ballod [2] shows that the average increased duration of life in the last decennium is for women and not for men, and that large cities and factories tend to shorten average male longevity. Hegar (Geschlechtstrieb) concludes that before forty, married, and after forty, unmarried, women are more liable to die, but that married outlive unmarried men. He is more prone than she to rheumatism, cancer, brain troubles, sudden death from internal or external causes, can less survive severe surgical operations and grows old more rapidly; his hair is gray earlier and he is more prone to loss of sight, hearing, memory, senile irritability, to deformities and anomalies, is less hardy and less resembles children. Woman's skull is smaller, especially at the base, but large in circumference at the crown, which is flatter and more angular; her forehead is more vertical; the glabella and superorbital ridges are less, as are the occipital and mastoid prominences and the parietal prominence; her face is smaller and a little lower, and she is slightly more prognathic. Her absolute brain weight to that of man is about as 9 to 10, but her smaller size makes her brain about equal, if not heavier, in weight. The lower centers are larger in women, and in nearly all these respects women differ less among themselves than do men. Martin and Clouston found the female brain slightly better irrigated by blood, especially in the occipital regions, although the number of its corpuscles as compared to those of man was as 9 [p. 564] to 10. The anterior regions of the brain were best supplied in man. The specific gravity of the gray matter of all parts of the brain was less in women, but in the white matter there was no difference. The female brain has more bilateral symmetry, i. e., its right and left hemispheres are more alike. In all save the occipital regions the male has more secondary gyri and probably the convolutions are deeper. In most forms of lunacy the male brain is most wasted at death, and four men to one woman die of general paralysis between thirty and fifty. Women are more often insane, but men most often die of insanity, while women who die in lunatic asylums more often die of body diseases. Mental stimulus, according to Warner, more readily lowers their general nutrition. Möbius,[3] on the other hand, who sees danger in the emancipation movement of the feminists, thinks that the fact that they have accomplished so little in the world of art and science is not due to subjection but to inferiority. He lays stress on Rödinger's results, viz., that in infants the convolutions about the Sylvian fissures are simpler, with fewer bends, that the island of Keil is smaller, less convex, and simpler, as is the third frontal gyrus, and the whole parietal lobe is inferior in females at all ages to that of men, these being the portions most closely connected with mentation. The sexes have the same convolutions, but of different sizes, and the same powers, but in differing degrees.

Women seem slightly more obtuse in sight, touch, and hearing, and less sensitive to pain. Concerning taste discriminations, investigators differ. Ellis and Galton conclude that she has less sensibility but more affectibility and nervous irritability. Only about four-tenths of one per cent of women are color blind as against three and a half per cent of men. In visual discriminations in the indirect field of vision, she excels, indicating that the retinal function is less focused in the fovea. With her eyes fixed straight ahead on the streets she observes persons and things farther right and left than man can do Bryan found that in rapid movements, she excelled from five to sixteen, except at about thirteen, while in precision boys slightly excel. Gilbert concludes that boys tap fastest at every [p. 565] age, and that reaction time is less at all ages for boys. Ellis concludes that in dexterity, as shown in cotton spinning, woolen weaving, cigar and cigarette making, and other fine work, man excels where opportunity and numbers are equal. In quick reading, where the sense of a paragraph is to be grasped in minimal time and with equal knowledge of the subject, woman excels in quick apprehension of wholes. Women go in flocks, and in social matters are less prone to stand out with salient individuality. They are more emotional, altruistic, intuitive, less judicial, and less able to make disinterested and impersonal judgment. Girls are most likely to know their environment, while the boys oftenest show surprising gaps in knowledge of what is right about them and unexpected acquaintance with something afar, special or unusual.

Miss Thompson [4] found from laboratory tests that men excel women in strength, rapidity, and in rate of fatigue, and slightly in accuracy, but the latter are superior in new motor combinations; that men have the lower sensory threshold for light, and women for distinguishing two points on the skin, in sweet, salt, sour, and bitter taste, in smell, color, and pain by pressure, and in discriminative pitch and color. Men excel in distinguishing lifted weights, sweet, sour, and bitter. Women excel in memory. This writer becomes feministic in crediting abstract deductions and taking Lourbet's jesting remark that the smaller and more agile male cell might better represent the female and the larger ovum the male, seriously, and defies Weismannism by ascribing sexual differences of type of mental action to the differences of the influences that surround the sexes in early years.

Her thought is more concrete and individual and she is more prone to associations in space, and man in time. Men are more prone to bring things under general rules and with regard to symmetry. Her logical thought is slower, but her associations quicker than those of man, she is less troubled by inconsistencies, and has less patience with the analysis involved in science and invention.

Of 483,517 patents recorded in Washington up to October,[p. 566] 1892, 3,458 were by women. In education men have made most of the reforms, while recent developments show that they can excel even in dressmaking and cooking. Woman has rapid tact in extricating herself from difficulties; girls speak quicker than boys; old women are likely to be talkative, old men glum; men progress most after graduation; women are very prone to lose accomplishments and special culture and training, are more punctual in school and college, more regular in attendance, and in higher grades have the best marks, but vary less from the average; they excel in mental reproduction rather than in production; are superior in arts of conversation, more conservative and less radical; their vasomotor system is more excitable; they are more emotional, blush and cry easier; are more often hypnotized; quicker to take suggestions; have most sympathy, pity, charity, generosity, and superstitions. Male crime to female is as 6 to 1, woman exceeding only in poisoning, domestic theft, and infanticide. She is about as superior to man in altruism as she is behind him in truth-telling, being more prone to ruse and deception. She is more credulous and less skeptical, more prone to fear and timidity, and has greater fidelity, dependence, reverence, and devotion. She dresses for adornment rather than use. In savage and civilized life, her body is more often mutilated and she is more primitive. Her hair is long; she is more prone to wear ornaments which show wealth rather than to dress solely for protection or concealment; is still fond of feathers, skin, and fur, flowing garments, and partial exposure of person, so that she betrays rank and wealth more often than men. She still pinches her waist and feet; uses pins, powders, and perfumes, neck ornaments, beads, overshoes, and sometimes shoes that are not rights and lefts; is more subject to fashion; her work is far less specialized than that of man and less reduced to mechanism or machinery. Man is best adapted to the present; woman is more rooted in the past and the future, closer to the race and a more generic past. Thus again, in very many of the above traits, woman is far nearer childhood than man, and therefore in mind and body more prophetic of the future as well as reminiscent of the past.[p. 567]

Professor Pearson [5] condemns as a superstition the current idea of the greater variability of man than of woman. He first eliminates everything characteristic of sex and all that is pathological, and focuses on size alone. Even color blindness, which is characteristic of sex, he sets aside. By so doing and measuring the limited number of persons, he finds slightly more variation in females than in males and so excoriates the common belief that the reverse is true. That his method is profoundly mistaken, if it does not indeed prove the contrary, will, I think, be plain to all biologists. Some have thought that every variation from the parental type was slightly abnormal. Certainly, normal and pathological shade into each other by imperceptible degrees, and Professor Pearson merely eliminates those classes of facts on which the whole question rests. As Ellis [6] well says, the real question of organic variational tendencies is untouched. If in size woman is more variable, it may be due to her less severe struggle for existence, or to the fact that male children being larger make greater demands on the mother and, therefore, have harder conditions to surmount. The biometric method, which Pearson so ably represents, miscarries here because the preliminary basis in the selection of facts is fundamentally wrong.

W. K. Brooks,[7] approaching the subject from the standpoint of biology, characterized the female body, instincts, and habits as conservative, devoted to keeping what has been acquired by successive generations as new layers of snow are added to glaciers. Thus woman is best in acting and judging in ordinary matters; man in those that are extraordinary. The male is the agent of variation and progress, and transmits variations best, so that perhaps the male cell and sex itself originated in order to produce variation. Influence is more potent than argument with women. An ideal or typical male is hard to define, but there is a standard ideal woman. Because her mind is, more than that of man, essentially an organ of heredity, we find that, although she may sometimes seem volatile and desultory, the fact that her processes seem to be unconscious emancipates her from nature less than is the case with man. Her thought is a mode of thinking. Brooks presents the following suggestive scheme: [p. 568]

II. The Medical Standpoint. -- Even the demands of the new-school hygiene now represented by so many experts, new journals, conferences, etc., have revealed no point of such wide divergence between doctors and current methods and ideals as in the education of adolescent girls. We have no space for even the outline of or history of this holy war, one of the most important of many that physiology and biology have had to wage with ignorance and well-entrenched custom, but must be content with sampling a few of the most representative medical opinions in chronological order since this issue was so fairly and opportunely raised. What follows in this section is immediately connected with Chapter VII.

Dr. Storer,[9] one of the first and most sagacious American writers in this field, urged that girls should be educated far more in body and less in mind, and thought delicate girls frequently ruined in both body and mind by school. He was not only one of the first to urge that surgery should be performed at the uterine ebb which affected the system even during pregnancy, but to hold that education should be regulated throughout with reference to monthly changes. An epoch, however, was marked by Dr. Clarke's [10] book in 1873, and the reply to it by Miss Brackett [11] and twelve other ladies eminent in the movement for the higher education of girls. The former was a not very scholarly, but a simple and sensible, plea by a practitioner of experience that woman's periods must be more respected. It appeared at the height of the movement to secure collegiate opportunities for girls, was suspected of being unofficially inspired by the unwillingness of Harvard College to receive them, and reached a seventeenth edition [p. 570] in a few years. The women who replied took very diverse views. To one it was an intrusion into the sacred domain of womanly privacy. To another it seemed insolent and coarse, an affront to the sex. To another it was only a sneer, not doing as men would be done by, for the vices of men were worse, twitting them of their sex, throwing sex in their teeth; "these things must not be thought of in this wise." One writer deplored that women had not said this for and of themselves, and advised that they study physiology, etc. On the whole, Dr. Clarke raised the most important issue in the history of female education, and his book is still a shibboleth of a woman's attitude on most questions pertaining to her sex and its so-called sphere. The misery of being a girl, said Byford,[12] consists in feeling at this age that she is prone to pain, depression of spirits, bears a badge of inferiority which must be endured, must wear corsets, pads, and long clothes that impede her movements and that must never be soiled or rumpled by free activity to which she was accustomed as a girl. Her studies are laid on her sensitive consciousness and her pride and self-respect prompt her to overwork. Girls' schools are governed too much, for girls need now not less but far more freedom than boys. Some parts of the body are clothed too thickly, and some too little for health. Nowhere in the world do men work so hard or girls and women do so little useful work or render so little real service to the community as in this country. Young men are often fastidious and unpractical, and are attracted by accomplishments that fall off and are lost soon after marriage, while they do not know how to seek or recognize what is useful, and thus defer matrimony as a too expensive luxury. In this self-imposed celibacy they become dangerous to the virtue of the debilitated if not degenerate girls in the community.

Dr. Beard [13] says, after sending many circulars and studying the returns they brought: "Nearly everything about the conduct of the schools was wrong, unphysiological and unpsychological, and they were conducted so as to make very sad and sorrowing the lives of those who were forced to attend [p. 571] them. It was clear that the teachers and managers of these schools knew nothing of and cared nothing for those matters relating to education that are of the highest importance, and that the routine of the schools was such as would have been devised by some evil deity who wished to take vengeance on the race and the nation. . . . Everything pushed in an unscientific and distressing manner, nature violated at every step, endless reciting and lecturing and striving to be first -- such are the female schools of America at this hour. The first signs of ascension or of declension in nations are seen in women. As the foliage of delicate plants first shows the early warmth of spring, and the earliest frosts of autumn, so the impressible, susceptive organization of woman appreciates and exhibits far sooner than that of man the manifestation of national progress or decay." Nathan Allen [14] urged that while in men everything depended upon bodily vigor, this was even more important for girls, for in them we were educating the race. The best balance for weak nerves or other organs was well-developed muscles, and in this at proper periods he saw the way of safety for the well and of salvation for the sickly. Stated and out-of-door and not excessive physical culture he thought had a normative influence upon the monthly function, and he, too, held to periodic remission of work for mind, heart, and muscles.

The current prejudices that menstruation is a disagreeable function or a badge of inferiority, Dr. Galippe [15] thinks arose from educational establishments for girls. The sentiment, which prevails in these schools, is that it is somewhat shameful and at least not worthy of serious and respectful consideration by well-bred minds. Instead of indicating her state to some person selected for that purpose and receiving from her the delicate, hygienic instruction and consideration needed, the pubescent girl conceals it and is left to herself, and metrorrhagia or anemia and often local states result which are simply pathetic. Girls do not complain of easily removable suffering, thinking often that pain is inseparable from [p. 572] this function, and take part in all the exercises of the school, both physical and mental, when they have crying need of all the highest functions of true motherhood to teach them the effects of fatigue and excitement, the need of rest, and proper regimen and toilet. It is vain to assume that because savages or peasants can live in a state of nature, that well-born girls at school can be thus abandoned. Civilization in some respects is an artificial state and needs new habits and functions because it involves greater susceptibility.

Dr. F. C. Taylor [16] presents some pertinent considerations as follows: Civilization is hard on woman, and constantly stimulates her beyond her strength, fires her with ambitions she can not realize, and robs her of the tranquillity she needs. Imperfect sexual hygiene is a prolific source of evil to the individual woman and to the race. If the latter deteriorates it will be through the degeneration of woman. In her, sex and its wider irradiations overshadow all else during her ripening period, is an ever-present influence controlling mind and body, and in old age is the glory of the declining day of life. If the sexual life is lowered or suppressed, a tonic needed for vigor in all directions is lost. Owing in part to the fact that her organs are internal and therefore less or later known, they are less often consciously connected with impressions that are indirectly if not directly sexual, and there is greater convertibility of emotions. Women can remain in what is really a suppressed semi-erotic state with never-culminating feeling, so scattered in their interests and enthusiasms that they can not fix their affections permanently. Particularly repressed molimina may become vicarious and issue in estheticism and all kinds of noble or ignoble interests. Women are sometimes led astray when their feelings are made especially delicate by bereavement, and on the other hand, excessive erotic sensations sometimes cause loss of power in the limbs. Unmarried women are, and ought to be, great walkers, but wives and mothers expend the same energy normally in other ways. Where the normal exercise of functions is unduly restrained, it finds, therefore, many other outlets. Dr. [p. 573] Taylor thinks, however, that the difference between boys and girls in learning self-abuse on account of the more obvious anatomy of the former is overestimated, and that the latter, more commonly than is thought, not only find their organs and use them improperly, but are more difficult to cure of this vice.

