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Title: Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls

Author: Edward H. Clarke

Release date: June 5, 2006 [eBook #18504]

Language: English

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Transcriber's Note:

A number of obvious typographical errors have
been corrected in this text. For a complete list,
please see the end of this document.
This document has inconsistent hyphenation.
Hover Greek words for transliteration.

Sex in Education;
OR,

A FAIR CHANCE FOR GIRLS.

BY

EDWARD H. CLARKE, M.D.,
MEMBER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS MEDICAL SOCIETY; FELLOW OF
THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES;
LATE PROFESSOR OF MATERIA MEDICA
IN HARVARD COLLEGE,
ETC., ETC.

BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
(LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.)
1875.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873, by
EDWARD H. CLARKE,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington

BOSTON:
STEREOTYPED AND PRINTED BY RAND, AVERY, & CO.

"An American female constitution, which collapses just in
the middle third of life, and comes out vulcanized India-
rubber, if it happen to live through the period when health
and strength are most wanted."
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.

"He reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it
came before him, womanhood.... What a woman should
demand is respect for her as she is a woman. Let her first
lesson be, with sweet Susan Winstanley, to reverence her
sex."
Charles Lamb: Essays of Elia.

"We trust that the time now approaches when man's
condition shall be progressively improved by the force of
reason and truth, when the brute part of nature shall be
crushed, that the god-like spirit may unfold."
Guizot: History of Civilization, I., 34.

CONTENTS.

PART I.
Introductory 11
PART II.
Chiefly Physiological 31
PART III.
Chiefly Clinical 61
PART IV.
Co-Education 118
PART V.
The European Way 162

PREFACE.

About a year ago the author was honored by an invitation to address the
New-England Women's Club in Boston. He accepted the invitation, and
selected for his subject the relation of sex to the education of women. The
essay excited an unexpected amount of discussion. Brief reports of it found
their way into the public journals. Teachers and others interested in the
education of girls, in different parts of the country, who read these reports,
or heard of them, made inquiry, by letter or otherwise, respecting it. Various
and conflicting criticisms were passed upon it. This manifestation of
interest in a brief and unstudied lecture to a small club appeared to the

author to indicate a general appreciation of the importance of the theme he
had chosen, compelled him to review carefully the statements he had made,
and has emboldened him to think that their publication in a more
comprehensive form, with added physiological details and clinical
illustrations, might contribute something, however little, to the cause of
sound education. Moreover, his own conviction, not only of the importance
of the subject, but of the soundness of the conclusions he has reached, and
of the necessity of bringing physiological facts and laws prominently to the
notice of all who are interested in education, conspires with the interest
excited by the theme of his lecture to justify him in presenting these pages
to the public. The leisure of his last professional vacation has been devoted
to their preparation. The original address, with the exception of a few verbal
alterations, is incorporated into them.
Great plainness of speech will be observed throughout this essay. The
nature of the subject it discusses, the general misapprehension both of the
strong and weak points in the physiology of the woman question, and the
ignorance displayed by many, of what the co-education of the sexes really
means, all forbid that ambiguity of language or euphemism of expression
should be employed in the discussion. The subject is treated solely from the
standpoint of physiology. Technical terms have been employed, only where
their use is more exact or less offensive than common ones.
If the publication of this brief memoir does nothing more than excite
discussion and stimulate investigation with regard to a matter of such vital
moment to the nation as the relation of sex to education, the author will be
amply repaid for the time and labor of its preparation. No one can
appreciate more than he its imperfections. Notwithstanding these, he hopes
a little good may be extracted from it, and so commends it to the
consideration of all who desire the best education of the sexes.
Boston, 18 Arlington Street, October, 1873.

PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION.

The demand for a second edition of this book in little more than a week
after the publication of the first, indicates the interest which the public take
in the relation of Sex to Education, and justifies the author in appealing to
physiology and pathology for light upon the vexed question of the
appropriate education of girls. Excepting a few verbal alterations, and the
correction of a few typographical errors, there is no difference between this
edition and the first. The author would have been glad to add to this edition
a section upon the relation of sex to women's work in life, after their
technical education is completed, but has not had time to do so.
Boston, 18 Arlington Street,
Nov. 8, 1873.

NOTE TO THE FIFTH EDITION.

The attention of the reader is called to the definition of "education" on
the twentieth page. It is there stated, that, throughout this essay, education is
not used in the limited sense of mental or intellectual training alone, but as
comprehending the whole manner of life, physical and psychical, during the
educational period; that is, following Worcester's comprehensive definition,
as comprehending instruction, discipline, manners, and habits. This, of
course, includes home-life and social life, as well as school-life; balls and
parties, as well as books and recitations; walking and riding, as much as

studying and sewing. When a remission or intermission is necessary, the
parent must decide what part of education shall be remitted or omitted,—
the walk, the ball, the school, the party, or all of these. None can doubt
which will interfere most with Nature's laws,—four hours' dancing, or four
hours' studying. These remarks may be unnecessary. They are made because
some who have noticed this essay have spoken of it as if it treated only of
the school, and seem to have forgotten the just and comprehensive
signification in which education is used throughout this memoir. Moreover,
it may be well to remind the reader, even at the risk of casting a reflection
upon his intelligence, that, in these pages, the relation of sex to mature life
is not discussed, except in a few passages, in which the large capacities and
great power of woman are alluded to, provided the epoch of development is
physiologically guided.

SEX IN EDUCATION.
PART I.ToC

INTRODUCTORY.

"Is there any thing better in a State than that both women
and men be rendered the very best? There is not."—Plato.

It is idle to say that what is right for man is wrong for woman. Pure
reason, abstract right and wrong, have nothing to do with sex: they neither
recognize nor know it. They teach that what is right or wrong for man is
equally right and wrong for woman. Both sexes are bound by the same code
of morals; both are amenable to the same divine law. Both have a right to
do the best they can; or, to speak more justly, both should feel the duty, and
have the opportunity, to do their best. Each must justify its existence by
becoming a complete development of manhood and womanhood; and each
should refuse whatever limits or dwarfs that development.
The problem of woman's sphere, to use the modern phrase, is not to be
solved by applying to it abstract principles of right and wrong. Its solution
must be obtained from physiology, not from ethics or metaphysics. The
question must be submitted to Agassiz and Huxley, not to Kant or Calvin, to
Church or Pope. Without denying the self-evident proposition, that
whatever a woman can do, she has a right to do, the question at once arises,
What can she do? And this includes the further question, What can she best
do? A girl can hold a plough, and ply a needle, after a fashion. If she can do
both better than a man, she ought to be both farmer and seamstress; but if,
on the whole, her husband can hold best the plough, and she ply best the
needle, they should divide the labor. He should be master of the plough, and
she mistress of the loom. The quæstio vexata of woman's sphere will be
decided by her organization. This limits her power, and reveals her
divinely-appointed tasks, just as man's organization limits his power, and
reveals his work. In the development of the organization is to be found the

way of strength and power for both sexes. Limitation or abortion of
development leads both to weakness and failure.
Neither is there any such thing as inferiority or superiority in this matter.
Man is not superior to woman, nor woman to man. The relation of the sexes
is one of equality, not of better and worse, or of higher and lower. By this it
is not intended to say that the sexes are the same. They are different, widely
different from each other, and so different that each can do, in certain
directions, what the other cannot; and in other directions, where both can do
the same things, one sex, as a rule, can do them better than the other; and in
still other matters they seem to be so nearly alike, that they can interchange
labor without perceptible difference. All this is so well known, that it would
be useless to refer to it, were it not that much of the discussion of the
irrepressible woman-question, and many of the efforts for bettering her
education and widening her sphere, seem to ignore any difference of the
sexes; seem to treat her as if she were identical with man, and to be trained
in precisely the same way; as if her organization, and consequently her
function, were masculine, not feminine. There are those who write and act
as if their object were to assimilate woman as much as possible to man, by
dropping all that is distinctively feminine out of her, and putting into her as
large an amount of masculineness as possible. These persons tacitly admit
the error just alluded to, that woman is inferior to man, and strive to get rid
of the inferiority by making her a man. There may be some subtle
physiological basis for such views—some strange quality of brain; for some
who hold and advocate them are of those, who, having missed the
symmetry and organic balance that harmonious development yields, have
drifted into an hermaphroditic condition. One of this class, who was glad to
have escaped the chains of matrimony, but knew the value and lamented the
loss of maternity, wished she had been born a widow with two children.
These misconceptions arise from mistaking difference of organization and
function for difference of position in the scale of being, which is equivalent
to saying that man is rated higher in the divine order because he has more
muscle, and woman lower because she has more fat. The loftiest ideal of
humanity, rejecting all comparisons of inferiority and superiority between
the sexes, demands that each shall be perfect in its kind, and not be
hindered in its best work. The lily is not inferior to the rose, nor the oak
superior to the clover: yet the glory of the lily is one, and the glory of the

oak is another; and the use of the oak is not the use of the clover. That is
poor horticulture which would train them all alike.
When Col. Higginson asked, not long ago, in one of his charming essays,
that almost persuade the reader, "Ought women to learn the alphabet?" and
added, "Give woman, if you dare, the alphabet, then summon her to the
career," his physiology was not equal to his wit. Women will learn the
alphabet at any rate; and man will be powerless to prevent them, should he
undertake so ungracious a task. The real question is not, Shall women learn
the alphabet? but How shall they learn it? In this case, how is more
important than ought or shall. The principle and duty are not denied. The
method is not so plain.
The fact that women have often equalled and sometimes excelled men in
physical labor, intellectual effort, and lofty heroism, is sufficient proof that
women have muscle, mind, and soul, as well as men; but it is no proof that
they have had, or should have, the same kind of training; nor is it any proof
that they are destined for the same career as men. The presumption is, that if
woman, subjected to a masculine training, arranged for the development of
a masculine organization, can equal man, she ought to excel him if educated
by a feminine training, arranged to develop a feminine organization. Indeed,
I have somewhere encountered an author who boldly affirms the superiority
of women to all existences on this planet, because of the complexity of their
organization. Without undertaking to indorse such an opinion, it may be
affirmed, that an appropriate method of education for girls—one that should
not ignore the mechanism of their bodies or blight any of their vital organs
—would yield a better result than the world has yet seen.
Gail Hamilton's statement is true, that, "a girl can go to school, pursue all
the studies which Dr. Todd enumerates, except ad infinitum; know them, not
as well as a chemist knows chemistry or a botanist botany, but as well as
they are known by boys of her age and training, as well, indeed, as they are
known by many college-taught men, enough, at least, to be a solace and a
resource to her; then graduate before she is eighteen, and come out of
school as healthy, as fresh, as eager, as she went in."[1] But it is not true that
she can do all this, and retain uninjured health and a future secure from
neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous
system, if she follows the same method that boys are trained in. Boys must
study and work in a boy's way, and girls in a girl's way. They may study the

same books, and attain an equal result, but should not follow the same
method. Mary can master Virgil and Euclid as well as George; but both will
be dwarfed,—defrauded of their rightful attainment,—if both are confined
to the same methods. It is said that Elena Cornaro, the accomplished
professor of six languages, whose statue adorns and honors Padua, was
educated like a boy. This means that she was initiated into, and mastered,
the studies that were considered to be the peculiar dower of men. It does not
mean that her life was a man's life, her way of study a man's way of study,
or that, in acquiring six languages, she ignored her own organization.
Women who choose to do so can master the humanities and the
mathematics, encounter the labor of the law and the pulpit, endure the
hardness of physic and the conflicts of politics; but they must do it all in
woman's way, not in man's way. In all their work they must respect their
own organization, and remain women, not strive to be men, or they will
ignominiously fail. For both sexes, there is no exception to the law, that
their greatest power and largest attainment lie in the perfect development of
their organization. "Woman," says a late writer, "must be regarded as
woman, not as a nondescript animal, with greater or less capacity for
assimilation to man." If we would give our girls a fair chance, and see them
become and do their best by reaching after and attaining an ideal beauty and
power, which shall be a crown of glory and a tower of strength to the
republic, we must look after their complete development as women.
Wherein they are men, they should be educated as men; wherein they are
women, they should be educated as women. The physiological motto is,
Educate a man for manhood, a woman for womanhood, both for humanity.
In this lies the hope of the race.
Perhaps it should be mentioned in this connection, that, throughout this
paper, education is not used in the limited and technical sense of intellectual
or mental training alone. By saying there is a boy's way of study and a girl's
way of study, it is not asserted that the intellectual process which masters
Juvenal, German, or chemistry, is different for the two sexes. Education is
here intended to include what its etymology indicates, the drawing out and
development of every part of the system; and this necessarily includes the
whole manner of life, physical and psychical, during the educational period.
"Education," says Worcester, "comprehends all that series of instruction and
discipline which is intended to enlighten the understanding, correct the
temper, and form the manners and habits, of youth, and fit them for

usefulness in their future stations." It has been and is the misfortune of this
country, and particularly of New England, that education, stripped of this,
its proper signification, has popularly stood for studying, without regard to
the physical training or no training that the schools afford. The cerebral
processes by which the acquisition of knowledge is made are the same for
each sex; but the mode of life which gives the finest nurture to the brain,
and so enables those processes to yield their best result, is not the same for
each sex. The best educational training for a boy is not the best for a girl,
nor that for a girl best for a boy.
The delicate bloom, early but rapidly fading beauty, and singular pallor
of American girls and women have almost passed into a proverb. The first
observation of a European that lands upon our shores is, that our women are
a feeble race; and, if he is a physiological observer, he is sure to add, They
will give birth to a feeble race, not of women only, but of men as well. "I
never saw before so many pretty girls together," said Lady Amberley to the
writer, after a visit to the public schools of Boston; and then added, "They
all looked sick." Circumstances have repeatedly carried me to Europe,
where I am always surprised by the red blood that fills and colors the faces
of ladies and peasant girls, reminding one of the canvas of Rubens and
Murillo; and am always equally surprised on my return, by crowds of pale,
bloodless female faces, that suggest consumption, scrofula, anemia, and
neuralgia. To a large extent, our present system of educating girls is the
cause of this palor and weakness. How our schools, through their methods
of education, contribute to this unfortunate result, and how our colleges that
have undertaken to educate girls like boys, that is, in the same way, have
succeeded in intensifying the evils of the schools, will be pointed out in
another place.
It has just been said that the educational methods of our schools and
colleges for girls are, to a large extent, the cause of "the thousand ills" that
beset American women. Let it be remembered that this is not asserting that
such methods of education are the sole cause of female weaknesses, but
only that they are one cause, and one of the most important causes of it. An
immense loss of female power may be fairly charged to irrational cooking
and indigestible diet. We live in the zone of perpetual pie and dough-nut;
and our girls revel in those unassimilable abominations. Much also may be
credited to artificial deformities strapped to the spine, or piled on the head,

much to corsets and skirts, and as much to the omission of clothing where it
is needed as to excess where the body does not require it; but, after the
amplest allowance for these as causes of weakness, there remains a large
margin of disease unaccounted for. Those grievous maladies which torture a
woman's earthly existence, called leucorrhœa, amenorrhœa, dysmenorrhœa,
chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsus uteri, hysteria, neuralgia, and the like,
are indirectly affected by food, clothing, and exercise; they are directly and
largely affected by the causes that will be presently pointed out, and which
arise from a neglect of the peculiarities of a woman's organization. The
regimen of our schools fosters this neglect. The regimen of a college
arranged for boys, if imposed on girls, would foster it still more.
The scope of this paper does not permit the discussion of these other
causes of female weaknesses. Its object is to call attention to the errors of
physical training that have crept into, and twined themselves about, our
ways of educating girls, both in public and private schools, and which now
threaten to attain a larger development, and inflict a consequently greater
injury, by their introduction into colleges and large seminaries of learning,
that have adopted, or are preparing to adopt, the co-education of the sexes.
Even if there were space to do so, it would not be necessary to discuss here
the other causes alluded to. They are receiving the amplest attention
elsewhere. The gifted authoress of "The Gates Ajar" has blown her trumpet
with no uncertain sound, in explanation and advocacy of a new-clothes
philosophy, which her sisters will do well to heed rather than to ridicule. It
would be a blessing to the race, if some inspired prophet of clothes would
appear, who should teach the coming woman how, in pharmaceutical
phrase, to fit, put on, wear, and take off her dress,—

"Cito, Tuto, et Jucunde."