Clouston, in various articles and books, has expressed himself in very trenchant terms. Each generation, he premises, can use up more than its share of energy, and women have a peculiar power of taking out of themselves more than they can bear. All should carry a reserve to meet emergencies and not use up all their power, and thus rob future generations.[17] His conception is also that human life is divided into stages, each of which must be lived out in such a way as not to draw upon the later stages. We should ask what nature aims at in each period and surround each by its own ideal conditions, and see to it that in no stage we strive for what belongs to another later one. Again, any organ like the brain or reproductive parts, if overworked, may draw upon the vigor of others. Each individual stage and organ has just so much energy. We should strive sedulously to keep the mental back in all and especially in females, and not "spoil a good mother to make a grammarian." In the United States, Clouston thinks that most families have more or less nervous taint or disease; that heredity is weak because woman has lost her cue, although nature is benign and always tends to a cure if we have not gone too far astray. Adolescence is more important for girls than for boys. Science and learning are happily less likely to take a dominating hold of woman's nature, because they are not along the lines on which it was built. Clouston is fond of reminding us that none of Shakespeare's women were learned, that even Portia describes herself as "an unlettered girl, unschooled, unpractised." Most great men's mothers were women of strong mind, but not highly educated. Would their sons have been better, he asks, had the mothers been schooled? Would they have been really better companions for men, and is learning bought at the [p. 574] expense of any degree of cheerfulness, which is the best sign of health, not too costly? "There is no time or place of organic repentance provided by nature for sins of the schoolmaster." A man can work if he is one-sided or defective, but not so a woman. "If she is not more or less finished and happy at twenty-five, she will never be." Parents want children to work in order to tone down their animal spirits, and it almost seems to Clouston as if the devil invented the school for spite. He quotes approvingly Oliver Wendell Holmes, who refers to the "American female constitution which collapses just in the middle third of life and comes out vulcanized India-rubber, if it happens to live through the period when health and strength are most wanted," and thinks girls' brains should be put to grass for a few generations. Fun is to the mind what fat is to the body. A large part of study should be what to omit and skip and not to know. Possibly we may be developing an unique kind of girl, a different species. A true fully developed woman is very hard to mature, but when ripe can stand very much.

Thorburn [18] fears disproportion between the development of muscle and of nerve in women. Girls should do hardly any steady work for one year before and two after puberty. They can not work without peril for about one-fourth of the time, and should adjust themselves to this law of their nature and plan to lie fallow about a quarter of the time. Teachers and others should not wait to be asked before excusing them from their task, but should command it without request. Girls should cultivate the festina lente of poise and develop the dignity and the efficiency of going slow, but this should be in no wise construed as inimical to their education. This problem we shall not have solved until there is no more danger of college unfitting women to be wives than of its unfitting men to be husbands.

Most frequent among all the menstrual disorders of schoolgirls, Dr. Wilson [19] thinks, is dysmenorrhea. Next comes suppression, while [p. 575] menorrhagia is rare at this age. He urges more attention to physical development before puberty. Constipation, headache, sallowness, acne, leucorrhea, insomnia, perversity of appetite, dyspepsia, overtension of nerves, tea-ism, coffee-ism, cold feet, emotional strain, he finds amazingly prevalent in the schools. American girls come to this crisis without having known much control or restraint, and with their habits and actions almost entirely unsystematized. They appear rosy and healthy because energies, that should go to perfecting other parts and functions, have been diverted to cerebration. Influences from those about her tend to make her give up free and girlish sports and romping, and to feel herself a woman too suddenly. Her dress interferes with portal circulation, digestion, respiration, and favors displacement at a time when her entire system is most susceptible to disturbances, which it did not heed before. She is thrown on her own responsibility, is often among strangers, her emotional nature is excited by music and art. From childhood, she is petted, pampered, and spoiled, thought cute and cunning, can not submit to restraint, and often has a small body of misinformation about herself, which is far worse than ignorance. She is made egotistic and superficial, is distracted by the beginnings of many sorts of knowledge. She lays the foundation of invalidism at a time when she should become a mother, has a horror of maternity, partly instinctive and partly induced, hankers for pastry, sweets, and hot bread that insult and vex the stomach, and dreads the recurrence of periods which bring irritation and depression. She does not turn to her mother for care or advice, for unconscious instinct teaches her that there is no help from that source. Probably most American girls now have, Wilson thinks, more or less hereditary tendencies towards functional disorders, so that to inaugurate a proper hygiene that should lead to healthy and vigorous womanhood in most cases needs nothing less than medical supervision; while gynecologists agree in recognizing a steady increase of female troubles, as well as the increased use of drugs or patent nostrums, their own endeavors tend less to specific and more to general regimen.

The views of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell [20] are well known and have been often expressed. Woman, he holds, is physiologically other than man and no education can change her. No one knows woman who does not know sick woman. She takes to being a patient naturally and comfortably, although if long ill she warps morally. Her doctor must often read the riot act to a mob of emotions; must look beyond drugs, for she is prone to think three pills a day easier than diet or regimen. He must listen and sympathize with her ills and with the joy [p. 576] of convalescence in order to be of real use to her. He must recognize how prone nervous and feeble women are to crave pity and love power; how prone, like all who have not learned the great lesson of bearing pain, they are to some narcotic habit. Out-of-door life, the camp cure, sewing for its moral value, and all that pertains to regimen and psychic influence must be at her doctor's command.

Grant Allen [21] insists that there ought to be a woman question and movement, but it must accept the fact that most adult women will be wives and mothers. In any ideal community the greatest possible number of women must be devoted to maternity and marriage, and support by men must be assumed and not female celibacy. The accidental and exceptional must not be the rule or the goal. This is only a pis aller. It is not so much the unmarried minority that need attention as the mothers. We must not abet woman as a sex in rebelling against maternity, quarreling with the moon, or sacrifice wifehood to maidenhood. The whole question of sex must be reconsidered. This woman will never do, nor will she go as far as men in emancipating herself. He even goes so far as to suggest that, wives or not, we must have mothers. Men must be made more virile, women more feminine, and sex distinctions must be pushed to the uttermost. Woman must not be allowed to cramp her intellect or her waist. What seem to men feminine idiosyncrasies must be unfolded. She must be set free from her craven fear of the Grundian goddess. Her sexuality is in danger of enfeeblement. She eschews marriage often from the want of a normal physical impulse. Instead of the ideal of becoming a self-supporting spinster, she ought to be married at twenty-five and plan to be. It is a shame to any normal woman not to long to be a wife and mother, and not to glory in her femininity, or to prate of those who insist on the laws of nature "as traitors to their sex," and "casting sex in their teeth." Allen estimates that about six children per marriage are necessary to keep up the population, as more than one-half die before maturity. If the best abstain from child-bearing, then the population is kept up by the lowest. Savages make but little provision for their [p. 577] women, so that analogy would lead us to suppose with Comte that in the highest state women will care only for children, and men do all the work.

Le Bon [22] pleaded that the education we now give to girls consists of instruction that fits brains otherwise constructed, perverts womanly instincts, falsifies the spirit and judgment, enfeebles the constitution, confuses their moods concerning their duties and their happiness, and generally disequilibrates them. It charges the brain with too much information that is useless, fails to give what can be applied, and fits them neither for domesticity nor for gaining their livelihood. It makes them misconceive their role in society and in the family, and often jealous of man and at heart inimical to the social order, and threatens future degeneration of the race.

In a suggestive series of ten articles, Dr. James Crichton Browne [23] defies Weismannism if it mitigates the woe that impends to a land if mothers decay. Girls, he says, suffer far more change and instability at the onset of puberty than boys, and he deprecates sowing the tares of ambition for careers in girls. He finds headaches far too common among young girls from ten to seventeen; advocates the abolition of evening study; finds danger that the ovum and sperm cell may have their activity so reduced before meeting that the infant comes to life old and without a fair chance. Despite the average increase of life for men, and still more for women, during the last forty years, he finds that beyond middle life there is little reduction of death-rate and that wear-and-tear diseases are increased; that even cancer is perhaps coming to have a nervous element; that neurasthenia and functional nerve troubles are augmenting; he thinks all "voluminous states" of nerves or souls are harbingers of epilepsy and especially deplores the propensity to take short-sighted views seeking immediate causes ("the lobster salad did it") for the outcrops of troubles of long and perhaps of ancestral incubation.

He [24] also holds that differences between sexes are involved in every organ and tissue, and deprecates the present relentless [p. 578] zeal of intersexual competition, concerning the results of which it is appalling to speculate from a medical point of view. When the University of St. Andrews opened its theological department to woman, it was not a retrograde movement, because our ancestors did no such thing, but a downhill step fraught with confusion and disaster. He quotes with approval Huxley's phrase that "what has been decided among prehistoric protozoa can not be annulled by an act of Parliament." This is a condition that no senatus academicum can obliterate by pen strokes. In unicellular organisms the conjugating cells are alike, but forms become more and more dimorphic. As we go higher sexes diverge not only in primary and secondary sex characteristics, but in functions not associated with sex. Reciprocal dependence increases as does harmony, and each is in some respects higher and each lower. In union they are strong; in competition mutually destructive. Warner, he thinks, is right in saying that "mental stimulus applied to children lowers their general nutrition." Gastric troubles and anorexia scholastica increase, and all the abdominal viscera become more or less exhausted until often apathy passes into mild coma, "the cyclone of mania, the anti-cyclone of melancholia, the hurricane of morbid impulse, or the settled bad weather of moral perversion." Work is man's greatest enemy when he is worn out or fatigued. On this point he believes there is a growing consensus of opinion, although admitting that direct and trusty evidence is hard to obtain.

Valuable, too, is the observation [25] that women are prone from their physical constitution and their lives to desire what they have not, and for that reason alone they particularly need absorbing occupations, and are spoiled by idleness and vacuity of mind, which makes them either lazy, phlegmatic, and unambitious, or else restless. Their education should not aim to cultivate the thinking powers alone or chiefly. Woman's work is all-round work, but friendship between men and women is a great power, and intellectual oneness increases all the fruitions of married life. Men are at fault because they do not realize this possibility and are prone to be less [p. 579] interested in the minds than in the bodies of women. Love should be less haphazard and less purely sentimental, and happy marriages should be bulwarked by mental affinity, but this does not mean the higher education as now administered for women. Women are weaker in body and mind than men, but they can achieve great things even intellectually, and might take courage from examples like that of Darwin, who did much of his best work in years of such weakness that he could apply himself for only an hour or two a day. Some men, however, will perhaps always respond to the charm of weakness and even ignorance in women.

Edson [26] avers that if our race is to go on and up, no matter what our ideals, the animal basis must be kept pure and wholesome. >From 1880-'90 the birth-rate in the United States decreased from 36 per thousand inhabitants to 30, and Billings thinks the chief factor in this decline is the voluntary avoidance of child-bearing. From 1875-'85 in Massachusetts this decline was from 20.6 to 18.47. In the United States as a whole from 1860-'90 the birth-rate declined from 25.61 to 19.22. Many women are so exhausted before marriage that after bearing one or two children they become wrecks, and while there is perhaps a growing dread of parturition or of the bother of children, many of the best women feel that they have not stamina enough and are embarrassed to know what to do with their leisure. Perhaps there will have to be a "new rape of the Sabines," and if women do not improve, men will have recourse to emigrant wives, or healthy girls with stamina will have an advantage equal to that of pretty girls now.

Jankau [27] thinks that great suffering and even unhappy marriages are due to lack of knowledge of puberty and sex by teachers and youth, the essentials of which he seeks to supply in an illustrated 68-page book, which he would have the mother and not the father give to pubescent boys. In no way can she secure greater and more lasting gratitude than by very frankly stating normal facts and fully warning of dangers.[p. 580] Every youth, he asserts, indulges at least once in self-abuse, and it depends on his heredity, character, training, and instruction whether or not it becomes a confirmed habit. The symptoms and progress of gonorrhea, syphilis, chancre and its three stages, modes of treatment and even of preventive methods to be employed in intercourse are described; but in every case and stage the young sufferer must turn to his mother, if he has one, and then without delay to the physician, and must not be despised but treated with sympathy and pity. The more the father has himself sinned and suffered, the more severe and the less compassionate a counselor will he be.

Prof. E. Hegar [28] advises definite instruction in sexual hygiene for the pupils of the middle schools, based on demonstration on the cadaver; this he thinks would solemnize all the teaching in both anatomy and physiology necessary for the proper regimen, and check morbid direction of curiosity. Dr. W. Stekel, of Vienna, would have children watched by day, and especially by night, for a few years, and thinks that the sexes should never be taught in the same classes. This, too, Hegar seems to approve.

To prevent the seeds of mischief in girls at this most peculiarly sensitive age, Dr. Playfair [29] says, in substance, we must constantly bear in mind the highly emotional and sensitive nervous organization which distinguishes woman from man and affects the nature and progress of every disease to which she is subject, and especially those of the reproductive functions. Regimen during the settled establishment of the great function of menstruation determines whether she shall have stamina and powers of resistance, or perhaps, with the appearance of health, collapse to invalidism at every strain. The prime and alarming fault of the heads of high schools and colleges for girls is that they, consciously or unconsciously, assume the absolutely untenable theory that the sexual question is of secondary importance, and that there is little real distinction between girls and boys from fourteen to twenty. The distinction caused by the menstrual functions, says Dr. Playfair,[p. 581] is absolute and should be systematically attended to, while in fact the feeling of school-mistresses is directly antagonistic to every such admission. Their point of view is that there is no real difference; that what is good for one sex is good for the other; or if there is a difference, it is a relict of an evil past where woman has been cruelly denied many advantages open to man, and that identity of opportunity and occupation will open a new and happy era, when such differences as remain will vanish. Why is it then that the most characteristic diseases of girls, anemia and chlorosis, associated with menstrual disturbances, are almost never seen in boys? Physical exercise out of doors should be required, foe girls are often listless; muscular activity is the best antidote to the sentimentalism and morbid fancies so liable after puberty. For all schoolgirls, every form of corset should be absolutely forbidden. The first danger signals should be carefully watched for, and when they appear everything should give way till perfect health is restored. The recent expression of a female principal that if the function was in abeyance for a time in the teens, it was of no great consequence, for she had noticed that it came around all right afterward when the girls left school, it is feared represents a point of view far too common, but which bodes the greatest danger for the future. The development of ideal lawn-tennis girls would be a better goal for modern institutions than scholars made at such a cost.

Taylor,[30] who also bases his opinion on large experience, holds that school modesty often promotes habitual constipation, and thinks the enfeeblement, lack of luster, debility, squeamishness about food, lack of interest in life, languid confidence and lack of incentive, clammy hands so common among pubescent girls, should be combated by romping, ball, beanbags, battledore, hoops, running, golf, tennis, bicycling, self-bathing in cold water, deep-breathing exercises once or twice a day, etc., rather than by systematic physical culture; that too early interest in the refinements of life arrests development and that nothing should be undertaken, especially at [p. 582] this age, by girls which can not be entered into with great heartiness and spontaneity. Interesting, too, are his suggestions on the psycho-pedagogy of flattery. Dr. Smith [31] states that "a very large per cent of females in every physician's practise are affected more or less by mental troubles, owing to menstrual disorders."

Henry T. Finck [32] insists that women attach far too much importance to politics; that their sphere is domestic, ninety-four out of every hundred marrying; that they control the all-determining first five years of a child's life and manners, which are almost as important as morals. One of the great functions of motherhood, he says, is to find husbands for daughters. The latter are often neglected, and vanity, which prompts American girls to dress like heiresses, produces, in his opinion, nearly as much unhappiness as whisky. In great cities superfine dressing opens pitfalls of temptation. He thinks the suffragists should take hold of solvable problems like that of servants and of gastronomy, until the kitchen is transformed into an art studio. They should develop the arts of entertainment, none of which are complete without a woman. Instead of becoming greedy money-makers, they should serve as an antidote to our extreme commercialism and politicism. Ten per cent more girls than boys are on the way to college in our high schools. Men's right to decide what women should be like is "inalienable and eternal." Men will continue to make women what they want them to be by marrying those who correspond to their ideals; thus real womanly women are not doomed.

Max O'Rell denies that Paris is a paradise of women, but declares that if he could be born again and select his life, he would be born an American woman. The female is higher than the male and represents more nearly than he the type which man is approaching. Woman's virtues are of a much higher quality than those of the male. In ancient days the virtues most admired were masculine -- courage and patriotism; but now, with Christianity, the female virtues of mod-[p. 583]esty, charity, chastity, etc., take precedence. Finck agrees with Ruskin that there has never been "a loveliness so variably refined, so modestly and kindly virtuous, so innocently fantastic, and so daintily pure as the present girl beauty of our British Isles," who is "nothing but soul and tenderness." Heine's poem "Du bist wie eine Blume," where woman is likened to a flower, Finck says has been set to music nearly two hundred times or more often than any poem in existence. This writer objects strongly to Miss I. H. Harper's statement that most women would gladly devote the years necessary to rearing two or three children, but object to giving up more time to this function. He thinks that sex in mind is no less marked than that in body and is steadily unfolding.

Prof. A. W. Small thinks that to train women to compete with men is like poison administered as a medicine, the evils being quite as bad as the disease. He doubts that on the whole women are better than men, because you can not compare things so different, and each have an equal right to do what they can do. The question of voting is merely one of social expediency. "The distinctively social mission of college women is to counterpoise women." The latter is so absorbing that none exclusively devoted to it can lead rounded lives. Women must be stewardesses of the mysteries of appropriate human life, so that aspiration for its adornments be not arrested. Men are weak in spiritual elements which college women may enforce. She is too ready to surrender her leverage.

III. Health and its Tests. -- In view of this consensus of professional opinion, let us turn to the question of the health of educated American women, which is the chief criterion of the value of all institutions which affect it. The first comprehensive statistical investigation [33] on college women was made in 1882 and included 705 graduates of 12 colleges, who answered 40 questions of a circular. Of these, 44 per cent said they did not worry over studies, 60 per cent reported having had some disorder, and those who studied hard had bad health. Of the whole number, 239 abstained from phys-[p. 584]ical, 2 from mental labor, and 73 from both, during their periods. Of the 705, only 169 never had any trouble at these times, and of course more had been sickly during the age of first menstruation than in college.

Professor Dewey found that of 290 college girls,[34] those who reported good health on entering college were 78.1 per cent; those during college, 74.9; those after graduation, 77.9. Again, 19.6 per cent reported deterioration of health during college; 44.4 per cent reported that they did not worry. In the period of pubescence, 53 per cent were troubled by pains, irregularity, etc.; during college life, 66 per cent, and after it, 64 per cent. Of those who entered college one or two years after the commencement of menstruation, 20.5 reported bad health; of those who entered from three to five years after, 17.7 per cent; of those who entered five years or more after, 154 per cent. Of those who entered at sixteen or less, 28 per cent lost in health and 17 per cent gained; of those who entered over twenty, 18 per cent lost and 28.5 per cent gained. After graduation, 83 per cent reported good health and 17 per cent bad. Among female colleges 55 per cent reported abstinence from study or exercises during menstruation, and in coeducational colleges 25 per cent. In coeducational colleges 33 per cent studied seriously, as did 26 in female colleges. On the whole, Dewey concluded that one-third more break down from emotional strain in female colleges than in coeducational institutions.

A later investigator [35] found a far more hopeful state of things. Of over 200 college girls it was found that 57 per cent suffered no prostration; 29.8 per cent were free from pain; 72.7 per cent were regular; and that only 2.75 per cent dropped out from ill health as against 2.85 per cent of college boys from Amherst. Of the causes for the interruption of studies, nervous debility leads, and headaches and imperfect eyesight follow. Of the complaints of 1,000 students who consulted the author during her six years at Smith, 30,8 per cent were for catarrhal disorders, 17 for digestive, 11 for [p. 585] menstrual, 8 for nervous, etc. Scanty was far more common than excessive flow, and this excess is greatest in the autumn, where most of the suppressions fall.[36]

Mrs. Sidgwick in England and Miss Hayes [37] in this country asked 32 and 42 questions respectively, the former addressed to 4 English and the latter to 12 American coeducational institutions. The results show that the Americans are better throughout, although it is possible that the 15 per cent of the English students and the 35 per cent of the American students, who did not answer the questionnaire, may have contained a large proportion of those who were ill. The American girls enter three and a half years younger than the English. The older worry more about personal and family matters. In the United States more improve than deteriorate during college, while the reverse seems true in England. We do not know whether a higher average of health is implied in the desire to go to college. In the following Miss Hayes has shown the [p. 586] relative healthfulness of these women on entering, during, and after college.

Dr. Mary P. Jacobi insists "there is nothing in the nature of menstruation to imply the necessity or even the desirability of rest for a woman whose menstruation is really normal," and advises college girls never to pursue a course of study that can not be kept up during this period. Graduates, it is urged, ought to have superior health, and female colleges should not admit invalids. She coincides with Miss Hayes that there is nothing at all in university education especially injurious to the constitution of women or involving a greater strain than they can ordinarily bear without injury, so that they often pass through college without its affecting their health either way. Colleges probably tend to check rather than favor hysteria. Mental training disciplines the feeling and increases the will power, and sometimes transforms a weak, sentimental girl into an honest, healthy woman. Many claim to be better during their college course than at entrance upon it. This is ascribed partly to change of climate, but more to the influences of interesting employment, freedom from petty home cares, congenial companionship, and learning how to take care of their health. Surprisingly different are the results of Dr. [p. 587] Engelmann's [38] study of 4,873 cases of school and college girls. He found irregularity in about 50 per cent and far more are retarded. His table is as follows:

Engelmann urges that "progress of surgery and reduction of mortality have been considered too much and woman and her morbidity too little." Prevention, which is now the watchword, must be based on a study of conditions which interfere [p. 588] with a healthy performance of the female function during the great waves of sexual life. "Many a young life is battered and forever crippled in the breakers of puberty; if it cross these unharmed and is not dashed to pieces on the rock of childbirth, it may still ground on the ever-recurring shallows of menstruation, and, lastly, upon the final bar of the menopause ere protection is found in the unruffled waters of the harbor beyond the reach of sexual storms." He holds mental stimulus to be the chief cause of sexual precocity in girls. He finds from the census of 1890 there were 32,751 young women in American colleges and 341,736 in secondary educational institutions, and it is these, he thinks, who preeminently need attention, although there are about 1,000,000 more between fifteen and twenty who are working for wages. The effects of mental strain in schoolgirls are most seen in increased frequency of menstruation. In college the freshman year is marked by most irregularity, and change of surroundings almost always delays the courses, often amounting to amenorrhea for two or three months. Schrader found this in 57 per cent of his 114 cases. Dr. Wood writes that it is surprising how quickly college life affects this function. Debility, on the other hand, shortens the intervals and increases the pain and amount of the flow. Examinations, Engelmann thinks, are "more deleterious to functional health than any other one cause in college life."

On the basis of a long study, Celia D. Mosher, M.D.,[40] prints some interesting preliminary conclusions concerning menstruation, that a rhythmic fall of blood pressure at definite intervals occurs in both men and women. Along with this, subjective observation of the sense of well-being shows concomitant variations, the sense of maximum efficiency of the individual, corresponding to the time when the pressure is high, and lessened efficiency to the periods of low pressure, the latter in both sexes being a period of increased susceptibility. If symptoms of any kind appear, they should come at the point of least resistance, or low pressure. This is true of digestive disturbances, catarrh, etc. The author believes [p. 589] that the tradition that women must suffer and be incapacitated at these times tends to increase the sense of lessened efficiency, especially in women without education and without absorbing occupations. Much, usually ascribed to dysmenorrhea, is really a coincident functional disturbance of other organs, induced perhaps by the favoring condition of lowered general blood pressure occurring near the periods.

A college girl or graduate confronted with a questionnaire knows well that if she confesses pain or ill health, it may contribute to increase the prejudice against the cause of education which she has dearly at heart, and normally is as reluctant to confess illness as a boy is to confess muscular weakness. The latter, however, can be tested, while there is no good criterion of health, which more perhaps than anything else in the world is especially dependent on subjective and uncontrollable factors. Every psychologist knows that pain is hard to gauge and harder yet to remember, and that general euphoria and disphoria are more matters of disposition, environment, habit of control, time of the month, etc., than of true symptomatic value. Again, confession of real illness is the last thing a normal girl will make. It means the abandonment of hope and life prospects, and is usually concealed even to herself as long as possible. Hence I attach very slight value to questionnaire returns in this field, and therefore think it more probable that the doctor's objective and personal tests and opinions are nearer the truth. If so, we must reluctantly conclude that it is, to say the very least, not yet proven that the higher education of women is not injurious to their health.

But even if she is personally as well or even better than man, the question is not settled, for she is far more liable than he to overdraw her reproductive power and consume in good looks, activity of mind and body, and other augmentations of her individuality, energy meant for the altruism of home and of posterity. The danger of this subtle process, so attractively masked and insidiously disguised from both the victim and her friends, is probably far greater and more common than any form of measurable deterioration. Almost the only indexes we have of this change are found in marriage-rates and natality, and if we apply these tests higher education for women must be more severely judged.[p. 590]

IV. Nubility of Educated Women. -- Mrs. Howes found about one-fourth and Dewey concluded that 23 per cent of the graduates of women's colleges marry; 21 per cent go into the professions; 28 per cent of coeducation girls marry, and 12 per cent go into the professions. From coeducational colleges 48 per cent teach as against 42 from the women's colleges.

The editor of the Overland Monthly [41] found from the register of the year 1890, including 1,078 names of the New England coeducational colleges, that 24.7 were married as against 14.8 of the graduates of the women's colleges. In New York, of the graduates of the preceding twelve years, these percentages were 25.7 and 20.6 respectively, and of all coeducational colleges 34.8 were married as against 22.9 of the women's colleges. If middle-aged women are excluded and the survey limited to the graduates of the eight years preceding 1859,[42] the New England female colleges showed 11 per cent married, coeducational colleges 26 per cent, the New York female colleges 15.1 per cent, and the Western coeducational colleges 36 per cent. Dewey [43] makes 26 per cent of the graduates of twelve American collegiate institutions at an average age of twenty-seven and six years out of college married, and 74 per cent single. Dr. Smith [44] gathered statistics from 343 college-bred and married women from thirty colleges and from their sisters, cousins, and friends otherwise trained, in order to compare equal social classes. Before 23 she found the number of non-college women married in proportion to married graduates as 30 to 8 per cent; from 23 to 32 as 64 to 83 per cent; and over 33 as 5 to 7 per cent. The age of most frequent marriage for non-college women is 23; for college women 25; and the mean age of marriage for the former is 24.3 years; of the latter, 26.3 years. The average number of years of married life of college-bred girls is 9.6, three years less than their sisters; two less than their cousins; and two and a half less than their friends. More than half the college women [p. 591] studied were teachers and three-fourths had secured economic independence before marriage. Seventy-seven per cent of the graduates married college men as against 51 per cent of the non-graduates.

Miss Shinn [45] later studied the marriage-rate of the Association of Collegiate Alumna comprising fifteen leading colleges. Of 1,805 enrolled in 1895, only 28 per cent were married, the rate for the country at large for women over 20 being nearly 80 per cent; she concluded that "under 25 college women rarely marry," and "that but a small proportion of them have married." Of 277 of the latest three classes but 10 were married; taking only those graduates past 25, 32.7 per cent; after 30, 43.7; after 35, 49.7; after 40, 54 per cent were married. "The ultimate probability of a college woman's marriage, therefore, seems to be below 55 per cent as against 90 per cent for other women." Taking five-year periods, most of them marry between 25 and 30. Of all the 1805 considered, 1,134, "early 63 per cent, are from colleges for women alone, and of these only 25.7 were married against 32.6 of those from coeducational colleges, although the latter average 0.7 of a year older than those from the women's colleges. College women marry least of all in the North Atlantic States, 23.7 per cent as against 37 per cent of the graduates of the Middle States colleges. Many of these graduates become teachers, and for no station in life save that of a nun, we are told, is marriage so unlikely as for resident teachers in a private girls' school, although this is a position mostly preferred by graduates from women's colleges, while women graduates from coeducational institutions prefer teaching in the public high schools. Miss Abbott [46] found that of 1,022 Vassar graduates 37.6 per cent taught, and suggested that the association of alumnæ may be recruited largely from teachers. Her conclusions agree with those of Miss Shinn, that college women marry late and in far less ratio than others.

Bryn Mawr [47] reports that in January, 1900, of the class [p. 592] of 1889, its oldest class, 40.7 per cent were married; of the first six classes ending with graduation in 1894, 30 per cent; of the first nine classes, 20.9 per cent; and of the first eleven classes ending in 1899, 15.2 per cent. This shows the importance of time and also how exceptionally old these graduates marry. The same result is shown by the following table:

It may be wrong to infer that if a small percentage of college women marry, it is the college that diverts them or that they are less desirable to men. Some who go to college desire marriage less or single careers more, so that one writer [48] is surprised that there is not less marriage among girl graduates and thinks college education actually promotes it by making many marriageable who would not be so otherwise. College girls certainly have a prolonged period of probation with diverted interest. During their course, according to another writer, very many receive and reject propositions of marriage in order to complete their education, but of course no statistics are available upon this point. Yet another says [49] that college [p. 593] women as a class need less to look to marriage as a means of support, and most who must at once earn their living teach. A woman, who was earning $60 a month and resigned to marry a man earning $40, exhibited rare devotion. Whether mercenary motives are increased by the luxury and expensive tastes and interests of college; whether, having tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge, women are not less inclined to renounce it for domestic life, can not be discussed on a basis of facts or statistics.

By corresponding with class secretaries and correlating their data with those kept at the college offices, I have gathered the latest and perhaps the fullest data yet published on the marriage and fecundity of female graduates for three leading colleges.[50] If there remain errors they are those of incomplete returns and show rather too few marriages, births, and deaths than too many, but great effort has been taken to reduce this error to a minimum. If such a census includes all graduates up to within a year or even two of its date, the total number of marriages rarely exceeds one-fourth, for those who wed are slow to do so. The last ten classes to graduate, if taken by themselves, would show a yet far smaller proportion married. From Vassar there were 323 graduates in the first ten classes, 1867-'76, of whom, in the spring of 1903, 179, or 55.4 per cent, had married. In the next ten classes there were 378 graduates, of whom 192 were married, 50.7 per cent. In the third ten classes, 1887-'96, were 603 graduates, of whom 169, or 28 per cent, were married. In Smith College, during the first ten years ending with the class of 1888, there were 370 graduates, of whom, in the spring of 1903, 158, or 42.7 per cent, were married. Of the next ten classes, including that of 1898, there were 1,130 graduates, of whom 331, or 28.3 per cent, were married. In Wellesley, during the first ten years ending with the class of 1888, there were 436 graduates, of whom, in the spring of 1903, 203, or 46.5 per cent, were married. In the next ten classes, ending with the class of 1898, there were 1,162 graduates, of whom 296, or 25.4 per [p. 594] cent were married. From these data it appears that not very far from one-half of the graduates of all these colleges who marry, or about a fourth of all, do so after they have been out of college from ten to fifteen years, at an age of at least thirty, and that a large part of the other fourth who marry do so as late as forty. The results of this late age upon fecundity is, as we shall see later, about what might be inferred.