Corsets that embrace the waist with a grip that tightens respiration into pain,
and skirts that weight the hips with heavier than maternal burdens, have
often caused grievous maladies, and imposed a needless invalidism. Yet,
recognizing all this, it must not be forgotten that breeches do not make a
man, nor the want of them unmake a woman.
Let the statement be emphasized and reiterated until it is heeded, that
woman's neglect of her own organization, though not the sole explanation

and cause of her many weaknesses, more than any single cause, adds to
their number, and intensifies their power. It limits and lowers her action
very much, as man is limited and degraded by dissipation. The saddest part
of it all is, that this neglect of herself in girlhood, when her organization is
ductile and impressible, breeds the germs of diseases that in later life yield
torturing or fatal maladies. Every physician's note-book affords copious
illustrations of these statements. The number of them which the writer has
seen prompted this imperfect essay upon a subject in which the public has a
most vital interest, and with regard to which it acts with the courage of
ignorance.
Two considerations deserve to be mentioned in this connection. One is,
that no organ or function in plant, animal, or human kind, can be properly
regarded as a disability or source of weakness. Through ignorance or
misdirection, it may limit or enfeeble the animal or being that misguides it;
but, rightly guided and developed, it is either in itself a source of power and
grace to its parent stock, or a necessary stage in the development of larger
grace and power. The female organization is no exception to this law; nor
are the particular set of organs and their functions with which this essay has
to deal an exception to it. The periodical movements which characterize and
influence woman's structure for more than half her terrestrial life, and
which, in their ebb and flow, sway every fibre and thrill every nerve of her
body a dozen times a year, and the occasional pregnancies which test her
material resources, and cradle the race, are, or are evidently intended to be,
fountains of power, not hinderances, to her. They are not infrequently
spoken of by women themselves with half-smothered anathemas; often
endured only as a necessary evil and sign of inferiority; and commonly
ignored, till some steadily-advancing malady whips the recalcitrant sufferer
into acknowledgment of their power, and respect for their function. All this
is a sad mistake. It is a foolish and criminal delicacy that has persuaded
woman to be so ashamed of the temple God built for her as to neglect one
of its most important services. On account of this neglect, each succeeding
generation, obedient to the law of hereditary transmission, has become
feebler than its predecessor. Our great-grandmothers are pointed at as types
of female physical excellence; their great-grand-daughters as illustrations of
female physical degeneracy. There is consolation, however, in the hope,
based on substantial physiological data, that our great-grand-daughters may
recapture their ancestors' bloom and force. "Three generations of

wholesome life," says Mr. Greg, "might suffice to eliminate the ancestral
poison, for the vis medicatrix naturæ has wonderful efficacy when allowed
free play; and perhaps the time may come when the worst cases shall deem
it a plain duty to curse no future generations with the damnosa hereditas,
which has caused such bitter wretchedness to themselves."[2]
The second consideration is the acknowledged influence of beauty.
"When one sees a god-like countenance," said Socrates to Phædrus, "or
some bodily form that represents beauty, he reverences it as a god, and
would sacrifice to it." From the days of Plato till now, all have felt the
power of woman's beauty, and been more than willing to sacrifice to it. The
proper, not exclusive search for it is a legitimate inspiration. The way for a
girl to obtain her portion of this radiant halo is by the symmetrical
development of every part of her organization, muscle, ovary, stomach and
nerve, and by a physiological management of every function that correlates
every organ; not by neglecting or trying to stifle or abort any of the vital
and integral parts of her structure, and supplying the deficiency by invoking
the aid of the milliner's stuffing, the colorist's pencil, the druggist's
compounds, the doctor's pelvic supporter, and the surgeon's spinal brace.
When travelling in the East, some years ago, it was my fortune to be
summoned as a physician into a harem. With curious and not unwilling step
I obeyed the summons. While examining the patient, nearly a dozen Syrian
girls—a grave Turk's wifely crowd, a result and illustration of
Mohammedan female education—pressed around the divan with eyes and
ears intent to see and hear a Western Hakim's medical examination. As I
looked upon their well-developed forms, their brown skins, rich with the
blood and sun of the East, and their unintelligent, sensuous faces, I thought
that if it were possible to marry the Oriental care of woman's organization
to the Western liberty and culture of her brain, there would be a new birth
and loftier type of womanly grace and force.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Woman's Wrongs, p. 59.
[2] Enigmas of Life, p. 34.

PART II.ToC

CHIEFLY PHYSIOLOGICAL.

"She girdeth her loins with strength."—Solomon.

Before describing the special forms of ill that exist among our American,
certainly among our New-England girls and women, and that are often
caused and fostered by our methods of education and social customs, it is
important to refer in considerable detail to a few physiological matters.
Physiology serves to disclose the cause, and explain the modus operandi, of
these ills, and offers the only rational clew to their prevention and relief.
The order in which the physiological data are presented that bear upon this
discussion is not essential; their relation to the subject matter of it will be
obvious as we proceed.
The sacred number, three, dominates the human frame. There is a trinity
in our anatomy. Three systems, to which all the organs are directly or
indirectly subsidiary, divide and control the body. First, there is the nutritive
system, composed of stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas, glands, and
vessels, by which food is elaborated, effete matter removed, the blood
manufactured, and the whole organization nourished. This is the
commissariat. Secondly, there is the nervous system, which co-ordinates all
the organs and functions; which enables man to entertain relations with the
world around him, and with his fellows; and through which intellectual
power is manifested, and human thought and reason made possible. Thirdly,

there is the reproductive system, by which the race is continued, and its
grasp on the earth assured. The first two of these systems are alike in each
sex. They are so alike, that they require a similar training in each, and yield
in each a similar result. The machinery of them is the same. No scalpel has
disclosed any difference between a man's and a woman's liver. No
microscope has revealed any structure, fibre, or cell, in the brain of man or
woman, that is not common to both. No analysis or dynamometer has
discovered or measured any chemical action or nerve-force that stamps
either of these systems as male or female. From these anatomical and
physiological data alone, the inference is legitimate, that intellectual power,
the correlation and measure of cerebral structure and metamorphosis, is
capable of equal development in both sexes. With regard to the reproductive
system, the case is altogether different. Woman, in the interest of the race, is
dowered with a set of organs peculiar to herself, whose complexity,
delicacy, sympathies, and force are among the marvels of creation. If
properly nurtured and cared for, they are a source of strength and power to
her. If neglected and mismanaged, they retaliate upon their possessor with
weakness and disease, as well of the mind as of the body. God was not in
error, when, after Eve's creation, he looked upon his work, and pronounced
it good. Let Eve take a wise care of the temple God made for her, and Adam
of the one made for him, and both will enter upon a career whose glory and
beauty no seer has foretold or poet sung.
Ever since the time of Hippocrates, woman has been physiologically
described as enjoying, and has always recognized herself as enjoying, or at
least as possessing, a tri-partite life. The first period extends from birth to
about the age of twelve or fifteen years; the second, from the end of the first
period to about the age of forty-five; and the third, from the last boundary to
the final passage into the unknown. The few years that are necessary for the
voyage from the first to the second period, and those from the second to the
third, are justly called critical ones. Mothers are, or should be, wisely
anxious about the first passage for their daughters, and women are often
unduly apprehensive about the second passage for themselves. All this is
obvious and known; and yet, in our educational arrangements, little heed is
paid to the fact, that the first of these critical voyages is made during a girl's
educational life, and extends over a very considerable portion of it.

This brief statement only hints at the vital physiological truths it contains:
it does not disclose them. Let us look at some of them a moment.
Remember, that we are now concerned only with the first of these passages,
that from a girl's childhood to her maturity. In childhood, boys and girls are
very nearly alike. If they are natural, they talk and romp, chase butterflies
and climb fences, love and hate, with an innocent abandon that is ignorant
of sex. Yet even then the difference is apparent to the observing. Inspired by
the divine instinct of motherhood, the girl that can only creep to her
mother's knees will caress a doll, that her tottling brother looks coldly upon.
The infant Achilles breaks the thin disguise of his gown and sleeves by
dropping the distaff, and grasping the sword. As maturity approaches, the
sexes diverge. An unmistakable difference marks the form and features of
each, and reveals the demand for a special training. This divergence,
however, is limited in its sweep and its duration. The difference exists for a
definite purpose, and goes only to a definite extent. The curves of
separation swell out as childhood recedes, like an ellipse, and, as old age
draws on, approach, till they unite like an ellipse again. In old age, the
second childhood, the difference of sex becomes of as little note as it was
during the first. At that period, the picture of the

"Lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side,
* * * * * * * * * *
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing,"

is faithful to either sex. Not as man or woman, but as a sexless being, does
advanced age enter and pass the portals of what is called death.
During the first of these critical periods, when the divergence of the sexes
becomes obvious to the most careless observer, the complicated apparatus
peculiar to the female enters upon a condition of functional activity. "The
ovaries, which constitute," says Dr. Dalton, "the 'essential parts'[3] of this
apparatus, and certain accessory organs, are now rapidly developed."
Previously they were inactive. During infancy and childhood all of them
existed, or rather all the germs of them existed; but they were incapable of
function. At this period they take on a process of rapid growth and
development. Coincident with this process, indicating it, and essential to it,
are the periodical phenomena which characterize woman's physique till she

attains the third division of her tripartite life. The growth of this peculiar
and marvellous apparatus, in the perfect development of which humanity
has so large an interest, occurs during the few years of a girl's educational
life. No such extraordinary task, calling for such rapid expenditure of force,
building up such a delicate and extensive mechanism within the organism,
—a house within a house, an engine within an engine,—is imposed upon
the male physique at the same epoch.[4] The organization of the male grows
steadily, gradually, and equally, from birth to maturity. The importance of
having our methods of female education recognize this peculiar demand for
growth, and of so adjusting themselves to it, as to allow a sufficient
opportunity for the healthy development of the ovaries and their accessory
organs, and for the establishment of their periodical functions, cannot be
overestimated. Moreover, unless the work is accomplished at that period,
unless the reproductive mechanism is built and put in good working order at
that time, it is never perfectly accomplished afterwards. "It is not enough,"
says Dr. Charles West, the accomplished London physician, and lecturer on
diseases of women, "it is not enough to take precautions till menstruation
has for the first time occurred: the period for its return should, even in the
healthiest girl, be watched for, and all previous precautions should be once
more repeated; and this should be done again and again, until at length the
habit of regular, healthy menstruation is established. If this be not
accomplished during the first few years of womanhood, it will, in all
probability, never be attained."[5] There have been instances, and I have
seen such, of females in whom the special mechanism we are speaking of
remained germinal,—undeveloped. It seemed to have been aborted. They
graduated from school or college excellent scholars, but with undeveloped
ovaries. Later they married, and were sterile.[6]
The system never does two things well at the same time. The muscles and
the brain cannot functionate in their best way at the same moment. One
cannot meditate a poem and drive a saw simultaneously, without dividing
his force. He may poetize fairly, and saw poorly; or he may saw fairly, and
poetize poorly; or he may both saw and poetize indifferently. Brain-work
and stomach-work interfere with each other if attempted together. The
digestion of a dinner calls force to the stomach, and temporarily slows the
brain. The experiment of trying to digest a hearty supper, and to sleep
during the process, has sometimes cost the careless experimenter his life.
The physiological principle of doing only one thing at a time, if you would

do it well, holds as truly of the growth of the organization as it does of the
performance of any of its special functions. If excessive labor, either mental
or physical, is imposed upon children, male or female, their development
will be in some way checked. If the schoolmaster overworks the brains of
his pupils, he diverts force to the brain that is needed elsewhere. He spends
in the study of geography and arithmetic, of Latin, Greek and chemistry, in
the brain-work of the school room, force that should have been spent in the
manufacture of blood, muscle, and nerve, that is, in growth. The results are
monstrous brains and puny bodies; abnormally active cerebration, and
abnormally weak digestion; flowing thought and constipated bowels; lofty
aspirations and neuralgic sensations;
"A youth of study an old age of nerves."
Nature has reserved the catamenial week for the process of ovulation, and
for the development and perfectation of the reproductive system. Previously
to the age of eighteen or twenty, opportunity must be periodically allowed
for the accomplishment of this task. Both muscular and brain labor must be
remitted enough to yield sufficient force for the work. If the reproductive
machinery is not manufactured then, it will not be later. If it is imperfectly
made then, it can only be patched up, not made perfect, afterwards. To be
well made, it must be carefully managed. Force must be allowed to flow
thither in an ample stream, and not diverted to the brain by the school, or to
the arms by the factory, or to the feet by dancing. "Every physician," says a
recent writer, "can point to students whose splendid cerebral development
has been paid for by emaciated limbs, enfeebled digestion, and disordered
lungs. Every biography of the intellectual great records the dangers they
have encountered, often those to which they have succumbed, in
overstepping the ordinary bounds of human capacity; and while beckoning
onward to the glories of their almost preternatural achievements, register,
by way of warning, the fearful penalty of disease, suffering, and bodily
infirmity, which Nature exacts as the price for this partial and inharmonious
grandeur. It cannot be otherwise. The brain cannot take more than its share
without injury to other organs. It cannot do more than its share without
depriving other organs of that exercise and nourishment which are essential
to their health and vigor. It is in the power of the individual to throw, as it
were, the whole vigor of the constitution into any one part, and, by giving to

this part exclusive or excessive attention, to develop it at the expense, and
to the neglect, of the others."[7]
In the system of lichens, Nylander reckons all organs of equal value.[8]
No one of them can be neglected without evil to the whole organization.
From lichens to men and women there is no exception to the law, that, if
one member suffers, all the members suffer. What is true of the neglect of a
single organ, is true in a geometrical ratio of the neglect of a system of
organs. If the nutritive system is wrong, the evil of poor nourishment and
bad assimilation infects the whole economy. Brain and thought are
enfeebled, because the stomach and liver are in error. If the nervous system
is abnormally developed, every organ feels the twist in the nerves. The
balance and co-ordination of movement and function are destroyed, and the
ill percolates into an unhappy posterity. If the reproductive system is
aborted, there may be no future generations to pay the penalty of the
abortion, but what is left of the organism suffers sadly. When this sort of
arrest of development occurs in a man, it takes the element of
masculineness out of him, and replaces it with adipose effeminacy. When it
occurs in a woman, it not only substitutes in her case a wiry and perhaps
thin bearded masculineness for distinctive feminine traits and power,
making her an epicene, but it entails a variety of prolonged weaknesses, that
dwarf her rightful power in almost every direction. The persistent neglect
and ignoring by women, and especially by girls, ignorantly more than
wilfully, of that part of their organization which they hold in trust for the
future of the race, has been fearfully punished here in America, where, of
all the world, they are least trammelled and should be the best, by all sorts
of female troubles. "Nature," says Lord Bacon, "is often hidden, sometimes
overcome, seldom extinguished." In the education of our girls, the attempt
to hide or overcome nature by training them as boys has almost
extinguished them as girls. Let the fact be accepted, that there is nothing to
be ashamed of in a woman's organization, and let her whole education and
life be guided by the divine requirements of her system.
The blood, which is our life, is a complex fluid. It contains the materials
out of which the tissues are made, and also the débris which results from
the destruction of the same tissues,—the worn-out cells of brain and
muscle,—the cast-off clothes of emotion, thought, and power. It is a
common carrier, conveying unceasingly to every gland and tissue, to every

nerve and organ, the fibrin and albumen which repair their constant waste,
thus supplying their daily bread; and as unceasingly conveying away from
every gland and tissue, from every nerve and organ, the oxidized refuse,
which are both the result and measure of their work. Like the water flowing
through the canals of Venice, that carries health and wealth to the portals of
every house, and filth and disease from every doorway, the blood flowing
through the canals of the organization carries nutriment to all the tissues,
and refuse from them. Its current sweeps nourishment in, and waste out.
The former, it yields to the body for assimilation; the latter, it deposits with
the organs of elimination for rejection. In order to have good blood, then,
two things are essential: first, a regular and sufficient supply of nutriment,
and, secondly, an equally regular and sufficient removal of waste.
Insufficient nourishment starves the blood; insufficient elimination poisons
it. A wise housekeeper will look as carefully after the condition of his drains
as after the quality of his food.
The principal organs of elimination, common to both sexes, are the
bowels, kidneys, lungs, and skin. A neglect of their functions is punished in
each alike. To woman is intrusted the exclusive management of another
process of elimination, viz., the catamenial function. This, using the blood
for its channel of operation, performs, like the blood, double duty. It is
necessary to ovulation, and to the integrity of every part of the reproductive
apparatus; it also serves as a means of elimination for the blood itself. A
careless management of this function, at any period of life during its
existence, is apt to be followed by consequences that may be serious; but a
neglect of it during the epoch of development, that is, from the age of
fourteen to eighteen or twenty, not only produces great evil at the time of
the neglect, but leaves a large legacy of evil to the future. The system is
then peculiarly susceptible; and disturbances of the delicate mechanism we
are considering, induced during the catamenial weeks of that critical age by
constrained positions, muscular effort, brain work, and all forms of mental
and physical excitement, germinate a host of ills. Sometimes these causes,
which pervade more or less the methods of instruction in our public and
private schools, which our social customs ignore, and to which operatives
of all sorts pay little heed, produce an excessive performance of the
catamenial function; and this is equivalent to a periodical hemorrhage.
Sometimes they produce an insufficient performance of it; and this, by
closing an avenue of elimination, poisons the blood, and depraves the