The tu quoque retort which many women love to make to men has too much basis, although the facts show results only about half as bad. Mr. Deming's admirable figures for Yale show 21.6 per cent of the Yale classes from 1861-'79 as unmarried, and the Harvard record from 1870-'79 is 26.5 per cent. President Eliot's figures for the Harvard classes of 1872-77, although we find them somewhat unfavorably erroneous, show 28 per cent, mostly now between forty and fifty years of age, unmarried. This proportion has greatly increased, for at Yale only about two per cent of the men of corresponding age in the last century were unmarried. Then, also, men married earlier, and it was customary for clergymen, who constituted a far larger proportion of graduates than now, to marry immediately after ordination, the average age of graduation being twenty-one. Indeed, this was necessary, for domestic service was rare, especially in rural districts, and a wife was necessary to do the work of housekeeping. "The average age of marriage for women was under twenty-one, many marrying in the teens, and several marriages at the age of fourteen are recorded."[51] "Remarriage was almost universal for both men and women, economic conditions rendering it a necessity." "Forty per cent of the wives of Yale graduates from 1701-'05 did not live to bring up their children, and it took a second, and frequently in large families a third woman,. to complete the work. The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another woman's children." Of the wives of Harvard graduates between the years 1658-'90 37.3 per cent died under the age of forty-five.

V. Fecundity of Educated Women. -- Here the matter is worse yet for educated women. Natality rates show the [p. 595] springs of national growth or decay, and only the constant influx of foreigners prevents us from realizing the ominous forebodings with which France is facing the problem of a steady decadence of birth-rates, which prompted and circulated such a book as Zola's Fruitfulness. In a significant paper by Dr. Allen,[52] on the New England family, which was the germ of American civilization, and where for two hundred years the homes were well-nigh models, it is shown how the birth-rate has steadily declined for half a century and that at a very rapid rate until it is lower than that of any European nation, France itself not excepted. In 1875, there were 359,000 families in Massachusetts; of these, 23,739 consisted of only one person, 115,456 of only two, and 140,974 of only three persons. Dr. Allen estimated that only one-half of the New England mothers could properly nurse their offspring, and that the number who could do so was constantly decreasing. While failure to do so might be often due to lack of wish, it was usually due to undeveloped mammary glands, feeble digestion, and nervousness. This state of things, he assures us, can be found to anything like the same extent nowhere else and among no other nation or race in history. Foreign families, especially if they acquire property, approach this condition a few years after they land on our shores. The Jews and our grandmothers thought barrenness a curse, but now the bearing and rearing of large families is felt to belong to low life. Love of offspring is less intense; woman's organization is changing under new conditions. Housekeeping, especially as a vocation which used to be one of the most hygienic and ennobling occupations for body and mind, is despised and evaded, and the influence of home is diminishing. Modes of life are artificial and too expensive, so that marriages are later as well as fewer, the death-rate of infants among old New England families is increasing, and so are abortions and divorces. Invalids make poor home-builders, poor husbands, wives, and worse fathers and mothers. From 1886 to 1891, both inclusive, 103,733 children were born in families where both parents were natives; 104,884 where both were foreign;[p. 596] 39,292 in families where one parent was native and the other foreign. During the same years 156,225 native-born inhabitants of Massachusetts and 40,176 foreign born died. The deaths of native Americans exceeded the deaths of the foreign born by 29,796, which, adding half the deaths of unknown or mixed parentage among the foreign of the State, make the births exceed the deaths by 87,824. The foreign-born inhabitants of the State, including less than one-fourth, give birth to more than one-half of the children.[53] First among the causes of the decline, Dr. Ellis [54] places physical and mental inability to bear and care for children, at the proper period, and secondly, he places unwillingness to sacrifice ease, freedom, and enjoyment involved in parenthood, the disposition to put pleasure in place of duty, the effeminacy of wealth, the new woman movement, and foeticide, and he pleads for domestic labor as one of the best correctives. Comparing the forty years ending 1890, the native marriages average 2.3 children each, while those of the foreign born average 7.4 each.

Sterility [55] is of all degrees, from total up to inability to produce a goodly number of children who mature well through adolescence and can themselves produce healthy offspring. It is vastly more complex in woman than in man, and, according to the averages of statistics from many sources, Duncan concludes, is due to the wife about six times as often as to the husband. In Great Britain, one of the most prolific of all lands, about one-tenth of all marriages are now unfruitful. The relative sterility of the one-child system occurs in England once in about thirteen fruitful marriages, and those without offspring sixteen months after marriage are beginning to be sterile, as also are those who do not at their best period bear a child every twenty months. The average age of cessation in Great Britain is thirty-eight years, and a woman who begins to bear children at the age of twenty to twenty-five should continue for ten or fifteen years. Fertile marriages in England average, in fact, about six living children each.[p. 597] The first child is a source of danger to the mother, about one-fifteenth of whom die, while only one in forty-eight die at the second birth.

The chief cause of all degrees of unfertility is, according to Duncan, overnutrition, and this is true down through the animal and even in the plant world. Overfeeding or fat production in the female is not only unfavorable to fertility, but illustrates how undue emphasis laid upon individuation is antithetical to generation. The relative childlessness of heiresses is a case in point. Excessive sexual indulgence and excitement are potent deterrents. Excess of desire and pleasure are often compensated by defect in reproductive energy, and so are too early marriages. "Women married under twenty years of age have much more sterility than women married from twenty to twenty-four, and the sterility of marriage before twenty is less than that after twenty-four, and from this point it gradually increases with the age of marriage." Premature and postmature women, too, have smaller children. Sterility is not a specific disease, but is the intricate product of causes as complex as modern civilization. While the rapid progress of gynecology has shed floods of light upon it, its larger problems are yet very far from solution.

Duncan had previously found [56] that the mortality of children was less if the mother's age was twenty-one to twenty-five than at any other quinquad; that the age of least puerperal mortality was twenty-five, and increased above and below; that the number of twins reached its maximum between twenty-five and twenty-nine; that children of mothers in these years were heaviest at birth and grew tallest; that the greatest viable fecundity was at twenty-six, the fathers being thirty-one and three-tenths; that although the shortest interval between births was when the mother was twenty-six, marriage when she was below twenty-five was more fertile than after, and that the quinquad of greatest fecundity was twenty to twenty-five. In his Republic, Plato said men should bear children from thirty to fifty-five and women from twenty to forty, while Aristotle thought the man should marry at thirty-seven and the woman at eighteen. Duncan said that [p. 598] while thirty-three women attain the age of eighteen, only twenty-eight men live to be thirty-seven; that in nine measurements the womb grew after twenty (although Hecker thought the number of pregnancies was a factor) and continued to grow in length till near the end of the fertile period; that the mortality of first confinements was twice that of all subsequent ones, and that mothers died least often in second confinement between twenty and twenty-five. Many who marry before twenty have no children, but if only those who do so are included, the years from sixteen to twenty are most fertile.

According to the very careful statistics compiled by Orschansky,[57] the rate of productivity or rapidity of births is greatest in women married at eighteen, and decreases generally afterward. The stature of both boys and girls at birth is greatest when the mother's age is twenty-seven to twenty-eight, and also with the fifth or sixth child born, as most pelvic diameters continue to grow to this age. The productive period ends earlier with mothers who begin to bear children young.

Körösi,[58] who tabulated data for 71,800 married couples, found that the maximal natality of mothers began between the ages of eighteen and nineteen, when the annual probability of birth was 44.6 and 42.2 respectively. This means that nearly one wife out of two will give birth to a child within a year from marriage. From twenty this probability declines, and at twenty-five is only 31.5 per cent; at thirty it is 24; at thirty-five it is 16; and at forty, 8 per cent. Comparable statistics for Berlin and Sweden, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Norway, and Denmark, resembled closely those of Budapest. With fathers, the highest natality is at twenty-five, when it is 38.9 per cent; at thirty it is 31.7; at thirty-five, 23; and at forty, 15 per cent. We may bet, says Körösi, 70 to 1 against a child being born of a mother aged forty-five, and 7 to 1 against a father having a child during his fortieth year. Bigenous natality, i. e., where the age of both parents is considered, gives results quite different from these monogenous tables.[p. 599] By making the complex combination necessary, it was found that for every year between twenty and forty, mothers acquired the highest natality possible to their age with fathers under thirty; while the latter reach their maximal natality with women under twenty, so that men between thirty-five and forty-five should choose wives between twenty and twenty-five, and those of forty-five to fifty, wives of twenty-five to thirty. His data also shows the interesting result that women under twenty-eight should choose older, and those above twenty-eight, younger husbands than themselves, while men at all ages have the greatest chance of offspring with wives younger than themselves. The most prolific marriages are when the woman is eighteen to twenty and the husband twenty-four to twenty-six. In a separate research Körösi showed that if healthy children, or those who lived to mature, be considered, the age of greatest fecundity fell about a year later.[59] If the father's age goes up, that of the mother declines, but not quite in the same degree, i. e., if the father is thirty-one, the mother should be thirty-one, total, 62; if he is forty, she should be twenty-four, total, 64. These lines plotted, Galton calls isogens.[60] If these are based on sufficient data, we can calculate the plus or minus age distance of the husband from his wife at each year which is likely to result in most children.[61]

Compiling from the census reports a table regarding the decreasing average in the size of families in the several sections of the country we have the following:

R. R. Kuczynski [63] shows that in the period from 1883 to 1897 the general marriage-rate of the foreign-born in this country was three-fourths higher than that of the native-born. From 1887 to 1889 the native-born in Massachusetts have the smallest general marriage-rate. In the three censuses of 1885, 1890, and 1895, the proportion of the married among the natives was less than one-third, while the proportion among the foreign-born exceeded one-half. The native population of Massachusetts has a special birth-rate of 6.3 births for one hundred adult women in child-bearing age, whereas in Berlin the annual rate of ten for every hundred women was proven to be not quite sufficient to keep up its population, so that this State is dying at a rapid pace. The number of adult native men living in wedlock in 1885 to 1895 was three-fifths, of foreign-born, two-thirds. The proportion of native adult women living in wedlock was six-thirteenths; of foreign-born, seven-thirteenths. In 1895 the number of women who were married but childless was one-fifth among the natives, and two-fifteenths among the foreign-born. "The average number of children born to every foreign-born married woman was two-thirds higher than for the natives, viz., four-sevenths higher among German women, six-sevenths among Irish, twice as high among French Canadian women." From 1883 to 1897 the special birth-rate of foreign-born adult women was more than twice as high as for the natives.

Engelmann,[64] from 1,700 cases, found that a little over twenty per cent of married women in America are childless, although his definition of sterility was the condition of those married three years without offspring. (Simpson's standard rate of sterility is eleven per cent.) Thus, he concludes that "the extremes of sterility are reached in this country." Among the laboring classes in St. Louis he found 2.1 children per married couple, in Boston he found it 1.7; in Michigan, 1.8 in recent years, but for the twenty-five years ending in 1895, 2.1. Mrs. Smith finds that among college [p. 602] female graduates the lowest fecundity prevails, 1.6. The relatives of these girls, who do not go to college, are more prolific, 1.89. In England, among female college graduates, there are 1.53 children to a marriage, while the average fertility of English women in the Victorian Year-Book is put down as 4.2. In Engelmann's genealogical records from 1600 to 1750, he found each marriage producing on the average at least six children, a number which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was reduced to 4.5. Benjamin Franklin stated that, one and all considered, each married couple in this country produced eight children. Indeed, Malthus uses the United States and Canada as the basis of his theory for super-fecundation, and, according to his table, the United States leads with a fecundation of 5.2. French Canadians to-day probably exceed all others, with an average fecundity of about 9.2 children per child-bearing mother. In a recent Russian district there were 7.2; in Norway, 5.8 children per family.

Herbert Spencer declared that "absolute or relative infertility is generally produced in women by mental labor carried to excess." This has probably been nowhere better illustrated than by college graduates. Miss Howes found that of 705 graduates, 196 were married, but 66 of these had no children, while the remaining 130 had 232 living children, or 1.7+ each, and had borne 31 who had died. On the important topic of the age of marriage, she says nothing. In Mrs. Sidgwick's census only 10.25 per cent of the English graduates and 19.5 per Cent of their sisters were married, and of these 72.4 and 63.2 per cent respectively had children and of these g and 31 per cent were dead. An anonymous writer [65] computes that of the 27.8 per cent of 2,000 college women who married, 66 per cent had no children. Dewey found that of the married, whom he studied, 37 per cent had no children, although the average number of years of married life was 6.2; 109 bore 202 children, of whom 12 per cent died, and of those who died about one-quarter died from causes connected with parturition. If all married female graduates in this report were taken together, there would be 1.2 children to [p. 603] every five years of married life. If we exclude those bearing no children, there are two children to seven years of married life. The non-graduate English sisters of the four colleges Mrs. Sidgwick included in her survey bore 64 more children than the same number of married graduates. President Thomas, in her valuable monograph, ignores this topic, and there are no available statistics on this subject for Bryn Mawr.

While from the knowledge at hand it is plain that our race would be speedily extinct if it depended upon the rate of replenishment of the educated classes, this is met by the widespread view expressed long ago by an intellectually gifted woman,[66] that further human evolution requires a decline in fertility. High nervous development augments the completeness, intensity, and fulness of individual life, but weakens the power of its transmission. "Evolution is thus seen to provide for the intellectual elevation of woman by constantly decreasing demands upon her for the performance of those functions which are purely physical." When only an average of two children is required, the barrier to woman's intellectual development will be slight. And she even adds that her sexual life is often in danger of unfolding at the expense of intellect, etc. Is not the reverse true of this class.

Two cultured German ladies,[67] who undertook a comprehensive psychological and sociological study, with the aid of an international committee and questionnaire, have collected opinions and data concerning actresses, female musicians, artists, poets, women devoted to science, journalism, agitation, and essay writing, from all of which they are led to conclude that mental work on the part of women in any of the above fields does not interfere with fruitfulness or with nursing. Culture, they deem absolute necessity, and its ideal harmonization with the life of woman a problem practically solved. The individual testimonies are numerous, varied, and interesting, but are by no means all in the line of these conclusions. The professional women, chiefly considered here, certainly on their own testimony have generally excellent [p. 604] health; some even insist that pregnancy gives added power of work. To be sure, some testify, the children of such women lack imagination, moral duality, affection, and other powers, not perhaps so easily obvious to parents as to others. Indeed, a report might be made out from these data that would strongly confirm views almost exactly the reverse of the conclusions of these authors.

My statistics,[68] gathered, like those on marriage-rate, from three colleges by correspondence with the class secretaries, are as follows: The total number of children born to the 55.4 per cent of Vassar graduates of the first ten classes ending with that of 1876 who married was 365, or 3.09 per mother, or 2.03 per married member, 58 married members having no children. Of the next ten classes, ending with that of 1886, 294 children had been born up to the spring of 1903, 2.57 per mother, or 1.53 per married member, 78 married members having no children. The 28 per cent married of the graduates of the next ten years, ending in 1896, bore 135 children, or 1.58 per mother, or 0.79 per married member, 84 married members having no children. Of the Smith graduates of the first ten years, ending with the class of 1888, had been born in the spring of 1903, 315 children, 2.08 per mother, or 1.99 per married member, 7 having no children, and 26 children having died. Of six of the next ten classes ending with that of 1898, reporting, there were 161 children, or 1.22 per mother, or 0.77 per married member, 78 married members having no children, and 9 children having died. Of the eight out of the first ten classes of Wellesley, ending with that of 1888, reporting, there were 311 children, or 2.37 per mother, or 1.81 per married member, 40 married members having no children, and of these children 25 were dead. Of five of the ten Wellesley classes, ending with that of 1898, reporting, there were 176 children, or 1.67 per mother, or 1.04 per married member, 64 married members having no children, and 11 children having died. These figures need no comment.