organization. The host of ills thus induced are known to physicians and to
the sufferers as amenorrhœa, menorrhagia, dysmenorrhœa, hysteria,
anemia, chorea, and the like. Some of these fasten themselves on their
victim for a lifetime, and some are shaken off. Now and then they lead to an
abortion of the function, and consequent sterility. Fortunate is the girls'
school or college that does not furnish abundant examples of these sad
cases. The more completely any such school or college succeeds, while
adopting every detail and method of a boy's school, in ignoring and
neglecting the physiological conditions of sexual development, the larger
will be the number of these pathological cases among its graduates. Clinical
illustrations of these statements will be given in another place.
The mysterious process which physiologists call metamorphosis of
tissue, or intestitial change, deserves attention in connection with our
subject. It interests both sexes alike. Unless it goes on normally, neither
boys, girls, men, nor women, can have bodies or brains worth talking about.
It is a process, without which not a step can be taken, or muscle moved, or
food digested, or nutriment assimilated, or any function, physical or mental,
performed. By its aid, growth and development are carried on. Youth,
maturity, and old age result from changes in its character. It is alike the
support and the guide of health convalescence, and disease. It is the means
by which, in the human system, force is developed, and growth and decay
rendered possible. The process, in itself, is one of the simplest. It is merely
the replacing of one microscopic cell by another; and yet upon this simple
process hang the issues of life and death, of thought and power.
Carpenter, in his physiology, reports the discovery, which we owe to
German investigation, "that the whole structure originates in a single cell;
that this cell gives birth to others, analogous to itself, and these again to
many future generations; and that all the varied tissues of the animal body
are developed from cells."[9] A more recent writer adds, "In the higher
animals and plants, we are presented with structures which may be regarded
as essentially aggregates of cells; and there is now a physiological division
of labor, some of the cells being concerned with the nutriment of the
organism, whilst others are set apart, and dedicated to the function of
reproduction. Every cell in such an aggregate leads a life, which, in a
certain limited sense, may be said to be independent; and each discharges
its own function in the general economy. Each cell has a period of

development, growth, and active life, and each ultimately perishes; the life
of the organism not only not depending upon the life of its elemental
factors, but actually being kept up by their constant destruction and as
constant renewal."[10] Growth, health, and disease are cellular
manifestations. With every act of life, the movement of a finger, the
pulsation of a heart, the uttering of a word, the coining of a thought, the
thrill of an emotion, there is the destruction of a certain number of cells.
Their destruction evolves or sets free the force that we recognize as
movement, speech, thought, and emotion. The number of cells destroyed
depends upon the intensity and duration of the effort that correlates their
destruction. When a blacksmith wields a hammer for an hour, he uses up the
number of cells necessary to yield that amount of muscular force. When a
girl studies Latin for an hour, she uses up the number of brain-cells
necessary to yield that amount of intellectual force. As fast as one cell is
destroyed, another is generated. The death of one is followed instantly by
the birth of its successor. This continual process of cellular death and birth,
the income and outgo of cells, that follow each other like the waves of the
sea, each different yet each the same, is metamorphosis of tissue. This is
life. It corresponds very nearly to Bichat's definition that, "life is
organization in action." The finer sense of Shakspeare dictated a truer
definition than the science of the French physiologist,—

"What's yet in this
That bears the name of life? Yet in this life
Lie hid more thousand deaths."

Measure for Measure, Act iii. Scene 1.

No physical or psychical act is possible without this change. It is a
process of continual waste and repair. Subject to its inevitable power, the
organization is continually wasting away and continually being repaired.
The old notion that our bodies are changed every seven years, science has
long since exploded. "The matter," said Mr. John Goodsir, "of the organized
frame to its minutest parts is in a continual flux." Our bodies are never the
same for any two successive days. The feet that Mary shall dance with next
Christmas Eve will not be the same feet that bore her triumphantly through
the previous Christmas holidays. The brain that she learns German with to-

day does not contain a cell in its convolutions that was spent in studying
French one year ago. Whether her present feet can dance better or worse
than those of a year ago, and whether her present brain can do more or less
German and French than the one of the year before, depends upon how she
has used her feet and brain during the intervening time, that is, upon the
metamorphosis of her tissue.
From birth to adult age, the cells of muscle, organ, and brain that are
spent in the activities of life, such as digesting, growing, studying, playing,
working, and the like, are replaced by others of better quality and larger
number. At least, such is the case where metamorphosis is permitted to go
on normally. The result is growth and development. This growing period or
formative epoch extends from birth to the age of twenty or twenty-five
years. Its duration is shorter for a girl than for a boy. She ripens quicker
than he. In the four years from fourteen to eighteen, she accomplishes an
amount of physiological cell change and growth which Nature does not
require of a boy in less than twice that number of years. It is obvious, that to
secure the best kind of growth during this period, and the best development
at the end of it, the waste of tissue produced by study, work, and fashion
must not be so great that repair will only equal it. It is equally obvious that a
girl upon whom Nature, for a limited period and for a definite purpose,
imposes so great a physiological task, will not have as much power left for
the tasks of the school, as the boy of whom Nature requires less at the
corresponding epoch. A margin must be allowed for growth. The repair
must be greater and better than the waste.
During middle age, life's active period, there is an equilibrium between
the body's waste and repair: one equals the other. The machine, when
properly managed, then holds its own. A French physiologist fixes the close
of this period for the ideal man of the future at eighty, when, he says, old
age begins. Few have such inherited power, and live with such
physiological wisdom, as to keep their machine in good repair,—in good
working-order,—to that late period. From the age of twenty-five or thirty,
however, to that of sixty or sixty-five, this equilibrium occurs. Repair then
equals waste; reconstruction equals destruction. The female organization,
like the male, is now developed: its tissues are consolidated; its functions
are established. With decent care, it can perform an immense amount of
physical and mental labor. It is now capable of its best work. But, in order

to do its best, it must obey the law of periodicity; just as the male
organization, to do its best, must obey the law of sustained effort.
When old age begins, whether, normally, at seventy or eighty, or,
prematurely, at fifty or thirty, repair does not equal waste, and degeneration
of tissue results. More cells are destroyed by wear and tear than are made
up from nutriment. The friction of the machine rubs the stuff of life away
faster than it can be replaced. The muscles stiffen, the hair turns white, the
joints crack, the arteries ossify, the nerve-centres harden or soften: all sorts
of degeneration creep on till death appears,—Mors janua vitæ. There the
curves unite, and men and women are alike again.
Sleep, whose inventor received the benediction of Sancho Panza, and
whose power Dryden apostrophized,—

"Of all the powers the best:
Oh! peace of mind, repairer of decay,
Whose balm renews the limbs to labor of the day,"—

is a most important physiological factor. Our schools are as apt in
frightening it away as our churches are in inviting it. Sleep is the
opportunity for repair. During its hours of quiet rest, when muscular and
nervous effort are stilled, millions of microscopic cells are busy in the
penetralia of the organism, like coral insects in the depths of the sea,
repairing the waste which the day's study and work have caused. Dr. B.W.
Richardson of London, one of the most ingenious and accomplished
physiologists of the present day, describes the labor of sleep in the
following language: "During this period of natural sleep, the most important
changes of nutrition are in progress: the body is renovating, and, if young,
is actually growing. If the body be properly covered, the animal heat is
being conserved, and laid up for expenditure during the waking hours that
are to follow; the respiration is reduced, the inspirations being lessened in
the proportion of six to seven, as compared with the number made when the
body is awake; the action of the heart is reduced; the voluntary muscles,
relieved of all fatigue, and with the extensors more relaxed than the flexors,
are undergoing repair of structure, and recruiting their excitability; and the
voluntary nervous system, dead for the time to the external vibration, or, as
the older men called it, 'stimulus' from without, is also undergoing rest and

repair, so that, when it comes again into work, it may receive better the
impressions it may have to gather up, and influence more effectively the
muscles it may be called upon to animate, direct, control."[11] An American
observer and physiologist, Dr. William A. Hammond, confirms the views of
his English colleague. He tells us that "the state of general repose which
accompanies sleep is of especial value to the organism, in allowing the
nutrition of the nervous tissue to go on at a greater rate than its destructive
metamorphosis." In another place he adds, "For the brain, there is no rest
except during sleep." And, again, he says, "The more active the mind, the
greater the necessity for sleep; just as with a steamer, the greater the number
of revolutions its engine makes, the more imperative is the demand for
fuel."[12] These statements justify and explain the instinctive demand for
sleep. They also show why it is that infants require more sleep than
children, and children than middle-age folk, and middle-age folk than old
people. Infants must have sleep for repair and rapid growth; children, for
repair and moderate growth; middle-age folk, for repair without growth;
and old people, only for the minimum of repair. Girls, between the ages of
fourteen and eighteen, must have sleep, not only for repair and growth, like
boys, but for the additional task of constructing, or, more properly speaking,
of developing and perfecting then, a reproductive system,—the engine
within an engine. The bearing of this physiological fact upon education is
obvious. Work of the school is work of the brain. Work of the brain eats the
brain away. Sleep is the chance and laboratory of repair. If a child's brain-
work and sleep are normally proportioned to each other, each night will
more than make good each day's loss. Clear heads will greet each welcome
morn. But if the reverse occurs, the night will not repair the day; and aching
heads will signalize the advance of neuralgia, tubercle, and disease. So
Nature punishes disobedience.
It is apparent, from these physiological considerations, that, in order to
give girls a fair chance in education, four conditions at least must be
observed: first, a sufficient supply of appropriate nutriment; secondly, a
normal management of the catamenial functions, including the building of
the reproductive apparatus; thirdly, mental and physical work so
apportioned, that repair shall exceed waste, and a margin be left for general
and sexual development; and fourthly, sufficient sleep. Evidence of the
results brought about by a disregard of these conditions will next be given.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] Human Physiology, p. 546.
[4] As might be expected, the mortality of girls is greater at this period than that
of boys, an additional reason for imposing less labor on the former at that time.
According to the authority of MM. Quetelet and Smits, the mortality of the two
sexes is equal in childhood, or that of the male is greatest; but that of the female
rises between the ages of fourteen and sixteen to 1.28 to one male death. For the
next four years, it falls again to 1.05 females to one male death.—Sur la
Reproduction et la Mortalité de l'Homme. 8vo. Bruxelles.
[5] Lectures on Diseases of Women. Am. ed., p. 48.
[6] "Much less uncommon than the absence of either ovary is the persistence of
both through the whole or greater part of life in the condition which they present
in infancy and early childhood, with scarcely a trace of graafian vesicles in their
tissue. This want of development of the ovaries is generally, though not
invariably, associated with want of development of the uterus and other sexual
organs; and I need not say that women in whom it exists are sterile."—Lectures
on the Diseases of Women, by Charles West, M.D. Am. ed., p. 37.
[7] Enigmas of Life, pp. 165-8.
[8] Tuckerman's Genera Lichenum, Introduction, p. v.
[9] Carpenter's Human Physiology, p. 455.
[10] Nicholson, Study of Biology, p. 79.
[11] Popular Science Monthly, August, 1872, p. 411.
[12] Sleep and its Derangements, pp. 9, 10, 13.

PART III.ToC

CHIEFLY CLINICAL.

"Et l'on nous persuadera difficilement que lorsque les
hommes ont tant de peine à être hommes, les femmes
puissent, tout en restant femmes, devenir hommes aussi,
mettant ainsi la main sur les deux rôles, exerçant la double
mission, résumant le double caractère de l'humanité! Nous
perdrons la femme, et nous n'aurons pas l'homme. Voila ce
qui nous arrivera. On nous donnera ce quelque chose de
monstreux, cet être répugnant, qui déjà parait à notre
horizon."—Le Comte A. De Gasparin.
"Facts given in evidence are premises from which a
conclusion is to be drawn. The first step in the exercise of
this duty is to acquire a belief of the truth of the facts."—
Ram, on Facts.

Clinical observation confirms the teachings of physiology. The sick
chamber, not the schoolroom; the physician's private consultation, not the
committee's public examination; the hospital, not the college, the workshop,
or the parlor,—disclose the sad results which modern social customs,
modern education, and modern ways of labor, have entailed on women.
Examples of them may be found in every walk of life. On the luxurious
couches of Beacon Street; in the palaces of Fifth Avenue; among the classes
of our private, common, and normal schools; among the female graduates
of our colleges; behind the counters of Washington Street and Broadway; in
our factories, workshops, and homes,—may be found numberless pale,
weak, neuralgic, dyspeptic, hysterical, menorrhagic, dysmenorrhœic girls
and women, that are living illustrations of the truth of this brief monograph.
It is not asserted here that improper methods of study, and a disregard of the
reproductive apparatus and its functions, during the educational life of girls,
are the sole causes of female diseases; neither is it asserted that all the
female graduates of our schools and colleges are pathological specimens.
But it is asserted that the number of these graduates who have been
permanently disabled to a greater or less degree by these causes is so great,
as to excite the gravest alarm, and to demand the serious attention of the
community. If these causes should continue for the next half-century, and

increase in the same ratio as they have for the last fifty years, it requires no
prophet to foretell that the wives who are to be mothers in our republic must
be drawn from trans-atlantic homes. The sons of the New World will have
to re-act, on a magnificent scale, the old story of unwived Rome and the
Sabines.
We have previously seen that the blood is the life, and that the loss of it is
the loss of so much life. Deluded by strange theories, and groping in
physiological darkness, our fathers' physicians were too often Sangrados.
Nourishing food, pure air, and hæmatized blood were stigmatized as the
friends of disease and the enemies of convalescence. Oxygen was shut out
from and carbonic acid shut into the chambers of phthisis and fever; and
veins were opened, that the currents of blood and disease might flow out
together. Happily, those days of ignorance, which God winked at, and
which the race survived, have passed by. Air and food and blood are
recognized as Nature's restoratives. No physician would dare, nowadays, to
bleed either man or woman once a month, year in and year out, for a quarter
of a century continuously. But girls often have the courage, or the
ignorance, to do this to themselves. And the worst of it is, that the
organization of our schools and workshops, and the demands of social life
and polite society, encourage them in this slow suicide. It has already been
stated that the excretory organs, by constantly eliminating from the system
its effete and used material, the measure and source of its force, keep the
machine in clean, healthy, and working order, and that the reproductive
apparatus of woman uses the blood as one of its agents of elimination. Kept
within natural limits, this elimination is a source of strength, a perpetual
fountain of health, a constant renewal of life. Beyond these limits it is a
hemorrhage, that, by draining away the life, becomes a source of weakness
and a perpetual fountain of disease.
The following case illustrates one of the ways in which our present
school methods of teaching girls generate a menorrhagia and its consequent
evils. Miss A——, a healthy, bright, intelligent girl, entered a female
school, an institution that is commonly but oddly called a seminary for
girls, in the State of New York, at the age of fifteen. She was then
sufficiently well-developed, and had a good color; all the functions
appeared to act normally, and the catamenia were fairly established. She
was ambitious as well as capable, and aimed to be among the first in the

school. Her temperament was what physiologists call nervous,—an
expression that does not denote a fidgety make, but refers to a relative
activity of the nervous system. She was always anxious about her
recitations. No matter how carefully she prepared for them, she was ever
fearful lest she should trip a little, and appear to less advantage than she
hoped. She went to school regularly every week, and every day of the
school year, just as boys do. She paid no more attention to the periodical
tides of her organization than her companions; and that was none at all. She
recited standing at all times, or at least whenever a standing recitation was
the order of the hour. She soon found, and this history is taken from her
own lips, that for a few days during every fourth week, the effort of reciting
produced an extraordinary physical result. The attendant anxiety and
excitement relaxed the sluices of the system that were already
physiologically open, and determined a hemorrhage as the concomitant of a
recitation. Subjected to the inflexible rules of the school, unwilling to seek
advice from any one, almost ashamed of her own physique, she ingeniously
protected herself against exposure, and went on intellectually leading her
companions, and physically defying nature. At the end of a year, she went
home with a gratifying report from her teachers, and pale cheeks and a
variety of aches. Her parents were pleased, and perhaps a little anxious. She
is a good scholar, said her father; somewhat over-worked possibly; and so
he gave her a trip among the mountains, and a week or two at the seashore.
After her vacation she returned to school, and repeated the previous year's
experience,—constant, sustained work, recitation and study for all days
alike, a hemorrhage once a month that would make the stroke oar of the
University crew falter, and a brilliant scholar. Before the expiration of the
second year, Nature began to assert her authority. The paleness of Miss A's
complexion increased. An unaccountable and uncontrollable twitching of a
rhythmical sort got into the muscles of her face, and made her hands go and
feet jump. She was sent home, and her physician called, who at once
diagnosticated chorea (St. Vitus' dance), and said she had studied too hard,
and wisely prescribed no study and a long vacation. Her parents took her to
Europe. A year of the sea and the Alps, of England and the Continent, the
Rhine and Italy, worked like a charm. The sluiceways were controlled, the
blood saved, and color and health returned. She came back seemingly well,
and at the age of eighteen went to her old school once more. During all this
time not a word had been said to her by her parents, her physician, or her

teachers, about any periodical care of herself; and the rules of the school did
not acknowledge the catamenia. The labor and regimen of the school soon
brought on the old menorrhagic trouble in the old way, with the addition of
occasional faintings to emphasize Nature's warnings. She persisted in
getting her education, however, and graduated at nineteen, the first scholar,
and an invalid. Again her parents were gratified and anxious. She is
overworked, said they, and wondered why girls break down so. To insure
her recovery, a second and longer travel was undertaken. Egypt and Asia
were added to Europe, and nearly two years were allotted to the cure. With
change of air and scene her health improved, but not so rapidly as with the
previous journey. She returned to America better than she went away, and
married at the age of twenty-two. Soon after that time she consulted the
writer on account of prolonged dyspepsia, neuralgia, and dysmenorrhœa,
which had replaced menorrhagia. Then I learned the long history of her
education, and of her efforts to study just as boys do. Her attention had
never been called before to the danger she had incurred while at school. She
is now what is called getting better, but has the delicacy and weaknesses of
American women, and, so far, is without children.
It is not difficult, in this case, either to discern the cause of the trouble, or
to trace its influence, through the varying phases of disease, from Miss A
——'s school-days, to her matronly life. She was well, and would have
been called robust, up to her first critical period. She then had two tasks
imposed upon her at once, both of which required for their perfect
accomplishment a few years of time and a large share of vital force: one
was the education of the brain, the other of the reproductive system. The
schoolmaster superintended the first, and Nature the second. The school,
with puritanic inflexibility, demanded every day of the month; Nature,
kinder than the school, demanded less than a fourth of the time,—a seventh
or an eighth of it would have probably answered. The schoolmaster might
have yielded somewhat, but would not; Nature could not. The pupil,
therefore, was compelled to undertake both tasks at the same time.
Ambitious, earnest, and conscientious, she obeyed the visible power and
authority of the school, and disobeyed, or rather ignorantly sought to evade,
the invisible power and authority of her organization. She put her will into
the education of her brain, and withdrew it from elsewhere. The system
does not do two things well at the same time. One or the other suffers from
neglect, when the attempt is made. Miss A—— made her brain and muscles

work actively, and diverted blood and force to them when her organization
demanded active work, with blood and force for evolution in another
region. At first the schoolmaster seemed to be successful. He not only made
his pupil's brain manipulate Latin, chemistry, philosophy, geography,
grammar, arithmetic, music, French, German, and the whole extraordinary
catalogue of an American young lady's school curriculum, with acrobatic
skill; but he made her do this irrespective of the periodical tides of her
organism, and made her perform her intellectual and muscular calisthenics,
obliging her to stand, walk, and recite, at the seasons of highest tide. For a
while she got on nicely. Presently, however, the strength of the loins, that
even Solomon put in as a part of his ideal woman, changed to weakness.
Periodical hemorrhages were the first warning of this. As soon as loss of
blood occurred regularly and largely, the way to imperfect development and
invalidism was open, and the progress easy and rapid. The nerves and their
centres lacked nourishment. There was more waste than repair,—no margin
for growth. St. Vitus' dance was a warning not to be neglected, and the
schoolmaster resigned to the doctor. A long vacation enabled the system to
retrace its steps, and recover force for evolution. Then the school resumed
its sway, and physiological laws were again defied. Fortunately graduation
soon occurred, and unintermitted, sustained labor was no longer enforced.
The menorrhagia ceased, but persistent dysmenorrhœa now indicates the
neuralgic friction of an imperfectly developed reproductive apparatus.
Doubtless the evil of her education will infect her whole life.
The next case is drawn from different social surroundings. Early
associations and natural aptitude inclined Miss B—— to the stage; and the
need of bread and butter sent her upon it as a child, at what age I do not
know. At fifteen she was an actress, determined to do her best, and
ambitious of success. She strenuously taxed muscle and brain at all times in
her calling. She worked in a man's sustained way, ignoring all demands for
special development, and essaying first to dis-establish, and then to bridle,
the catamenia. At twenty she was eminent. The excitement and effort of
acting periodically produced the same result with her that a recitation did
under similar conditions with Miss A——. If she had been a physiologist,
she would have known how this course of action would end. As she was an
actress, and not a physiologist, she persisted in the slow suicide of frequent
hemorrhages, and encouraged them by her method of professional
education, and later by her method of practising her profession. She tried to

ward off disease, and repair the loss of force, by consulting various doctors,
taking drugs, and resorting to all sorts of expedients; but the hemorrhages
continued, and were repeated at irregular and abnormally frequent intervals.
A careful local examination disclosed no local disturbance. There was
neither ulceration, hypertrophy, or congestion of the os or cervix uteri; no
displacement of any moment, of ovarian tenderness. In spite of all her
difficulties, however, she worked on courageously and steadily in a man's
way and with a woman's will. After a long and discouraging experience of
doctors, work, and weaknesses, when rather over thirty years old, she came
to Boston to consult the writer, who learned at that time the details just
recited. She was then pale and weak. A murmur in the veins, which a
French savant, by way of dedication to the Devil, christened bruit de diable,
a baptismal name that science has retained, was audible over her jugulars,
and a similar murmur over her heart. Palpitation and labored respiration
accompanied and impeded effort. She complained most of her head, which
felt "queer," would not go to sleep as formerly, and often gave her turns, in
which there was a mingling of dizziness, semi-consciousness, and fear. Her
education and work, or rather method of work, had wrought out for her
anemia and epileptiform attacks. She got two or three physiological
lectures, was ordered to take iron, and other nourishing food, allow time for
sleep, and, above all, to arrange her professional work in harmony with the
rhythmical or periodical action of woman's constitution. She made the effort
to do this, and, in six months, reported herself in better health—though far
from well—than she had been for six years before.
This case scarcely requires analysis in order to see how it bears on the
question of a girl's education and woman's work. A gifted and healthy girl,
obliged to get her education and earn her bread at the same time, labored
upon the two tasks zealously, perhaps over-much, and did this at the epoch
when the female organization is busy with the development of its
reproductive apparatus. Nor is this all. She labored continuously, yielding
nothing to Nature's periodical demand for force. She worked her engine up
to highest pressure, just as much at flood-tide as at other times. Naturally
there was not nervous power enough developed in the uterine and
associated ganglia to restrain the laboring orifices of the circulation, to
close the gates; and the flood of blood gushed through. With the frequent
repetition of the flooding, came inevitably the evils she suffered from,—
Nature's penalties. She now reports herself better; but whether

convalescence will continue will depend upon her method of work for the
future.
Let us take the next illustration from a walk in life different from either
of the foregoing. Miss C—— was a bookkeeper in a mercantile house. The
length of time she remained in the employ of the house, and its character,
are a sufficient guaranty that she did her work well. Like the other clerks,
she was at her post, standing, during business hours, from Monday morning
till Saturday night. The female pelvis being wider than that of the male, the
weight of the body, in the upright posture, tends to press the upper
extremities of the thighs out laterally in females more than in males. Hence
the former can stand less long with comfort than the latter. Miss C——,
however, believed in doing her work in a man's way, infected by the not
uncommon notion that womanliness means manliness. Moreover, she
would not, or could not, make any more allowance for the periodicity of her
organization than for the shape of her skeleton. When about twenty years of
age, perhaps a year or so older, she applied to me for advice in consequence
of neuralgia, back-ache, menorrhagia, leucorrhœa, and general debility. She
was anemic, and looked pale, care-worn, and anxious. There was no
evidence of any local organic affection of the pelvic organs. "Get a woman's
periodical remission from labor, if intermission is impossible, and do your
work in a woman's way, not copying a man's fashion, and you will need
very little apothecary's stuff," was the advice she received. "I must go on as
I am doing," was her answer. She tried iron, sitz-baths, and the like: of
course they were of no avail. Latterly I have lost sight of her, and, from her
appearance at her last visit to me, presume she has gone to a world where
back-ache and male and female skeletons are unknown.
Illustrations of this sort might be multiplied but these three are sufficient
to show how an abnormal method of study and work may and does open the
flood-gates of the system, and, by letting blood out, lets all sorts of evil in.
Let us now look at another phase; for menorrhagia and its consequences are
not the only punishments that girls receive for being educated and worked
just like boys. Nature's methods of punishing men and women are as
numerous as their organs and functions, and her penalties as infinite in
number and gradation as her blessings.
Amenorrhœa is perhaps more common than menorrhagia. It often
happens, however, during the first critical epoch, which is isochronal with

the technical educational period of a girl, that after a few occasions of
catamenial hemorrhage, moderate perhaps but still hemorrhage, which are
not heeded, the conservative force of Nature steps in, and saves the blood
by arresting the function. In such instances, amenorrhœa is a result of
menorrhagia. In this way, and in others that we need not stop to inquire into,
the regimen of our schools, colleges, and social life, that requires girls to
walk, work, stand, study, recite, and dance at all times as boys can and
should, may shut the uterine portals of the blood up, and keep poison in, as
well as open them, and let life out. Which of these two evils is worse in
itself, and which leaves the largest legacy of ills behind, it is difficult to say.
Let us examine some illustrations of this sort of arrest.
Miss D—— entered Vassar College at the age of fourteen. Up to that age,
she had been a healthy girl, judged by the standard of American girls. Her
parents were apparently strong enough to yield her a fair dower of force.
The catamenial function first showed signs of activity in her Sophomore
Year, when she was fifteen years old. Its appearance at this age[13] is
confirmatory evidence of the normal state of her health at that period of her
college career. Its commencement was normal, without pain or excess. She
performed all her college duties regularly and steadily. She studied, recited,
stood at the blackboard, walked, and went through her gymnastic exercises,
from the beginning to the end of the term, just as boys do. Her account of
her regimen there was so nearly that of a boy's regimen, that it would puzzle
a physiologist to determine, from the account alone, whether the subject of
it was male or female. She was an average scholar, who maintained a fair
position in her class, not one of the anxious sort, that are ambitious of
leading all the rest. Her first warning was fainting away, while exercising in
the gymnasium, at a time when she should have been comparatively quiet,
both mentally and physically. This warning was repeated several times,
under the same circumstances. Finally she was compelled to renounce
gymnastic exercises altogether. In her Junior Year, the organism's periodical
function began to be performed with pain, moderate at first, but more and
more severe with each returning month. When between seventeen and
eighteen years old, dysmenorrhœa was established as the order of that
function. Coincident with the appearance of pain, there was a diminution of
excretion; and, as the former increased, the latter became more marked. In
other respects she was well; and, in all respects, she appeared to be well to
her companions and to the faculty of the college. She graduated before

nineteen, with fair honors and a poor physique. The year succeeding her
graduation was one of steadily-advancing invalidism. She was tortured for
two or three days out of every month; and, for two or three days after each
season of torture, was weak and miserable, so that about one sixth or fifth
of her time was consumed in this way. The excretion from the blood, which
had been gradually lessening, after a time substantially stopped, though a
periodical effort to keep it up was made. She now suffered from what is
called amenorrhœa. At the same time she became pale, hysterical, nervous
in the ordinary sense, and almost constantly complained of headache.
Physicians were applied to for aid: drugs were administered; travelling,
with consequent change of air and scene, was undertaken; and all with little
apparent avail. After this experience, she was brought to Boston for advice,
when the writer first saw her, and learned all these details. She presented no
evidence of local uterine congestion, inflammation, ulceration, or
displacement. The evidence was altogether in favor of an arrest of the
development of the reproductive apparatus, at a stage when the
development was nearly complete. Confirmatory proof of such an arrest
was found in examining her breast, where the milliner had supplied the
organs Nature should have grown. It is unnecessary for our present purpose
to detail what treatment was advised. It is sufficient to say, that she
probably never will become physically what she would have been had her
education been physiologically guided.
This case needs very little comment: its teachings are obvious. Miss D
—— went to college in good physical condition. During the four years of
her college life, her parents and the college faculty required her to get what
is popularly called an education. Nature required her, during the same
period, to build and put in working-order a large and complicated
reproductive mechanism, a matter that is popularly ignored,—shoved out of
sight like a disgrace. She naturally obeyed the requirements of the faculty,
which she could see, rather than the requirements of the mechanism within
her, that she could not see. Subjected to the college regimen, she worked
four years in getting a liberal education. Her way of work was sustained and
continuous, and out of harmony with the rhythmical periodicity of the
female organization. The stream of vital and constructive force evolved
within her was turned steadily to the brain, and away from the ovaries and
their accessories. The result of this sort of education was, that these last-
mentioned organs, deprived of sufficient opportunity and nutriment, first

began to perform their functions with pain, a warning of error that was
unheeded; then, to cease to grow;[14] next, to set up once a month a
grumbling torture that made life miserable; and, lastly, the brain and the
whole nervous system, disturbed, in obedience to the law, that, if one
member suffers, all the members suffer, became neuralgic and hysterical.
And so Miss D——spent the few years next succeeding her graduation in
conflict with dysmenorrhœa, headache, neuralgia, and hysteria. Her parents
marvelled at her ill-health; and she furnished another text for the often-
repeated sermon on the delicacy of American girls.
It may not be unprofitable to give the history of one more case of this
sort. Miss E—— had an hereditary right to a good brain and to the best
cultivation of it. Her father was one of our ripest and broadest American
scholars, and her mother one of our most accomplished American women.
They both enjoyed excellent health. Their daughter had a literary training,
—an intellectual, moral, and æsthetic half of education, such as their
supervision would be likely to give, and one that few young men of her age
receive. Her health did not seem to suffer at first. She studied, recited,
walked, worked, stood, and the like, in the steady and sustained way that is
normal to the male organization. She seemed to evolve force enough to
acquire a number of languages, to become familiar with the natural
sciences, to take hold of philosophy and mathematics, and to keep in good
physical case while doing all this. At the age of twenty-one she might have
been presented to the public, on Commencement Day, by the president of
Vassar College or of Antioch College or of Michigan University, as the
wished-for result of American liberal female culture. Just at this time,
however, the catamenial function began to show signs of failure of power.
No severe or even moderate illness overtook her. She was subjected to no
unusual strain. She was only following the regimen of continued and
sustained work, regardless of Nature's periodical demands for a portion of
her time and force, when, without any apparent cause, the failure of power
was manifested by moderate dysmenorrhœa and diminished excretion. Soon
after this the function ceased altogether; and up to this present writing, a
period of six or eight years, it has shown no more signs of activity than an
amputated arm. In the course of a year or so after the cessation of the
function, her head began to trouble her. First there was headache, then a
frequent congested condition, which she described as a "rush of blood" to
her head; and, by and by, vagaries and forebodings and despondent feelings

began to crop out. Coincident with this mental state, her skin became rough
and coarse, and an inveterate acne covered her face. She retained her
appetite, ability to exercise and sleep. A careful local examination of the
pelvic organs, by an expert, disclosed no lesion or displacement there, no
ovaritis or other inflammation. Appropriate treatment faithfully persevered
in was unsuccessful in recovering the lost function. I was finally obliged to
consign her to an asylum.
The arrest of development of the reproductive system is most obvious to
the superficial observer in that part of it which the milliner is called upon to
cover up with pads, and which was alluded to in the case of Miss D——.
This, however, is too important a matter to be dismissed with a bare
allusion. A recent writer has pointed out the fact and its significance with
great clearness. "There is another marked change," says Dr. Nathan Allen,
"going on in the female organization at the present day, which is very
significant of something wrong. In the normal state, Nature has made ample
provision in the structure of the female for nursing her offspring. In order to
furnish this nourishment, pure in quality and abundant in quantity, she must
possess a good development of the sanguine and lymphatic temperament,
together with vigorous and healthy digestive organs. Formerly such an
organization was very generally possessed by American women, and they
found but little difficulty in nursing their infants. It was only occasionally,
in case of some defect in the organization, or where sickness of some kind
had overtaken the mother, that it became necessary to resort to the wet-
nurse or to feeding by hand. And the English, the Scotch, the German, the
Canadian French, and the Irish women now living in this country, generally
nurse their children: the exceptions are rare. But how is it with our
American women who become mothers? To those who have never
considered this subject, and even to medical men who have never carefully
looked into it, the facts, when correctly and fully presented, will be
surprising. It has been supposed by some that all, or nearly all, our
American women could nurse their offspring just as well as not; that the
disposition only was wanting, and that they did not care about having the
trouble or confinement necessarily attending it. But this is a great mistake.
This very indifference or aversion shows something wrong in the
organization as well as in the disposition: if the physical system were all
right, the mind and natural instincts would generally be right also. While
there may be here and there cases of this kind, such an indisposition is not

always found. It is a fact, that large numbers of our women are anxious to
nurse their offspring, and make the attempt: they persevere for a while,—
perhaps for weeks or months,—and then fail.... There is still another class
that cannot nurse at all, having neither the organs nor nourishment requisite
even to make a beginning.... Why should there be such a difference between
the women of our times and their mothers or grandmothers? Why should
there be such a difference between our American women and those of
foreign origin residing in the same locality, and surrounded by the same
external influences? The explanation is simple: they have not the right kind
of organization; there is a want of proper development of the lymphatic and
sanguine temperaments,—a marked deficiency in the organs of nutrition
and secretion. You cannot draw water without good, flowing springs. The
brain and nervous system have, for a long time, made relatively too large a
demand upon the organs of digestion and assimilation, while the exercise
and development of certain other tissues in the body have been sadly
neglected.... In consequence of the great neglect of physical exercise, and
the continuous application to study, together with various other influences,
large numbers of our American women have altogether an undue
predominance of the nervous temperament. If only here and there an
individual were found with such an organization, not much harm
comparatively would result; but, when a majority or nearly all have it, the
evil becomes one of no small magnitude."[15] And the evil, it should be
added, is not simply the inability to nurse; for, if one member suffers, all the
members suffer. A woman, whether married or unmarried, whether called to
the offices of maternity or relieved from them, who has been defrauded by
her education or otherwise of such an essential part of her development, is
not so much of a woman, intellectually and morally as well as physically, in
consequence of this defect. Her nervous system and brain, her instincts and
character, are on a lower plane, and incapable of their harmonious and best
development, if she is possessed, on reaching adult age, of only a portion of
a breast and an ovary, or none at all.
When arrested development of the reproductive system is nearly or quite
complete, it produces a change in the character, and a loss of power, which
it is easy to recognize, but difficult to describe. As this change is an
occasional attendant or result of amenorrhœa, when the latter, brought about
at an early age, is part of an early arrest, it should not be passed by without
an allusion. In these cases, which are not of frequent occurrence at present,