Turning to male colleges, we find that of the Harvard classes graduating from 1860 to 1878, the average number [p. 605] of children per married man ranges between the extreme of 1.83 and 2.71. The classes 1870 to 1879 average 1.95 per married man and 1.43 per graduate. Amherst shows a steady decline from four and five children in the earlier decades till, for the six classes ending with that of 1878, the extremes are 2.4, and 2.92 per father. At Wesleyan the six classes ending with that of 1870 show a maximum of 2.71 and a minimum of 1.37 per married man. At Yale the classes 1872 to 1878 average 1.96 per married man, and 1.27 per graduate. At Bowdoin the classes 1871 to 1877 average only 1.23 per class member. The size of families of male graduates has greatly declined, those of six and more being once frequent and now very rare, while families of one, two, and three children only have increased. This is due to many causes, economic and other. Engelmann concludes that the "male college graduate does more toward reproducing the population than does the native American of other classes."[69] But these data for native fecundity are based only on certain classes in two cities and are therefore too meager, while this standard of comparison should be the country. The delay of marriage is often very marked, and the increasing number of men who do marry and have no children now ranges all the way from 10 to 30 per cent. The record of children who die is too incomplete for inferences or comparisons. It would certainly seem that college men who do marry have little if any advantage in fecundity over college women, and that the higher education is sterilizing in its results for both in nearly the same degree. Even families where either parent is a graduate, especially if infant mortality is taken into account, fall considerably short of reproducing themselves, while if we consider classes as wholes, women are nearly twice as far from doing so as men, because but half as many of them marry. Any college that depended on the children of its graduates would be doomed to extinction, less than one-seventh of the entering classes of Harvard, e. g., being descendants of previous graduates. Colleges have grown and educated classes increased till some professions are overcrowded, but old families are being plowed under and lead-[p. 606]ers are recruited from the class below, so that the question of race suicide is a very different matter, and the bearing of these facts upon the question of shortening the college course less direct. Perhaps the inference from all these facts is that the stage of apprenticeship to life should be prolonged, if graduates represent the advance guard of progress, bearing the chief burden of the advance and often falling in the front line of battle, because success is ever harder and progress ever more costly. To give $10,000 tastes and aspirations on $1,000 incomes tends to delay and perhaps repress the desire for a family, and the best: years for genesis are lost. Once marriage and children were felt to be religious, if not also patriotic, duties, and now many, but not all, bachelors who shirk it without adequate excuse should perhaps be taxed progressively beyond a certain age. In the best periods of the best races, too, there has been a wholesome sentiment that both wedlock and parenthood were needed for the full maturity of the individual, and that if this stage of development was not attained, the moral, mental, and physical nature was liable to warp.

(a) Galton has shown us by convincing figures that if a woman is not married before twenty-eight and the man a few years later, even the most fertile races are doomed to extinction far sooner than those with low natality, because there are not enough children born after this age to keep up the population. "Postponement of marriage on the part of a woman conduces to infertility, as the reproductive system, if unused, becomes inoperative." About one-fourth of the children born are of mothers whose age does not exceed twenty-four, according to Coghlan,[70] and before women pass their twenty-eighth year they give birth to one-half their offspring. Women who marry after thirty can not expect more than two children, and after twenty-six not more than three. The age of women at marriage is the chief factor in determining the number of her children, the younger the more numerous the offspring, and this rule appears to hold even where the woman marries at an immature age. The proportion of fertile marriages is becoming very gradually less in most civilized lands.[p. 607]

(b) Again, unless we insist on extreme Weismannism, as few biologists now do we must admit that children born of generations of cultured ancestry have some advantage, even though their parents do not live to see their birth, over those born of the lowest classes, postnatal environment and nurture being the same in the two cases. If this be so, each generation ought to add a little, infinitesimal though it be, to progress in that most ancient form of wealth and worth which birth bestows, so that rotation of classes, while it may have many advantages, is thus bought at a very dear price.

(c) Another principle involved, suggested by the statistics of natality and by biological considerations, is that, while children born of parents slightly immature are liable to remain undeveloped, or, at least, have peculiar difficulties in coming to full maturity of powers of mind and body, those born of parents in slightly post-mature years tend more or less to precocity. The generalization here important is that by youthful parents heredity is more confined to older and lower dualities, so that those who attain sexual maturity early do not advance the phyletic series. Species and individuals, on the other hand, that attain propagative power late, make for progress of the stock, because they have not only the wealth of heredity in its completeness, but contribute individual additions, infinitesimal though they may be. Very early marriages, therefore, tend to the decay of culture and civilization, and all conditions that make for its "neotenia" are retrogressive, and each generation must reacquire everything anew because young parents transmit nothing not transmitted to them. Conversely, if we follow Mehnert,[71] hyperheredity due to long delay of propagation may be a factor for accounting for the overgrowth of the horns of certain stags, some of the monsters of the geologic past, and other hypertrophied organs of individual species and functions, even those of genius.

(d) Closely connected with this is a law brought out with ominous suggestiveness by child study, viz., that only children, and, to some extent, offspring limited to a pair of children, tend to be feeble and need special care.

(e) Another general consideration also pertinent in this [p. 608] discussion is, that the children of the rich tend to be prematurely or over-individualized, and those of the poor to be under-individualized by their postnatal environment, even where the age of parenthood remains the same.

(f) Not only are families produced by parents who marry late, small; but another consideration, often overlooked in this discussion, is that they are still more outbred by those who marry young, because, while the latter have four or sometimes even five generations per century, the former have perhaps three or even less. This reduces still more the ratio of increase.

(g) Yet another principle which I think may be suggested as following from the above is that if the children of post-mature parents mature early, such children themselves, if they marry, should do so earlier than those who mature late; hence, if they marry at the same age at which their parents did, they are biologically and psychologically older when they do so than were their parents, so that the evils of post-mature fertility increase in successive generations even if the age of marriage remains the same.

(h) One test of the complete domestication of an animal species is not only that it tends to grow larger than its wild congeners, but to breed well. This, too, is a test of the possibility of permanent captivity. Now, if we consider civilization as the domestication of man by himself, we may apply this criterion as an effective test of its soundness. This principle, too, would seem to apply to any trade or industry, or to any social class, or to educated classes. If so, it follows either that education is per se bad, when considered from a large racial point, or else that a postulate is laid upon us to find, as the right way of education, one which shall not tend to sterility. Otherwise, if higher education became universal, posterity would gradually be eliminated and the race progressively exterminated by schools and teachers.

With these ideas in view a peculiar pathos attaches to those who early in life have not wanted offspring, but do so when it begins to be a little too late. Many such parents console themselves by lavishing upon one or two care enough for half a dozen children. The result of this is, that instead of broadening by retarding their development, their offspring are [p. 609] robbed of many elements of a proper childhood, pass too rapidly over the developmental stages, and are hastened on to maturity by the excessive stimulus of too much adult environment and influence and too little wise neglect. They are infected too early with the insights and sometimes even the sentiments of early senescence, and show all the mingled charm and sadness of precocity. Their life has the flavor of fruit that ripens before its time. The buds are picked open and the tree of knowledge blooms and bears its fruit too early. A larger view is that we must develop such a system of higher education as shall conserve youth and increase not only viability but natality.

Excessive intellectualism insidiously instils the same aversion to "brute maternity" as does luxury, overindulgence, or excessive devotion to society. Just as man must fight the battles of competition, and be ready to lay down his life for his country, so woman needs a heroism of her own to face the pain, danger, and work of bearing and rearing children, and whatever lowers the tone of her body, nerves, or morale so that she seeks to escape this function, merits the same kind of opprobrium which society metes out to the exempts who can not or who will not fight to save their country in time of need. In an ideal and progressive state those exempted from this function would be at the bottom among those least fitted to survive, but where the birth-rate goes down in proportion to intelligence and education, either the principle of the survival of the best is false or else these classes are not the best, or are impaired by their training or environment. While we need not consider the cranky and extreme left wing of this movement, which strives to theoretically ignore and practically escape the monthly function, or the several coteries of half-cultured scientific women, personally known to the writer, who devote time, money, and effort to investigating artificial methods of gestation (which will probably be arrived at when Ludwig's humorous dream of injecting prepared chyme into the veins and dispensing with eating and the alimentary tract to release lower nutritive energy for higher uses is realized), we find wide-spread among the most cultured classes the one or two child system which would atone for numbers by lavishing wealth and even care to safeguard and bring the few [p. 610] to the highest possible development. But only children are usually twice spoiled -- first by enfeebled heredity at birth, and second by excessive care and indulgence, as Bohannon [72] has shown. The enfeebled nature of only children often needs exceptional incubating all through childhood and youth, but with the decline of reproductive vigor not only the wise neglect but the sound motherly good sense in treatment is prone also to lapse toward the senile and grandmotherly overfostering, so that partial sterility always involves the danger of perverted motherly instincts. From a biological point of view, there is an unutterable depth of pathos in the almost morbid oversolicitude of the invalid and highly educated mother for an only child to whom she has transmitted her enfeebled existence, and among the decadent families of New England this spectacle is not infrequent.

As Augustine said, the soul is made for God and is not happy till it finds rest in him, so woman's body and soul are made for maternity and she can never find true repose for either without it. The more we know of the contents of the young woman's mind the more clearly we see that everything conscious and unconscious in it points to this as the true goal of the way of life. Even if she does not realize it, her whole nature demands first of all children to love, who depend on her for care, and perhaps a little less, a man whom she heartily respects and trusts to strengthen and perhaps protect her in discharging this function. This alone can complete her being, and without it her sphere, however she shape it, is but a hemisphere; she is a little détraqué, and her destiny is more or less disarticulated from her inmost and deepest nature. All ripe, healthful, and womanly women desire this, and if they attain true self-knowledge confess it to themselves, however loath they may be to do so to others, and some who attain it too late wear their lives out in regret. Nothing can ever quite take its place, without it they are never completely happy, and every other satisfaction is a little vicarious. To see this is simple common sense and to admit it only common honesty. In an ideal society, with ideal men in it, woman's education should focus on motherhood and wifehood,[p. 611] and seek in every way to magnify these functions and to invest them with honor.

But the world is not right, and this career is not always optimal. Man is not always manly, but prone to be selfish and even sensuous, and so woman must strive to make the best of the second best and follow the principle of cypres, which English law admits for wills when it is impossible to carry them out exactly according to the testator's intent. This by no means signifies that every woman who takes to other absorbing pursuits has been disappointed. Happily for her, perhaps she often does not know her true rights but misconstrues them. She often loses a little light-heartedness, but is not consciously, or it may be even unconsciously, wearing off heartache. She feels a little lack of purpose. She had tasted adoration and felt her womanhood a noble thing, and in its place comes a little distrust, her self-respect is not quite so invincible, and she catches herself at self-justification that she is unwed. Her yesterdays seem a little dusty and her to-morrows a trifle faded. She craves something different and afar, and drags her anchor and perhaps slips adrift. Her joy in the many substitutes provided for her true happiness is nervously intense, yet she is harder to please and feels a trifle at odds with the world. As the years pass she perhaps grows fastidious and lavishes care upon herself, her regimen and toilet, and becomes, what I believe there is justification for calling, overcleanly in her person and all its surroundings in a way that suggests misophobia. She craves the costly; if unoccupied, grows inactive, luxurious, capricious, and freaky even in appetite, or gives herself up to Vanity Fair and develops a peculiar Americanized type, or else, in store or office, goes a trifle off in dress or form. Her disposition sags from its wonted buoyancy and the haze of ill-health slowly gathers in her horizon. Her opinion of men is less favorable, and she perhaps at last falls a conscious prey to the gospel of the feminists, and learns that for ages woman was a drudge and man a brute whom women should now rise and subdue or at least insist for herself on all his rights and positions.

Fortunately few and now ever fewer reach this extreme. Among the greatest achievements of our race, I esteem the work of woman, largely in the last generation or two, in work-[p. 612]ing out manifold new careers for herself, wherein those whom men exclude from it can rebuild so fair a substitute for their original Eden. So happy can the unwed now be in self-supporting vocations of charity, teaching, art, literature, religious and social vocations, and lighter manual callings requiring skill, fidelity, taste, in many of which lines she naturally excels man, that she finds not only consolation but content and joy. Here she is making the best possible original solution of her great problems, imposed on her by existing conditions, while many declared she could never do so, and no lover of his kind can fail to bid her so hearty a godspeed in all these endeavors. Those who see most clearly that bad conditions have forced her to compromise with her ideals, most fervently trust that her success in so doing may never make them forgotten.

VI. Education. -- 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, where there is no segregation of interests but which are devoted throughout to joint work or enjoyment.

A typical contemporary writer [73] thinks the question [p. 613] 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, 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 [p. 614] 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.[74] Some are whole-hearted and encourage the girls to do almost everything that the boys do in [p. 615] 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, playgrounds, 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 [p. 616] feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that in 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 would 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. Foe either sex to be a copy of the other is to be weakened, and each comes normally to respect more and to prefer their 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 [p. 617] 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 worldwide consent, boys and girls separate for a time, and lead their lives during this most critical period mole 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 mole independent of each other than before. Their home occupations differ as do their plays, games, tastes. History, anthropology, and sociology, as 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 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 differentia-[p. 618]tions 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?

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 [p. 619] 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 also 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,[75] 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 [p. 620] 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, 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 [p. 621] 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 camaraderie brings a little disenchantment. The impulse to be at one's best in the presence of the other sex grows 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 an anxious state of expectancy, or they 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 [p. 622] 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 seen 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 reenforced 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 com-[p. 623]plex 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 cases 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 in loco parentis 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 for 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 standards of admission, of an order natively lower. From this deteriora-[p. 624]tion 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 Chapter XII, and feel responsibility not to let the moral, religions, and poetic aspects of nature be lost in utilities. Woman should be true to her generic nature and take her stand against all premature specialization, and when the Zeitgeist insists on an ad hoc training for occupative pursuits without waiting for broad foundations to be laid, she should resist all these influences that make for psychological precocity. Das Ewig-Weibliche is no iridescent fiction but a very definable reality, and means perennial youth. It means that woman at her best never outgrows adolescence as man does, but lingers in, magnifies and glorifies this culminating stage of life with its all-sided interests, its convertibility of emotions, its enthusiasm, and zest for all that is good, beautiful, true, and heroic. This constitutes her freshness and charm, even in age, and makes her by nature more humanistic than man, more sympathetic and appreciative. It is not chiefly the 70,000 superfluous American women of the last census, but representatives of every class and age in the four thousand women's clubs of this country that now find some leisure for general culture in all fields, and in which most of them no doubt surpass their husbands. Those who still say that men do not like women to be their mental su-[p. 625]periors and that no man was ever won by the attraction of intellect, on the one hand, and those who urge that women really want husbands to be their intellectual superiors, both misapprehend. The male in all the orders of life is the agent of variation and tends by nature to expertness and specialization, without which his individuality is incomplete. In his chosen line he would lead and be authoritative and rarely seeks partnership in it in marriage. This is no subjection, but woman instinctively respects and even reveres, and perhaps educated woman is coming to demand, it in the man of her whole-hearted choice. This granted, man was never more plastic to woman's great work of creating in him all the wide range of secondary sex qualities which constitute his essential manhood. In all this the pedagogic fathers we teach in the history of education are most of them about as luminous and obsolete as is patristics for the religious teacher, or as methods of other countries are coming to be in solving our own peculiar pedagogic problems. The relation of the academically trained sexes is faintly typified by that of the ideal college to the ideal university, professional or technical school. This is the harmony of counterparts and constitutes the best basis of psychic amphimixis. For the reinstallation of the humanistic college the time has come when cultivated woman ought to come forward and render vital aid. If she does so and helps to evolve a high school and an A. B. course that is truly liberal, it will not only fit her nature and needs far better than anything now existing, but young men at the humanistic stage of their own education will seek to profit by it, and she will thus repay her debt to man in the past by aiding him to de-universitize the college and to rescue secondary education from its gravest dangers.