but which may be evolved by our methods of education more numerously
in the future, the system tolerates the absence of the catamenia, and the
consequent non-elimination of impurities from the blood. Acute or chronic
disease, the ordinary result of this condition, is not set up, but, instead, there
is a change in the character and development of the brain and nervous
system. There are in individuals of this class less adipose and more
muscular tissue than is commonly seen, a coarser skin, and, generally, a
tougher and more angular make-up. There is a corresponding change in the
intellectual and psychical condition,—a dropping out of maternal instincts,
and an appearance of Amazonian coarseness and force. Such persons are
analogous to the sexless class of termites. Naturalists tell us that these
insects are divided into males and females, and a third class called workers
and soldiers, who have no reproductive apparatus, and who, in their
structure and instincts, are unlike the fertile individuals.
A closer analogy than this, however, exists between these human
individuals and the eunuchs of Oriental civilization. Except the secretary of
the treasury, in the cabinet of Candace, queen of Ethiopia, who was
baptized by Philip and Narses, Justinian's general, none of that class have
made any impression on the world's life, that history has recorded. It may
be reasonably doubted if arrested development of the female reproductive
system, producing a class of agenes,[16] not epicenes, will yield a better
result of intellectual and moral power in the nineteenth century, than the
analogous class of Orientals exhibited. Clinical illustrations of this type of
arrested growth might be given, but my pen refuses the ungracious task.
Another result of the present methods of educating girls, and one
different from any of the preceding, remains to be noticed. Schools and
colleges, as we have seen, require girls to work their brains with full force
and sustained power, at the time when their organization periodically
requires a portion of their force for the performance of a periodical
function, and a portion of their power for the building up of a peculiar,
complicated, and important mechanism,—the engine within an engine.
They are required to do two things equally well at the same time. They are
urged to meditate a lesson and drive a machine simultaneously, and to do
them both with all their force. Their organizations are expected to make
good sound brains and nerves by working over the humanities, the sciences,
and the arts, and, at the same time, to make good sound reproductive

apparatuses, not only without any especial attention to the latter, but while
all available force is withdrawn from the latter and sent to the former. It is
not materialism to say, that, as the brain is, so will thought be. Without
discussing the French physiologist's dictum, that the brain secretes thought
as the liver does bile, we may be sure, that without brain there will be no
thought. The quality of the latter depends on the quality of the former. The
metamorphoses of brain manifest, measure, limit, enrich, and color thought.
Brain tissue, including both quantity and quality, correlates mental power.
The brain is manufactured from the blood; its quantity and quality are
determined by the quantity and quality of its blood supply. Blood is made
from food; but it may be lost by careless hemorrhage, or poisoned by
deficient elimination. When frequently and largely lost or poisoned, as I
have too frequent occasion to know it often is, it becomes impoverished,—
anemic. Then the brain suffers, and mental power is lost. The steps are few
and direct, from frequent loss of blood, impoverished blood, and abnormal
brain and nerve metamorphosis, to loss of mental force and nerve disease.
Ignorance or carelessness leads to anemic blood, and that to an anemic
mind. As the blood, so the brain; as the brain, so the mind.
The cases which have hitherto been presented illustrate some of the evils
which the reproductive system is apt to receive in consequence of obvious
derangement of its growth and functions. But it may, and often does,
happen that the catamenia are normally performed, and that the
reproductive system is fairly made up during the educational period. Then
force is withdrawn from the brain and nerves and ganglia. These are
dwarfed or checked or arrested in their development. In the process of
waste and repair, of destructive and constructive metamorphosis, by which
brains as well as bones are built up and consolidated, education often leaves
insufficient margin for growth. Income derived from air, food, and sleep,
which should largely, may only moderately exceed expenditure upon study
and work, and so leave but little surplus for growth in any direction; or,
what more commonly occurs, the income which the brain receives is all
spent upon study, and little or none upon its development, while that which
the nutritive and reproductive systems receive is retained by them, and
devoted to their own growth. When the school makes the same steady
demand for force from girls who are approaching puberty, ignoring Nature's
periodical demands, that it does from boys, who are not called upon for an
equal effort, there must be failure somewhere. Generally either the

reproductive system or the nervous system suffers. We have looked at
several instances of the former sort of failure; let us now examine some of
the latter.
Miss F—— was about twenty years old when she completed her
technical education. She inherited a nervous diathesis as well as a large
dower of intellectual and æsthetic graces. She was a good student, and
conscientiously devoted all her time, with the exception of ordinary
vacations, to the labor of her education. She made herself mistress of
several languages, and accomplished in many ways. The catamenial
function appeared normally, and, with the exception of occasional slight
attacks of menorrhagia, was normally performed during the whole period of
her education. She got on without any sort of serious illness. There were
few belonging to my clientele who required less professional advice for the
same period than she. With the ending of her school life, when she should
have been in good trim and well equipped, physically as well as
intellectually, for life's work, there commenced, without obvious cause, a
long period of invalidism. It would be tedious to the reader, and useless for
our present purpose, to detail the history and describe the protean shapes of
her sufferings. With the exception of small breasts, the reproductive system
was well developed. Repeated and careful examinations failed to detect any
derangement of the uterine mechanism. Her symptoms all pointed to the
nervous system as the fons et origo mali. First general debility, that
concealed but ubiquitous leader of innumerable armies of weakness and ill,
laid siege to her, and captured her. Then came insomnia, that worried her
nights for month after month, and made her beg for opium, alcohol, chloral,
bromides, any thing that would bring sleep. Neuralgia in every conceivable
form tormented her, most frequently in her back, but often, also, in her
head, sometimes in her sciatic nerves, sometimes setting up a tic
douloureux, sometimes causing a fearful dysmenorrhœa and frequently
making her head ache for days together. At other times hysteria got hold of
her, and made her fancy herself the victim of strange diseases. Mental effort
of the slightest character distressed her, and she could not bear physical
exercise of any amount. This condition, or rather these varying conditions,
continued for some years. She followed a careful and systematic regimen,
and was rewarded by a slow and gradual return of health and strength, when
a sudden accident killed her, and terminated her struggle with weakness and
pain.

Words fail to convey the lesson of this case to others with any thing like
the force that the observation of it conveyed its moral to those about Miss F
——, and especially to the physician who watched her career through her
educational life, and saw it lead to its logical conclusion of invalidism and
thence towards recovery, till life ended. When she finished school, as the
phrase goes, she was considered to be well. The principal of any seminary
or head of any college, judging by her looks alone, would not have hesitated
to call her rosy and strong. At that time the symptoms of failure which
began to appear were called signs of previous overwork. This was true, but
not so much in the sense of overwork as of erroneously-arranged work.
While a student, she wrought continuously,—just as much during each
catamenial week as at other times. As a consequence, in her metamorphosis
of tissue, repair did little more than make up waste. There were constant
demands of force for constant growth of the system generally, equally
constant demands of force for the labor of education, and periodical
demands of force for a periodical function. The regimen she followed did
not permit all these demands to be satisfied, and the failure fell on the
nervous system. She accomplished intellectually a good deal, but not more
than she might have done, and retained her health, had the order of her
education been a physiological one. It was not Latin, French, German,
mathematics, or philosophy that undermined her nerves; nor was it because
of any natural inferiority to boys that she failed; nor because she undertook
to master what women have no right to learn: she lost her health simply
because she undertook to do her work in a boy's way and not in a girl's way.
Let us learn the lesson of one more case. These details may be tedious;
but the justification of their presence here are the importance of the subject
they illustrate and elucidate, and the necessity of acquiring a belief of the
truth of the facts of female education.
Miss G—— worked her way through New-England primary, grammar,
and high schools to a Western college, which she entered with credit to
herself, and from which she graduated, confessedly its first scholar, leading
the male and female youth alike. All that need be told of her career is that
she worked as a student, continuously and perseveringly, through the years
of her first critical epoch, and for a few years after it, without any sort of
regard to the periodical type of her organization. It never appeared that she
studied excessively in other respects, or that her system was weakened

while in college by fevers or other sickness. Not a great while after
graduation, she began to show signs of failure, and some years later died
under the writer's care. A post-mortem examination was made, which
disclosed no disease in any part of the body, except in the brain, where the
microscope revealed commencing degeneration.
This was called an instance of death from over-work. Like the preceding
case, it was not so much the result of over-work as of un-physiological
work. She was unable to make a good brain, that could stand the wear and
tear of life, and a good reproductive system that should serve the race, at the
same time that she was continuously spending her force in intellectual
labor. Nature asked for a periodical remission, and did not get it. And so
Miss G——died, not because she had mastered the wasps of Aristophanes
and the Mécanique Céleste, not because she had made the acquaintance of
Kant and Kölliker, and ventured to explore the anatomy of flowers and the
secrets of chemistry, but because, while pursuing these studies, while doing
all this work, she steadily ignored her woman's make. Believing that woman
can do what man can, for she held that faith, she strove with noble but
ignorant bravery to compass man's intellectual attainment in a man's way,
and died in the effort. If she had aimed at the same goal, disregarding
masculine and following feminine methods, she would be alive now, a
grand example of female culture, attainment, and power.
These seven clinical observations are sufficient to illustrate the fact that
our modern methods of education do not give the female organization a fair
chance, but that they check development, and invite weakness. It would be
easy to multiply such observations, from the writer's own notes alone, and,
by doing so, to swell this essay into a portly volume; but the reader is
spared the needless infliction. Other observers have noticed similar facts,
and have urgently called attention to them.
Dr. Fisher, in a recent excellent monograph on insanity, says, "A few
examples of injury from continued study will show how mental strain
affects the health of young girls particularly. Every physician could, no
doubt, furnish many similar ones."
"Miss A—— graduated with honor at the normal school after several
years of close study, much of the time out of school; never attended balls or
parties; sank into a low state of health at once with depression. Was very

absurdly allowed to marry while in this state, and soon after became
violently insane, and is likely to remain so."
"Miss A—— graduated at the grammar school, not only first, but perfect,
and at once entered the normal school; was very ambitious to sustain her
reputation, and studied hard out of school; was slow to learn, but had a
retentive memory; could seldom be induced to go to parties, and, when she
did go, studied while dressing, and on the way; was assigned extra tasks at
school, because she performed them so well; was a fine healthy girl in
appearance, but broke down permanently at end of second year, and is now
a victim of hysteria and depression."
"Miss C——, of a nervous organization, and quick to learn; her health
suffered in normal school, so that her physician predicted insanity if her
studies were not discontinued. She persevered, however, and is now an
inmate of a hospital, with hysteria and depression."
"A certain proportion of girls are predisposed to mental or nervous
derangement. The same girls are apt to be quick, brilliant, ambitious, and
persistent at study, and need not stimulation, but repression. For the sake of
a temporary reputation for scholarship, they risk their health at the most
susceptible period of their lives, and break down after the excitement of
school-life has passed away. For sexual reasons they cannot compete with
boys, whose out-door habits still further increase the difference in their
favor. If it was a question of school-teachers instead of school-girls, the list
would be long of young women whose health of mind has become bankrupt
by a continuation of the mental strain commenced at school. Any method of
relief in our school-system to these over-susceptible minds should be
welcomed, even at the cost of the intellectual supremacy of woman in the
next generation."[17]
The fact which Dr. Fisher alludes to, that many girls break down not
during but after the excitement of school or college life, is an important
one, and is apt to be overlooked. The process by which the development of
the reproductive system is arrested, or degeneration of brain and nerve-
tissue set a going, is an insidious one. At its beginning, and for a long time
after it is well on in its progress, it would not be recognized by the
superficial observer. A class of girls might, and often do, graduate from our
schools, higher seminaries, and colleges, that appear to be well and strong

at the time of their graduation, but whose development has already been
checked, and whose health is on the verge of giving way. Their teachers
have known nothing of the amenorrhœa, menorrhagia, dysmenorrhœa, or
leucorrhœa which the pupils have sedulously concealed and disregarded;
and the cunning devices of dress have covered up all external evidences of
defect; and so, on graduation day, they are pointed out by their instructors to
admiring committees as rosy specimens of both physical and intellectual
education. A closer inspection by competent experts would reveal the secret
weakness which the labor of life that they are about to enter upon too late
discloses.
The testimony of Dr. Anstie of London, as to the gravity of the evils
incurred by the sort of erroneous education we are considering, is decided
and valuable. He says, "For, be it remembered, the epoch of sexual
development is one in which an enormous addition is being made to the
expenditure of vital energy; besides the continuous processes of growth of
the tissues and organs generally, the sexual apparatus, with its nervous
supply, is making by its development heavy demands upon the nutritive
powers of the organism; and it is scarcely possible but that portions of the
nervous centres, not directly connected with it, should proportionally suffer
in their nutrition, probably through defective blood supply. When we add to
this the abnormal strain that is being put on the brain, in many cases, by a
forcing plan of mental education, we shall perceive a source not merely of
exhaustive expenditure of nervous power, but of secondary irritation of
centres like the medulla oblongata that are probably already somewhat
lowered in power of vital resistance, and proportionably irritable."[18] A
little farther on, Dr. Anstie adds, "But I confess, that, with me, the result of
close attention given to the pathology of neuralgia has been the ever-
growing conviction, that, next to the influence of neurotic inheritance, there
is no such frequently powerful factor in the construction of the neuralgic
habit as mental warp of a certain kind, the product of an unwise education."
In another place, speaking of the liability of the brain to suffer from an
unwise education, and referring to the sexual development that we are
discussing in these pages, he makes the following statement, which no
intelligent physician will deny, and which it would be well for all teachers
who care for the best education of the girls intrusted to their charge to
ponder seriously. "I would also go farther, and express the opinion, that
peripheral influences of an extremely powerful and continuous kind, where

they concur with one of those critical periods of life at which the central
nervous system is relatively weak and unstable, can occasionally set going a
non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may localize itself in those nerves
upon whose centres the morbific peripheral influence is perpetually pouring
in. Even such influences as the psychical and emotional, be it remembered,
must be considered peripheral."[19] The brain of Miss G——, whose case
was related a few pages back, is a clinical illustration of the accuracy of this
opinion.
Dr. Weir Mitchell, one of our most eminent American physiologists, has
recently borne most emphatic testimony to the evils we have pointed out:
"Worst of all," he says, "to my mind, most destructive in every way, is the
American view of female education. The time taken for the more serious
instruction of girls extends to the age of eighteen, and rarely over this.
During these years, they are undergoing such organic development as
renders them remarkably sensitive." ... "To show more precisely how the
growing girl is injured by the causes just mentioned" (forced and continued
study at the sexual epoch) "would carry me upon subjects unfit for full
discussion in these pages; but no thoughtful reader can be much at a loss as
to my meaning." ... "To-day the American woman is, to speak plainly,
physically unfit for her duties as woman, and is, perhaps, of all civilized
females, the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks which tax so
heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to what Nature asks
from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain herself under the
pressure of those yet more exacting duties which now-a-days she is eager to
share with the man?"[20]
In our schools it is the ambitious and conscientious girls, those who have
in them the stuff of which the noblest women are made, that suffer, not the
romping or lazy sort; and thus our modern ways of education provide for
the "non-survival of the fittest." A speaker told an audience of women at
Wesleyan Hall not long ago, that he once attended the examination of a
Western college, where a girl beat the boys in unravelling the intracacies of
Juvenal. He did not report the consumption of blood and wear of brain
tissue that in her college way of study correlated her Latin, or hint at the
possibility of arrested development. Girls of bloodless skins and intellectual
faces may be seen any day, by those who desire the spectacle, among the
scholars of our high and normal schools,—faces that crown, and skins that

cover, curving spines, which should be straight, and neuralgic nerves that
should know no pain. Later on, when marriage and maternity overtake these
girls, and they "live laborious days" in a sense not intended by Milton's line,
they bend and break beneath the labor, like loaded grain before a storm, and
bear little fruit again. A training that yields this result is neither fair to the
girls nor to the race.
Let us quote the authority of such an acute and sagacious observer as Dr.
Maudsley, in support of the physiological and pathological views that have
been here presented. Referring to the physiological condition and
phenomena of the first critical epoch, he says, "In the great mental
revolution caused by the development of the sexual system at puberty, we
have the most striking example of the intimate and essential sympathy
between the brain, as a mental organ, and other organs of the body. The
change of character at this period is not by any means limited to the
appearance of the sexual feelings, and their sympathetic ideas, but, when
traced to its ultimate reach, will be found to extend to the highest feelings of
mankind, social, moral, and even religious."[21] He points out the fact that it
is very easy by improper training and forced work, during this susceptible
period, to turn a physiological into a pathological state. "The great mental
revolution which occurs at puberty may go beyond its physiological limits
in some instances, and become pathological." "The time of this mental
revolution is at best a trying period for youth." "The monthly activity of the
ovaries, which marks the advent of puberty in women, has a notable effect
upon the mind and body; wherefore it may become an important cause of
mental and physical derangement."[22] With regard to the physiological
effects of arrested development of the reproductive apparatus in women, Dr.
Maudsley uses the following plain and emphatic language: "The forms and
habits of mutilated men approach those of women; and women, whose
ovaries and uterus remain for some cause in a state of complete inaction,
approach the forms and habits of men. It is said, too, that, in
hermaphrodites, the mental character, like the physical, participates equally
in that of both sexes. While woman preserves her sex, she will necessarily
be feebler than man, and, having her special bodily and mental characters,
will have, to a certain extent, her own sphere of activity; where she has
become thoroughly masculine in nature, or hermaphrodite in mind,—when,
in fact, she has pretty well divested herself of her sex,—then she may take
his ground, and do his work; but she will have lost her feminine attractions,

and probably also her chief feminine functions."[23] It has been reserved for
our age and country, by its methods of female education, to demonstrate
that it is possible in some cases to divest a woman of her chief feminine
functions; in others, to produce grave and even fatal disease of the brain and
nervous system; in others, to engender torturing derangements and
imperfections of the reproductive apparatus that imbitter a lifetime. Such,
we know, is not the object of a liberal female education. Such is not the
consummation which the progress of the age demands. Fortunately, it is
only necessary to point out and prove the existence of such erroneous
methods and evil results to have them avoided. That they can be avoided,
and that woman can have a liberal education that shall develop all her
powers, without mutilation or disease, up to the loftiest ideal of
womanhood, is alike the teaching of physiology and the hope of the race.
In concluding this part of our subject, it is well to remember the
statement made at the beginning of our discussion, to the following effect,
viz., that it is not asserted here, that improper methods of study and a
disregard of the reproductive apparatus and its functions, during the
educational life of girls, are the sole causes of female diseases; neither is it
asserted that all the female graduates of our schools and colleges are
pathological specimens. But it is asserted that the number of these graduates
who have been permanently disabled to a greater or less degree, or fatally
injured, by these causes, is such as to excite the gravest alarm, and to
demand the serious attention of the community.
The preceding physiological and pathological data naturally open the
way to a consideration of the co-education of the sexes.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] It appears, from the researches of Mr. Whitehead on this point, that an
examination of four thousand cases gave fifteen years six and three-quarter
months as the average age in England for the appearance of the catamenia.—
Whitehead, on Abortion, &c.

[14] The arrest of development of the uterus, in connection with amenorrhœa, is
sometimes very marked. In the New-York Medical Journal for June, 1873, three
such cases are recorded, that came under the eye of those excellent observers, Dr.
E.R. Peaslee and Dr. T.G. Thomas. In one of these cases, the uterine cavity
measured one and a half inches; in another, one and seven-eighths inches; and, in
a third, one and a quarter inches. Recollecting that the normal measurement is
from two and a half to three inches, it appears that the arrest of development in
these cases occurred when the uterus was half or less than half grown. Liberal
education should avoid such errors.
[15] Physical Degeneracy. By Nathan Allen, M.D., Journal of Psychological
Medicine. October, 1870.
[16] According to the biblical account, woman was formed by subtracting a rib
from man. If, in the evolution of the future, a third division of the human race is
to be formed by subtracting sex from woman,—a retrograde development,—I
venture to propose the term agene (α without, γενος sex) as an appropriate
designation for the new development. Count Gasparin prophesies it thus:
"Quelque chose de monstreux, cet être répugnant, qui déjà parait à notre
horizon," a free translation of Virgil's earlier description:—
"Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademtum."
3d, 658 line.

[17] Plain Talk about Insanity. By T.W. Fisher, M.D. Boston. Pp. 23, 24.
[18] Neuralgia, and the Diseases that resemble it. By Francis E. Anstie, M.D. Pp.
122. English ed.
[19] Op. cit., p. 160.
[20] Wear and Tear. By S. Weir Mitchell, M.D.
[21] Body and Mind. By Henry Maudsley, M.D. Lond. p. 31
[22] Op. cit., p. 87.
[23] Op. cit., p. 32.

PART IV.ToC

CO-EDUCATION.

"Pistoc. Where, then, should I take my place?
1st Bacch. Near myself, that, with a she wit, a he wit may
be reclining at our repast."—Bacchides of Plautus.
"The woman's-rights movement, with its conventions, its
speech-makings, its crudities, and eccentricities, is
nevertheless a part of a healthful and necessary movement of
the human race towards progress."—Harriet Beecher
Stowe.

Guided by the laws of development which we have found physiology to
teach, and warned by the punishments, in the shape of weakness and
disease, which we have shown their infringement to bring about, and of
which our present methods of female education furnish innumerable
examples, it is not difficult to discern certain physiological principles that

limit and control the education, and, consequently, the co-education of our
youth. These principles we have learned to be, three for the two sexes in
common, and one for the peculiarities of the female sex. The three common
to both, the three to which both are subjected, and for which wise methods
of education will provide in the case of both, are, 1st, a sufficient supply of
appropriate nutriment. This of course includes good air and good water and
sufficient warmth, as much as bread and butter; oxygen and sunlight, as
much as meat. 2d, Mental and physical work and regimen so apportioned,
that repair shall exceed waste, and a margin be left for development. This
includes out-of-door exercise and appropriate ways of dressing, as much as
the hours of study, and the number and sort of studies. 3d, Sufficient sleep.
This includes the best time for sleeping, as well as the proper number of
hours for sleep. It excludes the "murdering of sleep," by late hours of study
and the crowding of studies, as much as by wine or tea or dissipation. All
these guide and limit the education of the two sexes very much alike. The
principle or condition peculiar to the female sex is the management of the
catamenial function, which, from the age of fourteen to nineteen, includes
the building of the reproductive apparatus. This imposes upon women, and
especially upon the young woman, a great care, a corresponding duty, and
compensating privileges. There is only a feeble counterpart to it in the male
organization; and, in his moral constitution, there cannot be found the fine
instincts and quick perceptions that have their root in this mechanism, and
correlate its functions. This lends to her development and to all her work a
rhythmical or periodical order, which must be recognized and obeyed. "In
this recognition of the chronometry of organic process, there is
unquestionably great promise for the future; for it is plain that the
observance of time in the motions of organic molecules is as certain and
universal, if not as exact, as that of the heavenly bodies."[24] Periodicity
characterizes the female organization, and developes feminine force.
Persistence characterizes the male organization, and develops masculine
force. Education will draw the best out of each by adjusting its methods to
the periodicity of one and the persistence of the other.
Before going farther, it is essential to acquire a definite notion of what is
meant, or, at least, of what we mean in this discussion, by the term co-
education. Following its etymology, con-educare, it signifies to draw out
together, or to unite in education; and this union refers to the time and
place, rather than to the methods and kinds of education. In this sense any

school or college may utilize its buildings, apparatus, and instructors to give
appropriate education to the two sexes as well as to different ages of the
same sex. This is juxtaposition in education. When the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology teaches one class of young men chemistry, and
another class engineering, in the same building and at the same time, it co-
educates those two classes. In this sense it is possible that many advantages
might be obtained from the co-education of the sexes, that would more than
counterbalance the evils of crowding large numbers of them together. This
sort of co-education does not exclude appropriate classification, nor compel
the two sexes to follow the same methods or the same regimen.
Another signification of co-education, and, as we apprehend, the one in
which it is commonly used, includes time, place, government, methods,
studies, and regimen. This is identical co-education. This means, that boys
and girls shall be taught the same things, at the same time, in the same
place, by the same faculty, with the same methods, and under the same
regimen. This admits age and proficiency, but not sex, as a factor in
classification. It is against the co-education of the sexes, in this sense of
identical co-education, that physiology protests; and it is this identity of
education, the prominent characteristic of our American school-system, that
has produced the evils described in the clinical part of this essay, and that
threatens to push the degeneration of the female sex still farther on. In these
pages, co-education of the sexes is used in its common acceptation of
identical co-education.
Let us look for a moment at what identical co-education is. The law has,
or had, a maxim, that a man and his wife are one, and that the one is the
man. Modern American education has a maxim, that boys' schools and girls'
schools are one, and that the one is the boys' school. Schools have been
arranged, accordingly, to meet the requirements of the masculine
organization. Studies have been selected that experience has proved to be
appropriate to a boy's intellectual development, and a regimen adopted,
while pursuing them, appropriate to his physical development. His school
and college life, his methods of study, recitations, exercises, and
recreations, are ordered upon the supposition, that, barring disease or
infirmity, punctual attendance upon the hours of recitation, and upon all
other duties in their season and order, may be required of him continuously,
in spite of ennui, inclement weather, or fatigue; that there is no week in the

month, or day in the week, or hour in the day, when it is a physical
necessity to relieve him from standing or from studying,—from physical
effort or mental labor; that the chapel-bell may safely call him to morning
prayer from New Year to Christmas, with the assurance, that, if the going
does not add to his stock of piety, it will not diminish his stock of health;
that he may be sent to the gymnasium and the examination-hall, to the
theatres of physical and intellectual display at any time,—in short, that he
develops health and strength, blood and nerve, intellect and life, by a
regular, uninterrupted, and sustained course of work. And all this is justified
both by experience and physiology.
Obedient to the American educational maxim, that boys' schools and
girls' schools are one, and that the one is the boys' school, the female
schools have copied the methods which have grown out of the requirements
of the male organization. Schools for girls have been modelled after schools
for boys. Were it not for differences of dress and figure, it would be
impossible, even for an expert, after visiting a high school for boys and one
for girls, to tell which was arranged for the male and which for the female
organization. Our girls' schools, whether public or private, have imposed
upon their pupils a boy's regimen; and it is now proposed, in some quarters,
to carry this principle still farther, by burdening girls, after they leave
school, with a quadrennium of masculine college regimen. And so girls are
to learn the alphabet in college, as they have learned it in the grammar-
school, just as boys do. This is grounded upon the supposition that
sustained regularity of action and attendance may be as safely required of a
girl as of a boy; that there is no physical necessity for periodically relieving
her from walking, standing, reciting, or studying; that the chapel-bell may
call her, as well as him, to a daily morning walk, with a standing prayer at
the end of it, regardless of the danger that such exercises, by deranging the
tides of her organization, may add to her piety at the expense of her blood;
that she may work her brain over mathematics, botany, chemistry, German,
and the like, with equal and sustained force on every day of the month, and
so safely divert blood from the reproductive apparatus to the head; in short,
that she, like her brother, develops health and strength, blood and nerve,
intellect and life, by a regular, uninterrupted, and sustained course of work.
All this is not justified, either by experience or physiology. The gardener
may plant, if he choose, the lily and the rose, the oak and the vine, within
the same enclosure; let the same soil nourish them, the same air visit them,

and the same sunshine warm and cheer them; still, he trains each of them
with a separate art, warding from each its peculiar dangers, developing
within each its peculiar powers, and teaching each to put forth to the utmost
its divine and peculiar gifts of strength and beauty. Girls lose health,
strength, blood, and nerve, by a regimen that ignores the periodical tides
and reproductive apparatus of their organization. The mothers and
instructors, the homes and schools, of our country's daughters, would profit
by occasionally reading the old Levitical law. The race has not yet quite
outgrown the physiology of Moses.
Co-education, then, signifies in common acceptation identical co-
education. This identity of training is what many at the present day seem to
be praying for and working for. Appropriate education of the two sexes,
carried as far as possible, is a consummation most devoutly to be desired;
identical education of the two sexes is a crime before God and humanity,
that physiology protests against, and that experience weeps over. Because
the education of boys has met with tolerable success, hitherto,—but only
tolerable it must be confessed,—in developing them into men, there are
those who would make girls grow into women by the same process.
Because a gardener has nursed an acorn till it grew into an oak, they would
have him cradle a grape in the same soil and way, and make it a vine.
Identical education, or identical co-education, of the sexes defrauds one sex
or the other, or perhaps both. It defies the Roman maxim, which physiology
has fully justified, mens sana in corpore sano. The sustained regimen,
regular recitation, erect posture, daily walk, persistent exercise, and
unintermitted labor that toughens a boy, and makes a man of him, can only
be partially applied to a girl. The regimen of intermittance, periodicity of
exercise and rest, work three-fourths of each month, and remission, if not
abstinence, the other fourth, physiological interchange of the erect and
reclining posture, care of the reproductive system that is the cradle of the
race, all this, that toughens a girl and makes a woman of her, will
emasculate a lad. A combination of the two methods of education, a
compromise between them, would probably yield an average result,
excluding the best of both. It would give a fair chance neither to a boy nor a
girl. Of all compromises, such a physiological one is the worst. It cultivates
mediocrity, and cheats the future of its rightful legacy of lofty manhood and
womanhood. It emasculates boys, stunts girls; makes semi-eunuchs of one
sex, and agenes of the other.

The error which has led to the identical education of the two sexes, and
which prophecies their identical co-education in colleges and universities, is
not confined to technical education. It permeates society. It is found in the
home, the workshop, the factory, and in all the ramifications of social life.
The identity of boys and girls, of men and women, is practically asserted
out of the school as much as in it, and it is theoretically proclaimed from the
pulpit and the rostrum. Woman seems to be looking up to man and his
development, as the goal and ideal of womanhood. The new gospel of
female development glorifies what she possesses in common with him, and
tramples under her feet, as a source of weakness and badge of inferiority,
the mechanism and functions peculiar to herself. In consequence of this
wide-spread error, largely the result of physiological ignorance, girls are
almost universally trained in masculine methods of living and working as
well as of studying. The notion is practically found everywhere, that boys
and girls are one, and that the boys make the one. Girls, young ladies, to use
the polite phrase, who are about leaving or have left school for society,
dissipation, or self-culture, rarely permit any of Nature's periodical demands
to interfere with their morning calls, or evening promenades, or midnight
dancing, or sober study. Even the home draws the sacred mantle of modesty
so closely over the reproductive function as not only to cover but to smother
it. Sisters imitate brothers in persistent work at all times. Female clerks in
stores strive to emulate the males by unremitting labor, seeking to develop
feminine force by masculine methods. Female operatives of all sorts, in
factories and elsewhere, labor in the same way; and, when the day is done,
are as likely to dance half the night, regardless of any pressure upon them of
a peculiar function, as their fashionable sisters in the polite world. All unite
in pushing the hateful thing out of sight and out of mind; and all are
punished by similar weakness, degeneration, and disease.
There are two reasons why female operatives of all sorts are likely to
suffer less, and actually do suffer less, from such persistent work, than
female students; why Jane in the factory can work more steadily with the
loom, than Jane in college with the dictionary; why the girl who makes the
bed can safely work more steadily the whole year through, than her little
mistress of sixteen who goes to school. The first reason is, that the female
operative, of whatever sort, has, as a rule, passed through the first critical
epoch of woman's life: she has got fairly by it. In her case, as a rule,
unfortunately there are too many exceptions to it, the catamenia have been

established; the function is in good running order; the reproductive
apparatus—the engine within an engine—has been constructed, and she
will not be called upon to furnish force for building it again. The female
student, on the contrary, has got these tasks before her, and must perform
them while getting her education; for the period of female sexual
development coincides with the educational period. The same five years of
life must be given to both tasks. After the function is normally established,
and the apparatus made, woman can labor mentally or physically, or both,
with very much greater persistence and intensity, than during the age of
development. She still retains the type of periodicity; and her best work,
both as to quality and amount, is accomplished when the order of her labor
partakes of the rhythmic order of her constitution. Still the fact remains, that
she can do more than before; her fibre has acquired toughness; the system is
consolidated; its fountains are less easily stirred. It should be mentioned in
this connection, what has been previously adverted to, that the toughness
and power of after life are largely in proportion to the normality of sexual
development. If there is error then, the organization never fully recovers.
This is an additional motive for a strict physiological regimen during a girl's
student life, and, just so far, an argument against the identical co-education
of the sexes. The second reason why female operatives are less likely to
suffer, and actually do suffer less, than school-girls, from persistent work
straight through the year, is because the former work their brains less. To
use the language of Herbert Spencer, "That antagonism between body and
brain which we see in those, who, pushing brain-activity to an extreme,
enfeeble their bodies,"[25] does not often exist in female operatives, any
more than in male. On the contrary, they belong to the class of those who,
in the words of the same author, by "pushing bodily activity to an extreme,
make their brains inert."[26] Hence they have stronger bodies, a reproductive
apparatus more normally constructed, and a catamenial function less readily
disturbed by effort, than their student sisters, who are not only younger than
they, but are trained to push "brain-activity to an extreme." Give girls a fair
chance for physical development at school, and they will be able in after
life, with reasonable care of themselves, to answer the demands that may be
made upon them.
The identical education of the sexes has borne the fruit which we have
pointed out. Their identical co-education will intensify the evils of separate
identical education; for it will introduce the element of emulation, and it

will introduce this element in its strongest form. It is easy to frame a
theoretical emulation, in which results only are compared and tested, that
would be healthy and invigorating; but such theoretical competition of the
sexes is not at all the sort of steady, untiring, day-after-day competition that
identical co-education implies. It is one thing to put up a goal a long way
off,—five or six months or three or four years distant,—and tell boys and
girls, each in their own way, to strive for it, and quite a different thing to put
up the same goal, at the same distance, and oblige each sex to run their race
for it side by side on the same road, in daily competition with each other,
and with equal expenditure of force at all times. Identical co-education is
racing in the latter way. The inevitable results of it have been shown in
some of the cases we have narrated. The trial of it on a larger scale would
only yield a larger number of similar degenerations, weaknesses, and
sacrifices of noble lives. Put a boy and girl together upon the same course
of study, with the same lofty ideal before them, and hold up to their eyes the
daily incitements of comparative progress, and there will be awakened
within them a stimulus unknown before, and that separate study does not
excite. The unconscious fires that have their seat deep down in the recesses
of the sexual organization will flame up through every tissue, permeate
every vessel, burn every nerve, flash from the eye, tingle in the brain, and
work the whole machine at highest pressure. There need not be, and
generally will not be, any low or sensual desire in all this elemental action.
It is only making youth work over the tasks of sober study with the wasting
force of intense passion. Of course such strenuous labor will yield brilliant,
though temporary, results. The fire is kept alive by the waste of the system,
and soon burns up its source. The first sex to suffer in this exhilarating and
costly competition must be, as experience shows it is, the one that has the
largest amount of force in readiness for immediate call; and this is the
female sex. At the age of development, Nature mobilizes the forces of a
girl's organization for the purpose of establishing a function that shall
endure for a generation, and for constructing an apparatus that shall cradle
and nurse a race. These mobilized forces, which, at the technical
educational period, the girl possesses and controls largely in excess of the
boy, under the passionate stimulus of identical co-education, are turned
from their divinely-appointed field of operations, to the region of brain
activity. The result is a most brilliant show of cerebral pyrotechnics, and
degenerations that we have described.