But even should all this be done, coeducation would by no means be thus justified. If adolescent boys normally pass through a generalized or even feminized stage of psychic development in which they are peculiarly plastic to the guidance of older women who have such rare insight into their nature, such infinite sympathy and patience with all the symptoms of their storm and stress metamorphosis, when they seek everything by turns and nothing long, and if young men will forever afterward understand woman's nature better for living [p. 626] out more fully this stage of their lives and will fail to do so if it is abridged or dwarfed, it by no means follows that intimate daily and class-room association with girls of their own age is necessary or best. The danger of this is that the boy's instinct to assert his own manhood will thus be made premature and excessive, that he will react against general culture in the capacity for which girls, who are older than boys at the same age, naturally excel them. Companionship and comparisons incline him to take premature refuge in some one talent that emphasizes his psycho-sexual difference too soon. Again, he is farther from nubile maturity than the girl classmate of his own age, and coeducation and marriage between them are prone to violate the important physiological law of disparity that requires the husband to be some years the wife's senior, both in their own interests as maturity begins to decline to age and in those of their offspring. Thus the young man with his years of restraint and probation ahead, and his inflammable desires, is best removed from the half-conscious cerebrations about wedlock, inevitably more insistent with constant girl companionship. If he resists this during all the years of his apprenticeship, he grows more immune and inhibitive of it when its proper hour arrives, and perhaps becomes in soul a bachelor before his time. In this side of his nature he is forever incommensurate with and unintelligible to woman, be she even teacher, sister, or mother. Better some risk of gross thoughts and even acts, to which phylogeny and recapitulation so strongly incline him, than this subtle eviration. But if the boy is unduly repelled from the sphere of girls' interests, the girl is in some danger of being unduly drawn to his, and, as we saw above, of forgetting some of the ideals of her own sex. Riper in mind and body than her male classmate, and often excelling him in the capacity of acquisition, nearer the age of her full maturity than he to his, he seems a little too crude and callow to fulfil the ideals of manhood normal to her age which point to older and riper men. In all that makes sexual attraction best, a classmate of her own age is too undeveloped, and so she often suffers mute disenchantment, and even if engagement be dreamed of, it would be on her part with unconscious reservations if not with some conscious renunciation of ideals. Thus the boy is correct [p. 627] in feeling himself understood and seen through by his girl classmates to a degree that is sometimes quite distasteful to him, while the girl finds herself misunderstood by and disappointed in men. Boys arrive at the humanistic stage of culture later than girls and pass it sooner, and to find them already there and with their greater aptitude excelling him, is not an inviting situation, and so he is tempted to abridge or cut it out and to hasten on and be mature and professional before his time, for thus he gravitates toward his normal relation to her sex of expert mastership on some bread- or fame-winning line. Of course, these influences are not patent, demonstrable by experiment, or measurable by statistics, but I have come to believe that, like many other facts and laws, they have a reality and a dominance that is all-pervasive and ineluctable, and that they will ultimately prevail over economic motives and traditions.

To be a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. The madonna conception expresses man's highest comprehension of woman's real nature. Sexual relations are brief, but love and care of offspring are long. The elimination of maternity is one of the great calamities, if not diseases, of our age. Marholm [76] points out at length how art again to-day gives woman a waspish waist with no abdomen, as if to carefully score away every trace of her mission; usually with no child in her arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated perhaps to entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading the artist who depicts her to a fashion-plate painter, perhaps with suggestions of the arts of toilet, cosmetics, and coquetry, as if to promote decadent reaction to decadent stimuli. As in the Munchausen tale, the wolf slowly ate the running nag from behind until he found himself in the harness, so in the disoriented woman the mistress, virtuous and otherwise, is slowly supplanting the mother. Please she must, even though she can not admire, and can so easily despise men who can not lead her, although she become thereby lax and vapid.

The more exhausted men become, whether by overwork, unnatural city life, alcohol, recrudescent polygamic inclinations, exclusive devotion to greed and pelf; whether they [p. 628] become weak, stooping, blear-eyed, bald-headed, bow-legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coarse, barbaric, and bestial, the more they lose the power to lead woman or to arouse her nature, which is essentially passive. Thus her perversions are his fault. Man, before he lost the soil and piety, was not only her protector and provider, but her priest. He not only supported and defended, but inspired the souls of women, so admirably calculated to receive and elaborate suggestions, but not to originate them. In their inmost soul even young girls often experience disenchantment, find men little and no heroes, and so cease to revere and begin to think stupidly of them as they think coarsely of her. Sometimes the girlish conceptions of men are too romantic and exalted; often the intimacy of school and college wear off a charm, while man must not forget that to-day he too often fails to realize the just and legitimate expectations and ideals of women. If women confide themselves, body and soul, less to him than he desires, it is not she, but he, who is often chiefly to blame. Indeed, in some psychic respects it seems as if in human society the processes of subordinating the male to the female, carried so far in some of the animal species, had already begun. If he is not worshiped as formerly, it is because he is less worshipful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to excite and retain the great love of true, not to say great, women. Where marriage and maternity are of less supreme interest to an increasing number of women, there are various results, the chief of which are as follows:

1. Women grow dollish; sink more or less consciously to man's level; gratify his desires and even his selfish caprices, but exact in return luxury and display, growing vain as he grows sordid; thus, while submitting, conquering, and tyrannizing over him, content with present worldly pleasure, unmindful of the past, the future, or the above. This may react to intersexual antagonism until man comes to hate woman as a witch, or, as in the days of celibacy, consider sex a wile of the devil. Along these lines even the stage is beginning to represent the tragedies of life.

2. The disappointed woman in whom something is dying comes to assert her own ego and more or less consciously to make it an end, aiming to possess and realize herself fully [p. 629] rather than to transmit. Despairing of herself as a woman, she asserts her lower rights in the place of her one great right to be loved. The desire for love may be transmuted into the desire for knowledge, or outer achievement become a succedaneum for inner content. Failing to respect herself as a productive organism, she gives vent to personal ambitions; seeks independence; comes to know very plainly what she wants; perhaps becomes intellectually emancipated, and substitutes science for religion, or the doctor for the priest, with the all-sided impressionability characteristic of her sex which, when cultivated, is so like an awakened child. She perhaps even affects mannish ways, unconsciously copying from those not most manly, or comes to feel that she has been robbed of something; competes with men, but sometimes where they are most sordid, brutish, and strongest; always expecting, but never finding, she turns successively to art, science, literature, and reforms; craves especially work that she can not do; and seeks stimuli for feelings which have never found their legitimate expression.

3. Another type, truer to woman's nature, subordinates self; goes beyond personal happiness; adopts the motto of self-immolation; enters a life of service, denial, and perhaps mortification, like the Countess Schimmelmann; and perhaps becomes a devotee, a saint, and, if need be, a martyr, but all with modesty, humility, and with a shrinking from publicity.

In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good environment of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the above-mentioned peculiar stage of first maturity, when they see the world at first hand, when the senses are at their very best, their susceptibilities and their insights the keenest, tension at its highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. Some such -- Stella Klive, Mary MacLane, Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff -- have been veritable spies upon woman's nature; have revealed the characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in which everything is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least unity, aim, or purpose. By and by perhaps they will see in all their scrappy past, if not order and coherence,[p. 630] a justification, and then alone will they realize that life is governed by motives deeper than those which are conscious or even personal. This is the age when, if ever, no girl should be compelled. It is the experiences of this age, never entirely obliterated in women, that enables them to take adolescent boys seriously, as men can rarely do, in whom these experiences are more limited in range though no less intense. It is this stage in woman which is most unintelligible to man and even unrealized to herself. It is the echoes from it that make vast numbers of mothers pursue the various branches of culture, often half secretly, to maintain their position with their college sons and daughters, with their husbands, or with society.

But in a very few years, I believe even in the early twenties with American girls, along with rapidly increasing development of capacity there is also observable the beginnings of loss and deterioration. Unless marriage comes there is lassitude, subtle symptoms of invalidism, the germs of a rather aimless dissatisfaction with life, a little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain forms of self-pampering, the resolution to be happy, though at too great cost; and thus the clear air of morning begins to haze over and unconsciously she begins to grope. By thirty, she is perhaps goaded into more or less sourness; has developed more petty self-indulgences; has come to feel a right to happiness almost as passionately as the men of the French Revolution and as the women in their late movement for enfranchisement felt for liberty. Very likely she has turned to other women and entered into innocent Platonic pairing-off relations with some one. There is a little more affectation, playing a role, and interest in dress and appearance is either less or more specialized and definite. Perhaps she has already begun to be a seeker who will perhaps find, lose, and seek again. Her temper is modified; there is a slight stagnation of soul; a craving for work or travel; a love of children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or else aversion to them; an analysis of psychic processes until they are weakened and insight becomes too clear; a sense of responsibility without an object; a slight general malaise and a sense that society is a false "margarine " affair; revolt against those that insist that in her child the real value of a woman is revealed. There are alternations between excessive self-respect which demands something almost like adoration of the other sex and self-[p. 631]distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the sexes generally.

A new danger, the greatest in the history of her sex, now impends, viz., arrest, complacency, and a sense of finality in the most perilous first stage of higher education for girls, when, after all, little has actually yet been won save only the right and opportunity to begin reconstructions, so that now for the first time in history methods and matter could be radically transformed to fit the nature and needs of girls. Now most female faculties, trustees, and students are content to ape the newest departures in some one or more male institutions as far as their means or obvious limitations make possible with a servility which is often abject and with rarely ever a thought of any adjustment, save the most superficial, to sex. It is the easiest, and therefore the most common, view typically expressed by the female head of a very successful institution,[77] who was "early convinced in my teaching experience that the methods for mental development for boys and girls applied equally without regard to sex, and I have carried the same thought when I began to develop the physical, and filled my gymnasium with the ordinary appliances used in men's gymnasia." There is no sex in mind or in science, it is said, but it might as well be urged that there is no age and hence that all methods adapted to teaching at different stages of development may be ignored. That woman can do many things as well as man does not prove that she ought to do the same things, or that man-made ways are the best for her. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer [78] was right in saying that woman's education has all the perplexities of that of man, and many more, still more difficult and intricate, of its own.

Hence, we must conclude that, while women's colleges have to a great extent solved the problem of special technical training, they have done as yet very little to solve the larger one of the proper education of woman. To assume that the latter question is settled, as is so often done, is disastrous. I have forced myself to go through many elaborate reports of [p. 632] meetings where female education was discussed by those supposed to be competent, but as a rule, not without rare, striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with the same sterile and complacent artificiality that was so long the curse of woman's life. I deem it almost reprehensible that, save a few general statistics, the women's colleges have not only made no study themselves of the larger problems that impend, but have often maintained a repellent attitude toward others who wished to do so. No one that I know of connected with any of these institutions, where the richest material is going to waste, is making any serious and competent research on lines calculated to bring out the psycho-physiological differences between the sexes, and those in authority are either conservative by constitution or else intimidated because public opinion is still liable to panics if discussion here becomes scientific and fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and the old habit of ignoring everything that pertains to sex in countenance.

Again, while I sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every opportunity which she can fill, and yield to none in appreciation of her ability, I insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college is that it is based upon the assumption, implied and often expressed, if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be trained to independence and self-support, and that matrimony and motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even urge, is thus best provided for. If these colleges are as the above statistics indicate, chiefly devoted to the training of those who do not marry, or if they are to educate for celibacy, this is right. These institutions may perhaps come to be training stations of a new-old type, the agamic or even agenic woman, be she aunt, maid -- old or young -- nun, school-teacher, or bachelor woman. I recognize the very great debt the world owes to members of this very diverse class in the past. Some of them have illustrated the very highest ideals of self-sacrifice, service, and devotion in giving to mankind what was meant for husband and children. Some of them belong to the class of superfluous women, and others illustrate the noblest type of altruism and have impoverished the heredity of the world to its loss, as did the monks, who Leslie Stephens thinks contributed to bring about the Dark Ages, because they were [p. 633] the best and most highly selected men of their age and, by withdrawing from the function of heredity and leaving no posterity, caused Europe to degenerate. Modern ideas and training are now doing this, whether for racial weal or woe can not yet be determined, for many whom nature designed for model mothers.

The bachelor woman is an interesting illustration of Spencer's law of the inverse relation of individuation and genesis. The completely developed individual is always a terminal representative in her line of descent. She has taken up and utilized in her own life all that was meant for her descendants, and has so overdrawn her account with heredity that, like every perfectly and completely developed individual, she is also completely sterile. This is the very apotheosis of selfishness from the standpoint of every biological ethics. While the complete man can do and sometimes does this, woman has a far greater and very peculiar power of overdrawing her reserves. First she loses mammary function, so that should she undertake maternity its functions are incompletely performed because she can not nurse, and this implies defective motherhood and leaves love of the child itself defective and maimed, for the mother who has never nursed can not love or be loved aright by her child. It crops out again in the abnormal or especially incomplete development of her offspring, in the critical years of adolescence, although they may have been healthful before, and a less degree of it perhaps is seen in the diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one-child system. These women are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of the men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr, the university student, in Hauptmann's Lonely Lives, who alienated the young husband from his noble wife; they enjoy all the keen pleasures of intellectual activity; their very look, step, and bearing is free; their mentality makes them good fellows and companionable in all the broad intellectual spheres; to converse with them is as charming and attractive for the best men as was Socrates's discourse with the accomplished hetæra; they are at home with the racket and on the golf links; they are splendid friends; their minds, in all their widening areas of contact, are as attractive as their bodies; and the world owes much and is [p. 634] likely to owe far more to high Platonic friendships of this kind. These women are often in every way magnificent, only they are not mothers, and sometimes have very little wifehood in them, and to attempt to marry them to develop these functions is one of the unique and too frequent tragedies of modern life and literature. Some, though by no means all, of them are functionally castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of child-bearing, and perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor the limitations of married life; they are incensed whenever attention is called to the functions peculiar to their sex, and the careful consideration of problems of the monthly rest are thought "not fit for cultivated women."

The slow evolution of this type is probably inevitable as civilization advances, and their training is a noble function. Already it has produced minds of the greatest acumen who have made very valuable contributions to science, and far more is to be expected of them in the future. Indeed, it may be their noble function to lead their sex out into the higher, larger life, and the deeper sense of its true position and function, for which I plead. Hitherto woman has not been able to solve her own problems. While she has been more religious than man, there have been few great women preachers; while she has excelled in teaching young children, there have been few Pestalozzis, or even Froebels; while her invalidism is a complex problem, she has turned to man in her diseases. This is due to the very intuitiveness and naïveté of her nature. But now that her world is so rapidly widening, she is in danger of losing her cue. She must be studied objectively and laboriously as we study children, and partly by men, because their sex must of necessity always remain objective and incommensurate with regard to woman, and therefore more or less theoretical. Again, in these days of intense new interest in feelings, emotions, and sentiments, when many a psychologist now envies and, like Schleiermacher, devoutly wishes he could become a woman, he can never really understand das Ewig-Weibliche, one of the two supreme oracles of guidance in life, because he is a man, and here the cultivated woman must explore the nature of her sex as man can not and become its mouthpiece. In many of the new fields opening in biology since Darwin, in embryology, botany, the study of children,[p. 635] animals, savages (teste Miss Fletcher), sociological investigation, to say nothing of all the vast body of work that requires painstaking detail, perseverance, and conscience, woman has superior ability, or her very sex gives her peculiar advantages where she is to lead and achieve great things in enlarging the kingdom of man. Perhaps, too, the present training of women may in the end develop those who shall one day attain a true self-knowledge and lead in the next step of devising a scheme that shall fit woman's nature and needs.

For the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first of all distinctly and ostensively invert the present maxim, and educate primarily and chiefly for motherhood, assuming that if that does not come single life can best take care of itself, because it is less intricate and lower and its needs far more easily met. While girls may be trained with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of adolescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy between the sexes in high school, if not in college, tends to rub off the bloom and delicacy which can develop in each, and girls suffer in this respect, let us repeat, far more than boys. The familiar camaraderie that ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their institutions we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Staël, the Misses Cobb, Martineau, Fuller, Bronté, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs. Browning, and while accepting and profiting by what they have done, and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and achievements, prospective mothers must not be allowed to forget a still larger class of ideal women, both in history and literature, from the Holy Mother to Beatrice Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who have inspired men to great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of noble mothers.

We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she can, from surreptitious or unworthy sources, what she most of all needs to know; must recognize that our present civilization is hard on woman and that she is not yet adjusted to her social environment; that as she was of old accused of having given man the apple of knowledge of good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less [p. 636] serious indictment of having given her the apple of intellectualism and encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense of health. We must recognize that riches are probably harder on her, on the whole, than poverty, and that poor parents should not labor too hard to exempt her from its wholesome discipline. The expectancy of change so stamped upon her sex by heredity as she advances into maturity must not be perverted into uneasiness, or her soul sown with the tares of ambition or fired by intersexual competition and driven on, to quote Dr. R. T. Edes, "by a tireless sort of energy which is a compound of conscience, ambition, and desire to please, plus a peculiar female obstinacy." If she is bright, she must not be overworked in the school factory, studying in a way which parodies Hood's Song of the Shirt; and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by preceptresses like an eminent lady principal,[79] who thinks girls' weakness is usually imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for suggesting illness and for intimating that men will have to choose between a healthy animal and an educated invalid for a wife.

Without specifying here details or curricula, the ideals that should be striven toward in the intermediate and collegiate education of adolescent girls with the proper presupposition of motherhood, and which are already just as practicable as Abbotsholme or L'École des Roches, may be rudely indicated somewhat as follows.

First, the ideal institution for the training of girls from twelve or thirteen on into the twenties, when the period most favorable to motherhood begins, should be in the country in the midst of hills, the climbing of which is the best stimulus for heart and lungs, and tends to mental elevation and breadth of view. There should be water for boating, bathing, and skating, aquaria and aquatic life; gardens both for kitchen vegetables and horticulture; forests for their seclusion and religious awe; good roads, walks, and paths that tempt to walking and wheeling; playgrounds and space for golf and tennis, with large covered but unheated space favorable for recreations in weather really too bad for out-of-door life and [p. 637] for those indisposed; and plenty of nooks that permit each to be alone with nature, for this develops inwardness, poise, and character, yet not too great remoteness from the city for a wise utilization of its advantages at intervals. All that can be called environment is even more important for girls than boys, significant as it is for the latter.

The first aim, which should dominate every item, pedagogic method and matter, should be health -- a momentous word that looms up beside holiness, to which it is etymologically akin. The new hygiene of the last few years should be supreme and make these academic areas sacred to the cult of the goddess Hygeia. Only those who realize what advances have been made in health culture and know something of its vast new literature can realize all that this means. The health of woman is, as we have seen, if possible even more important for the welfare of the race than that of man, and the influence of her body upon her mind is, in a sense, greater, so that its needs should be supreme and primary. Foods should favor the completest digestion, so that metabolism be on the highest plane. The dietary should be abundant, plain, and varied, and cooked with all the refinements possible in the modern cooking-school, which should be one of its departments, with limited use of rich foods or desserts and stimulating drinks, but with wholesome proximity to dairy and farm. Nutrition is the first law of health and happiness, the prime condition and creator of euphoria, and the appetite should be, as it always is if unperverted, like a kind of somatic conscience steadfastly pointing toward the true pole of needs.

Sleep should be regular, with a fixed retiring hour and curfew, on plain beds in rooms of scrupulous neatness reserved chiefly for it with every precaution for quiet, and, if possible, with windows more or less open the year round, and, like other rooms, never overheated. Bathing in moderation, and especially dress and toilet should be almost raised to fine arts and objects of constant suggestion. Each student should have three rooms, for bath, sleep, and study, respectively, and be responsible for their care, with every encouragement for expressing individual tastes, but with an all-dominant idea of simplicity, convenience, refinement, and elegance, without luxury. Girls need to go away from home a good [p. 638] part of every year to escape the indiscretion and often the coddling of parents and to learn self-reliance, and a family dormitory system with but few, twelve to twenty, in each building, to escape nervous wear and distraction, to secure intimacy and acquaintance with one or more matrons or teachers and to ensure the most pedagogic dietetics, is suggested.

Exercise comes after regimen, of which it is a special form. Swedish gymnastics should be abandoned or reduced to a minimum of best points, because it is too severe and lays too little stress upon the rhythm element in forbidding music. Out-of-door walks and games should have precedence over all else. The principle sometimes advocated, that methods of physical training should apply to both boys and girls without regard to sex, and with all the ordinary appliances found in the men's gymnasia introduced, should be reversed and every possible adjustment made to sex. Free plays and games should always have precedence over indoor or uniform commando exercises. Boating and basket-ball should be allowed, but with the competition element sedulously reduced, and with dancing of many kinds and forms the most prominent of indoor exercises. The dance cadences the soul; the stately minuet gives poise; the figure dances train the mind; and pantomime and dramatic features should be introduced and even specialties, if there are strong individual predispositions. The history of the dance, which has often been a mode of worship, a school of morals, and which is the root of the best that is in the drama, the best of all exercises and that could be again the heart of our whole educational system, should be exploited, and the dancing school and class rescued from its present degradation. No girl is educated who can not dance, although she need not know the ballroom in its modern form.[80]

Manners, a word too often relegated to the past as savoring of the primness of the ancient dame school or female seminary, are really minor or sometimes major morals. They can express everything in the whole range of the impulsive or emotional life. Now that we understand the primacy of movement over feeling, we can appreciate what a school of [p. 639] bearing and repose in daily converse with others means. I would revive some of the ancient casuistry of details, but less the rules of the drawing-room, call and party, although these should not be neglected, than the deeper expressions of true ladyhood seen in an exquisite, tender and unselfish regard for the feelings of others. The ideal of compelling every one whom they meet to like them is a noble one, and the control of every automatism is not only a part of good breeding, but nervous health.

Regularity should be another all-pervading norm. In the main, even though he may have "played his sex symphony too harshly," E. H. Clarke was right. Periodicity, perhaps the deepest law of the cosmos, celebrates its highest triumphs in woman's life. For years everything must give way to its thorough and settled establishment. In the monthly Sabbaths of rest, the ideal school should revert to the meaning of the word leisure. The paradise of stated rest should be revisited, idleness be actively cultivated; reverie, in which the soul, which needs these seasons of withdrawal for its own development, expatiates over the whole life of the race, should be provided for and encouraged in every legitimate way, for in rest the whole momentum of heredity is felt in ways most favorable to full and complete development. Then woman should realize that to be is greater than to do; should step reverently aside from her daily routine and let Lord Nature work. In this time of sensitiveness and perturbation, when anemia and chlorosis are so peculiarly immanent to her sex, remission of toil should not only be permitted, but required; and yet the greatest individual liberty should be allowed to adjust itself to the vast diversities of individual constitutional needs. (See Chapter VII on this point.) The cottage home, which should take the place of the dormitory, should always have special interest and attractions for these seasons.

There should always be some personal instruction at these seasons during earlier adolescent years. I have glanced over nearly a score of books and pamphlets that are especially written for girls; while all are well meant and far better than the ordinary modes by which girls acquire knowledge of their own nature if left to themselves, they are, like books for boys, far too prolix, and most are too scientific and plain and direct.[p. 640] Moreover, no two girls need just the same instruction, and to leave it to reading is too indirect and causes the mind to dwell on it for too long periods. Best of all is individual instruction at the time, concise, practical, and never, especially in the early years, without a certain mystic and religious tone which should pervade all and make everything sacred. This should not be given by male physicians -- and indeed most female doctors would make it too professional, and the maiden teacher must forever lack reverence for it -- but it should come from one whose soul and body are full of wifehood and motherhood and who is old enough to know and is not without the necessary technical knowledge.

Another principle should be to broaden by retarding; to keep the purely mental back and by every method to bring the intuitions to the front; appeals to tact and taste should be incessant; a purely intellectual man is no doubt biologically a deformity, but a purely intellectual woman is far more so. Bookishness is probably a bad sign in a girl; it suggests artificiality, pedantry, the lugging of dead knowledge. Mere learning is not the ideal, and prodigies of scholarship are always morbid. The rule should be to keep nothing that is not to become practical; to open no brain tracts which are not to be highways for the daily traffic of thought and conduct; not to overburden the soul with the impedimenta of libraries and records of what is afar off in time or zest, and always to follow truly the guidance of normal and spontaneous interests wisely interpreted.

Religion will always hold as prominent a place in woman's life as politics does in man's, and adolescence is still more its seedtime with girls than with boys. Its roots are the sentiment of awe and reverence, and it is the great agent in the world for transforming life from its earlier selfish to its only really mature form of altruism. The tales of the heroes of virtue, duty, devotion, and self-sacrifice from the Old Testament come naturally first; then perhaps the prophets paraphrased as in the pedagogic triumph of Kent and Saunders's little series; and when adolescence is at its height then the chief stress of religious instruction should be laid upon Jesus's life and work. (See this topic in Chapter XV.) He should be taught first humanly, and only later when the limitations [p. 641] of manhood seem exhausted should his deity be adduced as a welcome surplusage. The supernatural is a reflex of the heart; each sustains and neither can exist without the other. If the transcendent and supernal had no objective, existence, we should have to invent and teach them, or dwarf the life of feeling and sentiment. Whatever else religion is, therefore, it is the supremest poetry of the soul, reflecting like nothing else all that is deepest, most generic and racial in it. Theology should be reduced to a minimum, but nothing denied where wanted. Paul and his works and ways should be for the most part deferred until after eighteen. The juvenile as well as the cyclone revivalist should be very carefully excluded, and yet in every springtime, when nature is recreated, service and teaching should gently encourage the revival and even the regeneration of all the religious instincts. The mission recruiter should be allowed to do his work outside these halls, and everything in the way of infection and all that brings religion into conflict with good taste and good sense should be excluded, while esthetics should supplement, reenforce, and go hand in hand with piety. Religion is in its infancy, and woman, who has sustained it in the past, must be the chief agent in its further and higher development. Orthodoxies and all narrowness should forever give place to cordial hospitality toward every serious view, which should be met by the method of greater sympathy rather than that of criticism.

Nature in her many phases should, of course, make up a large part of the entire curriculum (see Chapter XII), but here again the methods of the sexes should differ somewhat after puberty. The poetic and mythic factors and some glimpses of the history of science should be given more prominence; the field naturalist rather than the laboratory man of technic should be the ideal especially at first; nature should be taught as God's first revelation, as an Old Testament related to the Bible as a primordial dispensation to a later and clearer and more special one. Reverence and love should be the motive powers, and no aspect should be studied without beginning and culminating in interests akin to devotion. Mathematics should be taught only in its rudiments, and those with special talents or tastes for it should go to agamic schools.[p. 642] Chemistry, too, although not excluded, should have a subordinate place. The average girl has little love of sozzling and mussing with the elements, and cooking involves problems L organic chemistry too complex to be understood very profoundly, but the rudiments of household chemistry should be taught. Physics, too, should be kept to elementary stages. Meteorology should have a larger, and geology and astronomy increasingly larger places, and are especially valuable because, and largely in proportion as, they are taught out of doors, but the general principles and the untechnical and practical aspects should be kept in the foreground. With botany more serious work should be done. Plant-lore and the poetic aspect, as in astronomy, should have attention throughout, while Latin nomenclature and microscopic technic should come late if at all, and vulgar names should have precedence over Latin terminology. Flowers, gardening, and excursions should never be wanting. Economic and even medical aspects should appear, and prominent and early should come the whole matter of self cross-fertilization and that by insects. The moral value of this subject will never be fully understood till we have what might almost be called a woman's botany, constructed on lines different from any of the text-books I have glanced at. Here much knowledge interesting in itself can be early taught, which will spring up into a world of serviceable insights as adolescence develops and the great law of sex unfolds.

Zoology should always be taught with plenty of pets, menagerie resources, and with aquaria, aviaries, apiaries, formicaries, etc., as adjuncts. It should start in the environment like everything else. Bird and animal lore, books, and pictures should abound in the early stages, and the very prolific chapter of instincts should have ample illustration, while the morphological nomenclature and details of structure should be less essential. Woman has domesticated nearly all the animals, and is so superior to man in insight into their modes of life and psychoses that many of them are almost exemplifications of moral qualities to her even more than to man. The peacock is an embodied expression of pride, the pig of filth, the fox of cunning, the serpent of subtle danger, the eagle of sublimity, the goose of stupidity, and so on through all the range of human qualities, as we have seen.[p. 643] At bottom, however, the study of animal life is coming to be more and more a problem of heredity, and its problems should have dominant position and to them the other matter should grade up.

This shades over into and prepares for the study of the primitive man and child so closely related to each other. The myth, custom, belief, domestic practises of savages, vegetative and animal traits in infancy and childhood, the development of which is a priceless boon for the higher education of women, open of themselves a great field of human interest where she needs to know the great results, the striking details, the salient illustrations, the basal principles rather than to be entangled in the details of anthropometry, craniometry, philology, etc.

All this lays the basis for a larger study of modern man, history with the biographical element very prominent throughout, with plenty of stories of heroes of virtue, acts of valor, tales of saintly lives and the personal element more prominent, and specialization in the study of dynasties, wars, authorities, and controversies relegated to a very subordinate place. Sociology, undeveloped, rudimentary, and in some places suspected as it is, should have in the curriculum of her higher education a place above political economy. The stories of the great reforms, and accounts of the constitution of society, of the home, church, state, and school, and philanthropies and ideals, should come to the fore.

Art in all its forms should be opened at least in a propædeutic way and individual tastes amply and judiciously fed, but there should be no special training in music without some taste and gift, and the aim should be to develop critical and discriminative appreciation and the good taste that sees the vast superiority of all that is good and classic over what is cheap and fustian.

In literature, myth, poetry, and drama should perhaps lead, and the knowledge of the great authors in the vernacular fostered. Greek, Hebrew, and perhaps Latin languages should be entirely excluded, not but what they are of great value and have their place, but because a smattering knowledge is bought at too high a price of ignorance of more valuable things. German, French, and Italian should be allowed and provided [p. 644] for by native teachers and by conversational methods if desired, and in their proper season.

In the studies of the soul of man, generally called the philosophic branches, metaphysics and epistemology should have the smallest, and logic the next least place. Psychology should be taught on the genetic basis of animals and children, and one of its tap-roots should be developed from the love of infancy and youth, than which nothing in all the world is more worthy. If a woman Descartes ever arises, she will put life before theory, and her watchword will be not cogito, ergo sum, but sum, ergo cogito. The psychology of sentiments and feelings and intuitions will take precedence of that of pure intellect; ethics will be taught on the basis of the whole series of practical duties and problems, and the theories of the ultimate nature of right or the constitution of conscience will have small place.