That undue and disproportionate brain activity exerts a sterilizing
influence upon both sexes is alike a doctrine of physiology, and an
induction from experience. And both physiology and experience also teach
that this influence is more potent upon the female than upon the male. The
explanation of the latter fact—of the greater aptitude of the female
organization to become thus modified by excessive brain activity—is
probably to be found in the larger size, more complicated relations, and
more important functions, of the female reproductive apparatus. This
delicate and complex mechanism is liable to be aborted or deranged by the
withdrawal of force that is needed for its construction and maintenance. It
is, perhaps, idle to speculate upon the prospective evil that would accrue to
the human race, should such an organic modification, introduced by
abnormal education, be pushed to its ultimate limit. But inasmuch as the
subject is not only germain to our inquiry, but has attracted the attention of
a recent writer, whose bold and philosophic speculations, clothed in forcible
language, have startled the best thought of the age, it may be well to quote
him briefly on this point. Referring to the fact, that, in our modern
civilization, the cultivated classes have smaller families than the
uncultivated ones, he says, "If the superior sections and specimens of
humanity are to lose, relatively, their procreative power in virtue of, and in
proportion to, that superiority, how is culture or progress to be propagated
so as to benefit the species as a whole, and how are those gradually
amended organizations from which we hope so much to be secured? If,
indeed, it were ignorance, stupidity, and destitution, instead of mental and
moral development, that were the sterilizing influences, then the
improvement of the race would go on swimmingly, and in an ever-
accelerating ratio. But since the conditions are exactly reversed, how should
not an exactly opposite direction be pursued? How should the race not
deteriorate, when those who morally and physically are fitted to perpetuate
it are (relatively), by a law of physiology, those least likely to do so?"[27]
The answer to Mr. Greg's inquiry is obvious. If the culture of the race
moves on into the future in the same rut and by the same methods that limit
and direct it now; if the education of the sexes remains identical, instead of
being appropriate and special; and especially if the intense and passionate
stimulus of the identical co-education of the sexes is added to their identical
education,—then the sterilizing influence of such a training, acting with
tenfold more force upon the female than upon the male, will go on, and the

race will be propagated from its inferior classes.[28] The stream of life that
is to flow into the future will be Celtic rather than American: it will come
from the collieries, and not from the peerage. Fortunately, the reverse of this
picture is equally possible. The race holds its destinies in its own hands.
The highest wisdom will secure the survival and propagation of the fittest.
Physiology teaches that this result, the attainment of which our hopes
prophecy, is to be secured, not by an identical education, or an identical co-
education of the sexes, but by a special and appropriate education, that
shall produce a just and harmonious development of every part.
Let one remark be made here. It has been asserted that the chief reason
why the higher and educated classes have smaller families than the lower
and uneducated is, that the former criminally prevent or destroy increase.
The pulpit,[29] as well as the medical press, has cried out against this
enormity. That a disposition to do this thing exists, and is often carried into
effect, is not to be denied, and cannot be too strongly condemned. On the
other hand, it should be proclaimed, to the credit and honor of our
cultivated women, and as a reproach to the identical education of the sexes,
that many of them bear in silence the accusation of self-tampering, who are
denied the oft-prayed-for trial, blessing, and responsibility of offspring. As
a matter of personal experience, my advice has been much more frequently
and earnestly sought by those of our best classes who desired to know how
to obtain, than by those who wished to escape, the offices of maternity.
The experiment of the identical co-education of the sexes has been set on
foot by some of our Western colleges. It has not yet been tried long enough
to show much more than its first fruits, viz., its results while the students are
in college; and of these the only obvious ones are increased emulation, and
intellectual development and attainments. The defects of the reproductive
mechanism, and the friction of its action, are not exhibited there; nor is
there time or opportunity in college for the evils which these defects entail
to be exhibited. President Magoun of Iowa College tells us, that, in the
institution over which he presides, "Forty-two young men and fifty-three
young ladies have pursued college courses;" and adds, "Nothing needs to be
said as to the control of the two sexes in the college. The young ladies are
placed under the supervision of a lady principal and assistant as to
deportment, and every thing besides recitations (in which they are under the
supervision of the same professors and other teachers with the young men,

reciting with them); and one simple rule as to social intercourse governs
every thing. The moral and religious influences attending the arrangement
have been most happy."[30] From this it is evident that Iowa College is
trying the identical co-education of the sexes; and the president reports the
happy moral and religious results of the experiment, but leaves us ignorant
of its physiological results. It may never have occurred to him, that a class
of a hundred young ladies might graduate from Iowa College or Antioch
College or Michigan University, whose average health during their college
course had appeared to the president and faculty as good as that of their
male classmates who had made equal intellectual progress with them, upon
whom no scandal had dropped its venom, who might be presented to the
public on Commencement Day as specimens of as good health as their
uneducated sisters, with roses in their cheeks as natural as those in their
hands, the major part of whom might, notwithstanding all this, have
physical defects that a physiologist could easily discover, and that would
produce, sooner or later, more or less of the sad results we have previously
described. A philanthropist and an intelligent observer, who has for a long
time taken an active part in promoting the best education of the sexes, and
who still holds some sort of official connection with a college occupied
with identical co-education, told the writer a few months ago, that he had
endeavored to trace the post-college history of the female graduates of the
institution he was interested in. His object was to ascertain how their
physique behaved under the stress,—the wear and tear of woman's work in
life. The conclusion that resulted from his inquiry he formulated in the
statement, that "the co-education of the sexes is intellectually a success,
physically a failure." Another gentleman, more closely connected with a
similar institution of education than the person just referred to, has arrived
at a similar conclusion. Only a few female graduates of colleges have
consulted the writer professionally. All sought his advice two, three, or
more years after graduation; and, in all, the difficulties under which they
labored could be distinctly traced to their college order of life and study,
that is, to identical co-education. If physicians who are living in the
neighborhood of the present residences of these graduates have been
consulted by them in the same proportion with him, the inference is
inevitable, that the ratio of invalidism among female college graduates is
greater than even among the graduates of our common, high, and normal
schools. All such observations as these, however, are only of value, at

present, as indications of the drift of identical co-education, not as proofs of
its physical fruits, or of their influence on mental force. Two or three
generations, at least, of the female college graduates of this sort of co-
education must come and go before any sufficient idea can be formed of the
harvest it will yield. The physiologist dreads to see the costly experiment
tried. The urgent reformer, who cares less for human suffering and human
life than for the trial of his theories, will regard the experiment with
equanimity if not with complacency.
If, then, the identical co-education of the sexes is condemned both by
physiology and experience, may it not be that their special and appropriate
co-education would yield a better result than their special and appropriate
separate education? This is a most important question, and one difficult to
resolve. The discussion of it must be referred to those who are engaged in
the practical work of instruction, and the decision will rest with experience.
Physiology advocates, as we have seen, the special and appropriate
education of the sexes, and has only a single word to utter with regard to
simple co-education, or juxtaposition in education.
That word is with regard to the common belief in the danger of
improprieties and scandal as a part of co-education. There is some danger in
this respect; but not a serious or unavoidable one. Doubtless there would be
occasional lapses in a double-sexed college; and so there are outside of
schoolhouses and seminaries of learning. Even the church and the clergy are
not exempt from reproach in such things. There are sects, professing to
commingle religion and love, who illustrate the dangers of juxtaposition
even in things holy. "No physiologist can well doubt that the holy kiss of
love in such cases owes all its warmth to the sexual feeling which
consciously or unconsciously inspires it, or that the mystical union of the
sexes lies very close to a union that is nowise mystical, when it does not
lead to madness."[31] There is less, or certainly no more danger in having
the sexes unite at the repasts of knowledge, than, as Plautus bluntly puts it,
having he wits and she wits recline at the repasts of fashion. Isolation is
more likely to breed pruriency than commingling to provoke indulgence.
The virtue of the cloister and the cell scarcely deserves the name. A girl has
her honor in her own keeping. If she can be trusted with boys and men at
the lecture-room and in church, she can be trusted with them at school and
in college. Jean Paul says, "To insure modesty, I would advise the education

of the sexes together; for two boys will preserve twelve girls, or two girls
twelve boys, innocent amidst winks, jokes, and improprieties, merely by
that instinctive sense which is the forerunner of matured modesty. But I will
guarantee nothing in a school where girls are alone together, and still less
when boys are." A certain amount of juxta-position is an advantage to each
sex. More than a certain amount is an evil to both. Instinct and common
sense can be safely left to draw the line of demarcation. At the same time it
is well to remember that juxtaposition may be carried too far. Temptations
enough beset the young, without adding to them. Let learning and purity go
hand in hand.
There are two considerations appertaining to this subject, which,
although they do not belong to the physiology of the matter, deserve to be
mentioned in this connection. One amounts to a practical prohibition, for
the present at least, of the experiment of the special and appropriate co-
education of the sexes; and the other is an inherent difficulty in the
experiment itself. The former can be removed whenever those who heartily
believe in the success of the experiment choose to get rid of it; and the latter
by patient and intelligent effort.
The present practical prohibition of the experiment is the poverty of our
colleges. Identical co-education can be easily tried with the existing
organization of collegiate instruction. This has been tried, and is still going
on in separate and double-sexed schools of all sorts, and has failed. Special
and appropriate co-education requires in many ways, not in all, re-
arrangement of the organization of instruction; and this will cost money and
a good deal of it. Harvard College, for example, rich as it is supposed to be,
whose banner, to use Mr. Higginson's illustration, is the red flag that the
bulls of female reform are just now pitching into,—Harvard College could
not undertake the task of special and appropriate co-education, in such a
way as to give the two sexes a fair chance, which means the best chance,
and the only chance it ought to give or will ever give, without an
endowment, additional to its present resources, of from one to two millions
of dollars; and it probably would require the larger rather than the smaller
sum. And this I say advisedly. By which I mean, not with the advice and
consent of the president and fellows of the college, but as an opinion
founded on nearly twenty years' personal acquaintance, as an instructor in
one of the departments of the university, with the organization of instruction

in it, and upon the demands which physiology teaches the special and
appropriate education of girls would make upon it. To make boys half-girls,
and girls half-boys, can never be the legitimate function of any college. But
such a result, the natural child of identical co-education, is sure to follow
the training of a college that has not the pecuniary means to prevent it. This
obstacle is of course a removable one. It is only necessary for those who
wish to get it out of the way to put their hands in their pockets, and produce
a couple of millions. The offer of such a sum, conditioned upon the liberal
education of women, might influence even a body as soulless as the
corporation of Harvard College is sometimes represented to be.
The inherent difficulty in the experiment of special and appropriate co-
education is the difficulty of adjusting, in the same institution, the methods
of instruction to the physiological needs of each sex; to the persistent type
of one, and the periodical type of the other; to the demand for a margin in
metamorphosis of tissue, beyond what study causes, for general growth in
one sex, and to a larger margin in the other sex, that shall permit not only
general growth, but also the construction of the reproductive apparatus. This
difficulty can only be removed by patient and intelligent effort. The first
step in the direction of removing it is to see plainly what errors or dangers
lie in the way. These, or some of them, we have endeavored to point out.
"Nothing is so conducive to a right appreciation of the truth as a right
appreciation of the error by which it is surrounded."[32] When we have
acquired a belief of the facts concerning the identical education, the
identical co-education, the appropriate education, and the appropriate co-
education of the sexes, we shall be in a condition to draw just conclusions
from them.
The intimate connection of mind and brain, the correlation of mental
power and cerebral metamorphosis, explains and justifies the physiologist's
demand, that in the education of girls, as well as of boys, the machinery and
methods of instruction shall be carefully adjusted to their organization. If it
were possible, they should be adjusted to the organization of each
individual. None doubt the importance of age, acquirement, idiosyncrasy,
and probable career in life, as factors in classification. Sex goes deeper than
any or all of these. To neglect this is to neglect the chief factor of the
problem. Rightly interpreted and followed, it will yield the grandest results.
Disregarded, it will balk the best methods of teaching and the genius of the

best teachers. Sex is not concerned with studies as such. These, for any
thing that appears to the contrary physiologically, may be the same for the
intellectual development of females as of males; but, as we have seen, it is
largely concerned about an appropriate way of pursuing them. Girls will
have a fair chance, and women the largest freedom and greatest power, now
that legal hinderances are removed, and all bars let down, when they are
taught to develop and are willing to respect their own organization. How to
bring about this development and insure this respect, in a double-sexed
college, is one of the problems of co-education.
It does not come within the scope of this essay to speculate upon the
ways—the regimen, methods of instruction, and other details of college life,
—by which the inherent difficulties of co-education may be obviated. Here
tentative and judicious experiment is better than speculation. It would seem
to be the part of wisdom, however, to make the simplest and least costly
experiment first; that is, to discard the identical separate education of girls
as boys, and to ascertain what their appropriate separate education is, and
what it will accomplish. Aided by the light of such an experiment, it would
be comparatively easy to solve the more difficult problem of the appropriate
co-education of the sexes.
It may be well to mention two or three details, which are so important
that no system of appropriate female education, separate or mixed, can
neglect them. They have been implied throughout the whole of the present
discussion, but not distinctly enunciated. One is, that during the period of
rapid development, that is, from fourteen to eighteen,[33] a girl should not
study as many hours a day as a boy. "In most of our schools," says a
distinguished physiological authority previously quoted, "the hours are too
many for both boys and girls. From a quarter of nine or nine, until half-past
two, is with us (Philadelphia schools for girls) the common schooltime in
private seminaries. The usual recess is twenty minutes or half an hour, and
it is not filled by enforced exercise. In certain schools,—would it were the
rule,—ten minutes' recess is given after every hour. To these hours, we must
add the time spent in study out of school. This, for some reason, nearly
always exceeds the time stated by teachers to be necessary; and most girls
between the age of thirteen and seventeen thus expend two or three hours.
Does any physician believe that it is good for a growing girl to be so
occupied seven or eight hours a day? or that it is right for her to use her

brains as long a time as the mechanic employs his muscles? But this is only
a part of the evil. The multiplicity of studies, the number of teachers,—each
eager to get the most he can out of his pupil,—the severer drill of our day,
and the greater intensity of application demanded, produce effects on the
growing brain, which, in a vast number of cases, can be only disastrous.
Even in girls of from fourteen to eighteen, such as crowd the normal school
in Philadelphia, this sort of tension and this variety of study occasion an
amount of ill-health which is sadly familiar to many physicians."[34]
Experience teaches that a healthy and growing boy may spend six hours
of force daily upon his studies, and leave sufficient margin for physical
growth. A girl cannot spend more than four, or, in occasional instances, five
hours of force daily upon her studies, and leave sufficient margin for the
general physical growth that she must make in common with a boy, and
also for constructing a reproductive apparatus. If she puts as much force
into her brain education as a boy, the brain or the special apparatus will
suffer. Appropriate education and appropriate co-education must adjust their
methods and regimen to this law.
Another detail is, that, during every fourth week, there should be a
remission, and sometimes an intermission, of both study and exercise. Some
individuals require, at that time, a complete intermission from mental and
physical effort for a single day; others for two or three days; others require
only a remission, and can do half work safely for two or three days, and
their usual work after that. The diminished labor, which shall give Nature
an opportunity to accomplish her special periodical task and growth, is a
physiological necessity for all, however robust they may seem to be. The
apportionment of study and exercise to individual needs cannot be decided
by general rules, nor can the decision of it be safely left to the pupil's
caprice or ambition. Each case must be decided upon its own merits. The
organization of studies and instruction must be flexible enough to admit of
the periodical and temporary absence of each pupil, without loss of rank, or
necessity of making up work, from recitation, and exercise of all sorts. The
periodical type of woman's way of work must be harmonized with the
persistent type of man's way of work in any successful plan of co-education.
The keen eye and rapid hand of gain, of what Jouffroy calls self-interest
well understood, is sometimes quicker than the brain and will of
philanthropy to discern and inaugurate reform. An illustration of this

statement, and a practical recognition of the physiological method of
woman's work, lately came under my observation. There is an
establishment in Boston, owned and carried on by a man, in which ten or a
dozen girls are constantly employed. Each of them is given and required to
take a vacation of three days every fourth week. It is scarcely necessary to
say that their sanitary condition is exceptionally good, and that the
aggregate yearly amount of work which the owner obtains is greater than
when persistent attendance and labor was required. I have never heard of
any female school, public or private, in which any such plan has been
adopted; nor is it likely that any similar plan will be adopted so long as the
community entertain the conviction that a boy's education and a girl's
education should be the same, and that the same means the boy's. What is
known in England as the Ten-hour Act, which Mr. Mundella and Sir John
Lubbock have recently carried through Parliament, is a step in a similar
direction. It is an act providing for the special protection of women against
over-work. It does not recognize, and probably was not intended to
recognize, the periodical type of woman's organization. It is founded on the
fact, however, which law has been so slow to acknowledge, that the male
and female organization are not identical.[35]
This is not the place for the discussion of these details, and therefore we
will not dwell upon them. Our object is rather to show good and imperative
reason why they should be discussed by others; to show how faulty and
pregnant of ill the education of American girls has been and is, and to
demonstrate the truth, that the progress and development of the race depend
upon the appropriate, and not upon the identical education of the sexes.
Little good will be done in this direction, however, by any advice or
argument, by whatever facts supported, or by whatever authority presented,
unless the women of our country are themselves convinced of the evils that
they have been educated into, and out of which they are determined to
educate their daughters. They must breed in them the lofty spirit
Wallenstein bade his be of:—