Domesticity will be taught by example in some ideal home building by a kind of laboratory method. A nursery with all carefully selected appliances and adjuncts, a dining-room, a kitchen, bedroom, closets, cellars, outhouses, building, its material, the grounds, lawn, shrubbery, hothouse, library, and all the other adjuncts of the hearth will be both exemplified and taught. A general course in pedagogy, especially its history and ideals, another in child study, and finally a course in maternity the last year taught broadly, and not without practical details of nursing, should be comprehensive and culminating. In its largest sense education might be the heart of all the higher training of young women.

Applied knowledge will thus be brought to a focus in a department of teaching as one of the specialties of motherhood and not as a vocation apart. The training should aim to develop power of maternity in soul as well as in body, so that home influence may extend on and up through the plastic years of pubescence, and future generations shall not rebel against these influences until they have wrought their perfect work.

The methods throughout should be objective, with copious illustrations by way of object-lessons, apparatus, charts, pictures, diagrams, and lectures, far less book work and recitation, only a limited amount of room study, the function of examination reduced to a minimum, and everything as sug-[p. 645]gestive and germinal as possible. Hints that are not followed up; information not elaborated into a thin pedagogic sillabub or froth; seed that is sown on the waters with no thought of reaping; faith in a God who does not pay at the end of each week, month, or year, but who always pays abundantly some time; training which does not develop hypertrophied memory pouches that carry, or creative powers that discover and produce -- these are lines on which such an institution should develop. Specialization has its place, but it always hurts a woman's soul more than a man's, should always come later, and if there is special capacity it should be trained elsewhere. Unconscious education is a power of which we have yet to learn the full ranges.

In most groups in this series of ideal departments there should be at least one healthful, wise, large-souled, honorable, married and attractive man, and, if possible, several of them. His very presence in an institution for young women gives poise, polarizes the soul, and gives wholesome but long-circuited tension at root no doubt sexual, but all unconsciously so. This mentor should not be more father than brother, though he should combine the best of each, but should add another element. He need not be a doctor, clergyman, or even a great scholar, but should be accessible for confidential conferences even though intimate. He should know the soul of the adolescent girl and how to prescribe; he should be wise and fruitful in advice, but especially should be to all a source of contagion and inspiration for poise and courage even though religious or medical problems be involved. But even if he lack all these latter qualities, though he be so poised that impulsive girls can turn their hearts inside out in his presence and perhaps even weep on his shoulder, the presence of such a being, though a complete realization of this ideal could be only remotely approximated, would be the center of an atmosphere most wholesomely tonic.

In these all too meager outlines I have sketched a humanistic and liberal education and have refrained from all details and special curriculization. Many of the above features I believe would be as helpful for boys as girls, but woman has here an opportunity to resume her exalted and supreme position, to be the first in this higher field, to lead man and pay [p. 646] her debt to his educational institutions, by resuming her crown. The ideal institutions, however, for the two will always be radically and probably always increasingly divergent.

As a psychologist, penetrated with the growing sense of the predominance of the heart over the mere intellect, I believe myself not alone in desiring to make a tender declaration of being more and more passionately in love with woman as I conceive she came from the hand of God. I keenly envy my Catholic friends their Maryolatry. Who ever asked if the holy mother, whom the wise men adored, knew the astronomy of the Chaldees or had studied Egyptian or Babylonian, or even whether she knew how to read or write her own tongue, and who has ever thought of caring? We can not conceive that she bemoaned any limitations of her sex, but she has been an object of adoration all these centuries because she glorified womanhood by being more generic, nearer the race, and richer in love, pity, unselfish devotion and intuition than man. The glorified madonna ideal shows us how much more whole and holy it is to be a woman than to be artist, orator, professor, or expert, and suggests to our own sex that to be a man is larger than to be gentleman, philosopher, general, president, or millionaire.

But with all this love and hunger in my heart, I can not help sharing in the growing fear that modern woman, at least in more ways and places than one, is in danger of declining from her orbit; that she is coming to lack just confidence and pride in her sex as such, and is just now in danger of lapsing to mannish ways, methods, and ideals, until her original divinity may become obscured. But if our worship at her shrine is with a love and adoration a little qualified and unsteady, we have a fixed and abiding faith without which we should have no resource against pessimism for the future of our race, that she will ere long evolve a sphere of life and even education which fits her needs as well as, if not better than, those of man fit his.

Meanwhile, if the eternally womanly seems somewhat less divine, we can turn with unabated faith to the eternally childlike, the best of which in each are so closely related. The [p. 647] oracles of infancy and childhood will never fail. Distracted as we are in the maze of new sciences, skills, ideals, knowledges that we can not fully coordinate by our logic or curriculize by our pedagogy; confused between the claims of old and new methods; needing desperately for survival as a nation and a race some clue to thrid the mazes of the manifold modern cultures, we have now at least one source to which we can turn -- we have found the only magnet in all the universe that points steadfastly to the undiscovered pole of human destiny. We know what can and will ultimately coordinate in the generic, which is larger than the logical order, all that is worth knowing, teaching, or doing by the best methods, that will save us from misfits and the waste ineffable of premature and belated knowledge, and that is in the interests and line of normal development in the child in our midst that must henceforth ever lead us; which epitomizes in its development all the stages, human and prehuman; that is the proper object of all that strange new love of everything that is naive, spontaneous, and unsophisticated in human nature. The heart and soul of growing childhood is the criterion by which we judge the larger heart and soul of mature womanhood, and these are ultimately the only guide into the heart of the new education which is to be, when the school becomes what Melanchthon said it must be -- a true workshop of the Holy Ghost -- and what the new psychology, when it rises to the heights of prophecy, foresees as the true paradise of restored intuitive human nature.

[1] The Psychology of Woman. Pop. Sci. Mo., June, 1895 See also Ellis: Man and Woman. London, p. 409.

[2] Die mittlere Lebensdaur in Stadt u. Land. Leipzig, 1897.

[3] Ueber den physiolog. Schwachsinn des Weibes. Fifth ed. Halle, 1903.

[4] The Mental Traits of Sex. Chicago Univ. Press, 1903.

[5] The Chances of Death.

[6] Variation in Man and Woman. Pop. Sci. Mo., January, 1903.

[7] The Condition of Woman from a Zoological Point of View. Two articles. Pop. Sci. Mo., June, 1879.

[8] The Influences of Woman in the Evolution of the Human Race. Natural Science, August, 1897 p. 89.

[9] Female Hygiene, by H. R. Storer, M.D. California State Board of Health, 1871 and in many other publications.

[10] Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls, by Edward H. Clarke, M.D. Boston, 1873.

[11] The Education of American Girls. New York, 1874.

[12] The Second Decade of Life. Cincinnati Lancet and Observer, 1877, p. 342.

[13] American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences. New York, 1881.

[14] The Education of Girls as Connected with their Growth and Physical Development. Sanitarian, 1879.

[15] De la Menstruation dens les Etablissements Consacrès à l'Education des Jennes Filles. Rev. de Hygiene et de Police Sanitarie, 1880, ii, p. 605 et sec.

[16] Effects in Woman of Imperfect Hygiene of Sex Functions. Am. Jour. of Obstet., 1882, p. 161.

[17] Female Education from a Medical Point of View, by T. S. Clouston, M.D. Pop. Sci. Mo., 1884, two articles, pp. 214, 319.

[18] Female Education from a Medical Point of View, by John Thorburn, M. D. Manchester, 1884.

[19] Menstrual Disorders in Schoolgirls. The Texas Sanitarium, June, 1885. J. T. Wilson, M. D. See also subsequent discussion.

[20] See e. g. his Doctor and Patient. Philadelphia, 1888, passim, and many other of his writings.

[21] Plain Words about the Woman Question. Pop. Sci. Mo., December, 1889.

[22] Revue Scientifique, 1890, p. 460.

[23] Brit. Med. Jour., vol, i, 1892.

[24] Sex in Education, by Sir James Crichton Browne, M. D. Educational Review, 1892, p. 164.

[25] The Waste of Woman's Intellectual Force, by M. G. Van Rensselaer, M.D. Forum, 1892, p. 616.

[26] American Life and Physical Deterioration, by Cyrus Edson, M. D. North Am. Rev., October, 1893.

[27] Anatomie, Physiologie und Hygiene des Geschlechtsreifen Sohnes. München, 1894.

[28] Der Geschlechtstrieb: Eine socialmed. Studie, 1895.

[29] Remarks on the Education and Training of Girls of the Easy Classes at about the Period of Puberty. Brit. Med. Journal, vol. ii, 895, p. 1405 et seq.

[30] Puberty in Girls and Certain of its Disturbances, by J. Madison Taylor, M. D. Pediatrics, July 15, 1896.

[31] Menstruation and Some of its Effects upon the Normal Mentalization of Woman. M. M. Smith, M. D. Memphis Med: Month., August, 1896, p. 393.

[32] Independent, May 30, 1901.

[33] Health Statistics of Women College Students, by Annie G. Howes. Boston, 1885.

[34] Health and Sex in Higher Education, by John Dewey. Pop. Sci. Mo., 1886.

[35] The Influence of College Life on Health, G..A. Preston, M. D. Communications of Mass. Med. Sec., Boston, 1895, p. 167.

[36] Miss Preston describes typical cases of girls who ought not to go to college. One gave up her leisure for months to entrance conditions, and overwork brought overwhelming desire to systematize. Everything has its exact place, and if a caller moves it slightly, the discomfort is intense until she can replace it. If she writes a letter, she prefers a friend present so that she can have courage to seal it at once rather than look it over again and again to make sure that everything is just right. If not, she would be dissatisfied, tear it up, write another just as inaccurate, and so on. Every night she arranges a precise program for all the next day, and is miserable if it can not be carried out to the letter. She is obliged to make a bedtime review of even the trivialities of every day, striving to recall every word she has heard or spoken. This began as a memory drill, but is now an obsession. She also has to make lists of everything she has done or intends to do, and hoards these up for reference knowing it is very silly, but she just can not help it. All these habits are stronger just after a recitation or a visit. If she wakes at night, she must go through some painful routine; translations must be many times revised, and even then she made poor recitations. She was at last prevailed upon to give up study and quite recovered.

Another student of nervous debility, in love with an intimate girl friend as morbid and nervous as she, had cervical and spinal pressures, twitchings in the right arm, indigestion, etc. She stopped study a year and was greatly improved. Another delicate girl student living at home was subject to strange fears, had always to count the steps upstairs and feared terrible things if the last one was an odd number and had to go back and end with an even one. When away from home, she was always alarmed at the ringing of a door-bell or a knock, fearing ill tidings from home.

[37] Health of Woman Students in England, by Alice Hayes. Education, January, 1891.

[38] The American Girl of To-day. President's Address, Am. Gyn. Sec.. Washington, 1900.

[39] Fed. Sem., vol, iii, June, 1896, p. 469.

[40] Normal Menstruation and Some of the Factors Modifying it. Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, April, May, June, 1901, p. 178.

[41] A Comparison of Coeducation and Women's Colleges. Overland Mo., 1890, p. 443.

[42] Overland Mo., May, 1889, p. 556

[43] Pop. Sci. Mo., 1886, p. 606.

[44] Statistics of College and Non-College Women. Am. Statistical Ass'n, June, 1900

[45] Marriage-Rate of College Women. Century, October, 1895, p. 946.

[46] College Women and Matrimony again, by Frances M. Abbott, M. D. Century, 1896, p. 796.

[47] Education of Women, by M. Carey Thomas. Monographs on Education in the United States, 1899, p. 36.

[48] The Marriage of Women College Graduates. Anon. Nature, September 24, 1890.

[49] College Women and Matrimony again, by Frances M. Abbott, M. D. Century, 1896.

[50] See for details the study of Dr. Theodate Smith and myself on Marriage and Fecundity of College Men and Women. Fed. Sem., September, 1903, vol. x, pp. 275-34.

[51] Miss Smith: Op. cit., p. 280.

[52] The New England Family, by Nathan Allen, M. D. New England Magazine, 1882.

[53] Vital Statistics of Massachusetts from 1856 to 1895, by S. W. Abbott.

[54] Deterioration of Puritan Stock and its Causes, by Dr. Ellis. New York, 1894. Published by the author.

[55] Sterility in Woman. Gulstonian Lectures, by J. Matthew Duncan. London, 1889.

[56] Fecundity, Fertility, Sterility, etc., 1877.

[57] Étude sur l'hérédité. St. Petersburg, 1894.

[58] An Estimate of the Degrees of Legitimate Natality, etc. Phil. Trans. of the Royal Soc., B. Part II, 1895, pp. 781-875.

[59] Ueber den Einfluss des Elterlichen Alters auf die Lebenskraft der Kinder. Jahrbuch f. Nat. Oekon. u. Statistik. Third ser., vol, iv, p. 518.

[60] Proc. Royal Sec., vol. lv, p. 18 et seq.

[61] Maurel,[62] in an interesting study of the conditions which modify masculinity, finds it to be augmented by the youth of the parents, especially the father, when conception takes place nearest the period of marriage, also by the complete maturity of the ovum and perhaps also of the male element, and the vigor of the parents The higher classes develop less masculinity in general than the lower. He also finds that the proportion of male to female births, which in Europe and India is greater in about the same degree, does not hold of the African races. Reduced masculinity means real social deficit, and is, therefore, one of the best criteria of the vigor of a class of the population. Emigration, which in general favors natality, diminishes masculinity, while crossing among the Neo-Latin races and precocious marriages increase it, and syphilis, alcoholism, and arthritism diminish it. He holds that femininity is a product of enfeebled fecundation, and that paternity is a more important fact in sex determination than maternity.

[62] Rev. Scientifique, April 4, 1903.

[63] The Fecundity of the Native and Foreign Born Population in Massachusetts. The Quart. Jour. of Economics, November, 1901, and February, 1902.

[64] The Increasing Sterility of American Women. Jour. of Am. Med. Ass'n, October, 1901.

[65] Health and Fertility of Educated Women. Med. Record, 1885, p. 407.

[66] Woman and Skilled Labor, by Frances E. White, M. D. Penn. Mo., July, 1875.

[67] Mutterschaft und geistige Arbeit, von Adele Gerhard and Helene Simon. Berlin, 1901, p. 333.

[68] See Marriage and Fecundity of College Men and Women. Ped. Sem., September, 1903, vol. x, pp. 275-314.

[69] The cause of race decline is not education. Pop. Sci. Monthly, June, 1903.

[70] Childbirth in New South Wales. A Study in Statistics. Sydney, 1899.

[71] Biomechanik. E. Mehnert, Jena, 1898.

[72] The Only Child in a Family. Fed. Sem., April, 1898, vol. v, pp. 475-496.

[73] David Starr Tordan: The Higher Education of Women. Pop. Sci. Mo., Dec., 1902.

[74] Coeducation. A series of essays by various authors, edited by Alice Woods. With an introduction by M. E. Sadler. London, 1803, p. 148 et seq.

[75] The Evolution of Ideals. W. G. Chambers, Fed. Sem., March, 1903, vol. x, p. 101 et seq. Also, B. Warner: The Young Woman, &c., New York, 1903, pp. 218.

[76] The Psychology of Woman. London, 1899.

[77] Physical Development of Women and Children, by Miss M. E. Allen. Am. Ass'n for Phys. Ed., April, 1890.

[78] Forum, September, 1891. See also Bunge: Die zunehmende Unfähigkeit der Frauen ihre Kinder zu stillen. München, 1903, 32 S. Also President Harper's Decemial Report, p. XCIV., et seq.

[79] Forum, 1891, p. 4.

[80] See vol, i, p. 213 et seq.