"Leave now the puny wish, the girlish feeling,
Oh, thrust it far behind thee! Give thou proof
Thou'rt the daughter of the Mighty,—his
Who where he moves creates the wonderful.
Meet and disarm necessity by choice."

Schiller: The Piccolomini, act iii. 8. (Coleridge's Translation.)

FOOTNOTES:

[24] Body and Mind. Op. cit., p. 178.
[25] The Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer, chap. 13.
[26] The Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer, chap. 13.
[27] Enigmas of Life. Op. cit., by W.R. Greg, p. 142.
[28] It is a fact not to be lost sight of, says Dr. J.C. Toner of Washington, that the
proportion between the number of American children under fifteen years of age,
and the number of American women between the child-bearing ages of fifteen
and fifty, is declining steadily. In 1830, there were to every 1,000 marriageable
women, 1,952 children under fifteen years of age. Ten years later, there were
1,863, or 89 less children to every thousand women than in 1830. In 1850, this
number had declined to 1,720; in 1860, to 1,666; and in 1870, to 1,568. The total
decline in the forty years was 384, or about 20 per cent of the whole proportional
number in 1830, a generation ago. The United-States census of 1870 shows that
there is, in the city of New York, but one child under fifteen years of age, to each
thousand nubile women, when there ought to be three; and the same is true of
our other large cities.—The Nation, Aug. 28, 1873, p. 145.
[29] Vid. a pamphlet by the Rev. Dr. Todd.
[30] The New Englander, July, 1873. Art., Iowa College.
[31] Body and Mind. Op. cit., p. 85.
[32] Use of the Ophthalmoscope. By T.C. Allbutt. London. P. 5.
[33] Some physiologists consider that the period of growth extends to a later age
than this. Dr. Anstie fixes the limit at twenty five. He says, "The central nervous
system is more slow in reaching its fullest development; and the brain,
especially, is many years later in acquiring its maximum of organic consistency
and functional power."—Neuralgia, Op. cit., by F.E. Anstie, p. 20.
[34] Wear and Tear. Op. cit., p. 33-4.
[35] It is a curious commentary on the present aspect of the "woman question" to
see many who honestly advocate the elevation and enfranchisement of woman,
oppose any movement or law that recognizes Nature's fundamental distinction of
sex. There are those who insist upon the traditional fallacy that man and woman
are identical, and that the identity is confined to the man, with the energy of
infatuation. It appears from the Spectator, that Mr. and Mrs. Fawcett strongly
object to the Ten-hour Act, on the ground that it discriminates unfairly against
women as compared with men. Upon this the Spectator justly remarks, that the

true question for an objector to the bill to consider is not one of abstract
principle, but this: "Is the restraint proposed so great as really to diminish the
average productiveness of woman's labor, or, by increasing its efficacy, to
maintain its level, or even improve it in spite of the hours lost? What is the
length of labor beyond which an average woman's constitution is overtaxed and
deteriorated, and within which, therefore, the law ought to keep them in spite of
their relations, and sometimes in spite of themselves."—Vid. Spectator, London,
June 14, 1873.

PART V.ToC

THE EUROPEAN WAY.

"And let it appear that he doth not change his country
manners for those of foreign parts, but only prick in some
flowers of that he hath learned abroad into the customs of
his own country."—Lord Bacon.

One branch of the stream of travel that flows with steadily-increasing
volume across the Atlantic, from the western to the eastern continent, passes
from the United States, through Nova Scotia, to England. The traveller who
follows this route is struck, almost as soon as he leaves the boundaries of
the republic, with the difference between the physique of the inhabitants he
encounters and that of those he has left behind him. The difference is most
marked between the females of the two sections. The firmer step, fuller
chest, and ruddier cheek of the Nova-Scotian girl foretell still greater
differences of color, form, and strength that England and the Continent
present. These differences impressed one who passed through Nova Scotia
not long ago very strongly. Her observations upon them are an excellent
illustration of our subject, and they deserve to be read in this connection.
Her remarks, moreover, are indirect but valuable testimony to the evils of

our sort of identical education of the sexes. "Nova Scotia," she says, "is a
country of gracious surprises."
"But most beautiful among her beauties, most wonderful among her
wonders, are her children. During two weeks' travel in the Provinces, I have
been constantly more and more impressed by their superiority in
appearance, size, and health, to the children of the New-England and
Middle States. In the outset of our journey, I was struck by it; along all the
roadsides they looked up, boys and girls, fair, broad-cheeked, sturdy-
legged, such as with us are seen only now and then. I did not, however,
realize at first that this was the universal law of the land, and that it pointed
to something more than climate as a cause. But the first school that I saw,
en masse, gave a startling impetus to the train of observation and influence
into which I was unconsciously falling. It was a Sunday school in the little
town of Wolfville, which lies between the Gaspereau and Cornwallis
Rivers, just beyond the meadows of the Grand Pré, where lived Gabriel
Lajeunesse, and Benedict Bellefontaine, and the rest of the 'simple Acadian
farmers.' I arrived too early at one of the village churches; and, while I was
waiting for a sexton, a door opened, and out poured the Sunday school,
whose services had just ended. On they came, dividing in the centre, and
falling to the right and left about me, thirty or forty boys and girls, between
the ages of seven and fifteen. They all had fair skins, red cheeks, and clear
eyes; they were all broad-shouldered, straight, and sturdy; the younger ones
were more than sturdy,—they were fat, from the ankles up. But perhaps the
most noticeable thing of all was the quiet, sturdy, unharassed expression
which their faces wore; a look which is the greatest charm of a child's face,
but which we rarely see in children over two or three years old. Boys of
eleven or twelve were there, with shoulders broader than the average of our
boys at sixteen, and yet with the pure childlike look on their faces. Girls of
ten or eleven were there, who looked almost like women,—that is, like ideal
women,—simply because they looked so calm and undisturbed.... Out of
them all there was but one child who looked sickly. He had evidently met
with some accident, and was lame. Afterward, as the congregation
assembled, I watched the fathers and mothers of these children. They, too,
were broad-shouldered, tall, and straight, especially the women. Even old
women were straight, like the negroes one sees at the South walking with
burdens on their heads.

"Five days later I saw, in Halifax, the celebration of the anniversary of
the settlement of the Province. The children of the city and of some of the
neighboring towns marched in 'Bands of Hope,' and processions such as we
see in the cities of the States on the Fourth of July. This was just the
opportunity I wanted. It was the same here as in the country. I counted, on
that day, just eleven sickly-looking children; no more! Such brilliant
cheeks, such merry eyes, such evident strength,—it was a scene to kindle
the dullest soul! There were scores of little ones there, whose droll, fat legs
would have drawn a crowd in Central Park; and they all had that same
quiet, composed, well-balanced expression of countenance of which I spoke
before, and of which it would be hard to find an instance in all Central Park.
"Climate, undoubtedly, has something to do with this. The air is moist;
and the mercury rarely rises above 80°, or falls below 10°. Also the
comparative quiet of their lives helps to make them so beautiful and strong.
But the most significant fact to my mind is, that, until the past year, there
have been in Nova Scotia no public schools, comparatively few private
ones; and in these there is no severe pressure brought to bear on the
pupils.... I must not be understood to argue from the health of the children
of Nova Scotia, as contrasted with the lack of health among our children,
that it is best to have no public schools; only that it is better to have no
public schools than to have such public schools as are now killing off our
children.... In Massachusetts, the mortality from diseases of the brain and
nervous system is eleven per cent. In Nova Scotia it is only eight per cent."
[36]

It would be interesting and instructive to ascertain, if we could, the
regimen of female education in Europe. The acknowledged and
unmistakable differences between American and European girls and women
—the delicate bloom, unnatural weakness, and premature decay of the
former, contrasted with the bronzed complexion, developed form, and
enduring force of the latter—are not adequately explained by climate.
Given sufficient time, difference of climate will produce immense
differences of form, color, and force in the same species of animals and
men. But a century does not afford a period long enough for the production
of great changes. That length of time could not transform the sturdy
German fraulein and robust English damsel into the fragile American miss.
Everybody recognizes and laments the change that has been and is going

on. "The race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls, that used to grow up in
country places, and made the bright, neat, New-England kitchens of olden
times,—the girls that could wash, iron, brew, bake, harness a horse and
drive him, no less than braid straw, embroider, draw, paint, and read
innumerable books,—this race of women, pride of olden time, is daily
lessening; and, in their stead, come the fragile, easy-fatigued, languid girls
of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common things."[37]
No similar change has been wrought, during the past century, upon the mass
of females in Europe. There—

"Nature keeps the reverent frame
With which her years began."

If we could ascertain the regimen of European female education, so as to
compare it fairly with the American plan of the identical education of the
sexes, it is not impossible that the comparison might teach us how it is, that
conservation of female force makes a part of trans-Atlantic, and
deterioration of the same force a part of cis-Atlantic civilization. It is
probable such an inquiry would show that the disregard of the female
organization, which is a palpable and pervading principle of American
education, either does not exist at all in Europe, or exists only in a limited
degree.
With the hope of obtaining information upon this point, the writer
addressed inquiries to various individuals, who would be likely to have the
desired knowledge. Only a few answers to his inquiries have been received
up to the present writing; more are promised by and by. The subject is a
delicate and difficult one to investigate. The reports of committees and
examining boards, of ministers of instruction, and other officials, throw
little or no light upon it. The matter belongs so much to the domestic
economy of the household and school, that it is not easy to learn much that
is definite about it except by personal inspection and inquiry. The little
information that has been received, however, is important. It indicates, if it
does not demonstrate, an essential difference between the regimen or
organization, using these terms in their broadest sense, of female education
in America and in Europe.

Dr. H. Hagen, an eminent physician and naturalist of Königsburg,
Prussia, now connected with the Museum of Comparative Zoology at
Cambridge, writes from Germany, where he has been lately, in reply to
these inquiries, as follows:—
Nuremberg, July 23, 1873.
Dear Sir,—The information, given by two prominent physicians
in Berlin, in answer to the questions in your letter, is mostly of a
negative character. I believe them to prove that generally girls here
are doing very well as to the catamenial function.
First, most of the girls in North Germany begin this function in
the fifteenth year, or even later; of course some few sooner, even in
the twelfth year or before; but the rule is after the fifteenth year.
Now, nearly all leave the school in the fifteenth year, and then
follow some lectures given at home at leisure. The school-girls are
of course rarely troubled by the periodical function.
There is an established kind of tradition giving the rule for the
regimen during the catamenial period: this regimen goes from
mother to daughter, and the advice of physicians is seldom asked for
with regard to it. As a rule, the greatest care is taken to avoid any
cold or exposure at this time. If the girls are still school-girls, they
go to school, study and write as at other times, provided the function
is normally performed.
School-girls never ride in Germany, nor are they invited to parties
or to dancing-parties. All this comes after the school. And even then
care is taken to stay at home when the periodical function is present.
Concerning the health of the German girls, as compared with
American girls, the German physicians have not sufficient
information to warrant any statement. But the health of the German
girls is commonly good except in the higher classes in the great
capitals, where the same obnoxious agencies are to be found in
Germany as in the whole world. But here also there is a very strong
exception, or, better, a difference between America and Germany, as
German girls are never accustomed to the free manners and modes

of life of American girls. As a rule, in Germany, the mother directs
the manner of living of the daughter entirely.
I shall have more and better information some time later.
Yours,
H. Hagen.

A German lady, who was educated in the schools of Dantzic, Prussia,
afforded information, which, as far as it went, confirmed the above. Three
customs, or habits, which exert a great influence upon the health and
development of girls, appear from Dr. Hagen's letter to make a part of the
German female educational regimen. The first is, that girls leave school at
about the age of fifteen or sixteen, that is, as soon as the epoch of rapid
sexual development arrives. It appears, moreover, that during this epoch, or
the greater part of it, a German girl's education is carried on at home, by
means of lectures or private arrangements. These, of course, are not as
inflexible as the rigid rules of a technical school, and admit of easy
adjustment to the periodical demands of the female constitution. The second
is the traditional motherly supervision and careful regimen of the
catamenial week. Evidently the notion that a boy's education and a girl's
education should be the same, and that the same means the boy's, has not
yet penetrated the German mind. This has not yet evolved the idea of the
identical education of the sexes. It appears that in Germany, schools,
studies, parties, walks, rides, dances, and the like, are not allowed to
displace or derange the demands of Nature. The female organization is
respected. The third custom is, that German school-girls are not invited to
parties at all. "All this comes after the school," says Dr. Hagen. The brain is
not worked by day in the labor of study, and tried by night with the
excitement of the ball. Pleasant recreation for children of both sexes, and
abundance of it, is provided for them, all over Germany,—is regarded as
necessity for them,—is made a part of their daily life; but then it is open-air,
oxygen-surrounding, blood-making, health-giving, innocent recreation; not
gas, furnaces, low necks, spinal trails, the civilized representatives of caudal
appendages, and late hours.
Desirous of obtaining, if possible, a more exact notion than even a
physician could give of the German, traditional method of managing the

catamenial function for the first few years after its appearance, I made
inquiries of a German lady, now a mother, whose family name holds an
honored place, both in German diplomacy and science, and who has
enjoyed corresponding opportunities for an experimental acquaintance with
the German regimen of female education. The following is her reply. For
obvious reasons, the name of the writer is not given. She has been much in
this country as well as in Germany; a fact that explains the knowledge of
American customs that her letter exhibits.
My Dear Doctor,—I have great pleasure in answering your
inquiries in regard to the course, which, to my knowledge, German
mothers adopt with their daughters at the catamenial period. As soon
as a girl attains maturity in this respect, which is seldom before the
age of sixteen, she is ordered to observe complete rest; not only rest
of the body, but rest of the mind. Many mothers oblige their
daughters to remain in bed for three days, if they are at all delicate
in health; but even those who are physically very strong are obliged
to abstain from study, to remain in their rooms for three days, and
keep perfectly quiet. During the whole of each period, they are not
allowed to run, walk much, ride, skate, or dance. In fact, entire
repose is strictly enforced in every well-regulated household and
school. A German girl would consider the idea of going to a party at
such times as simply preposterous; and the difference that exists in
this respect in America is wholly unintelligible to them.
As a general rule, a married woman in Germany, even after she
has had many children, is as strong and healthy, if not more so, than
when she was a girl. In America, with a few exceptions, it appears
to be the reverse; and, I have no doubt, it is owing to the want of
care on the part of girls at this particular time, and to the neglect of
their mothers to enforce proper rules in this most important matter.
It has seemed to me, often, that the difference in the education of
girls in America and in Germany, as regards their physical training,
is, that in America it is marked by a great degree of recklessness;
while in Germany, the erring, if it can be called erring, is on the side
of anxious, extreme caution. Therefore beautiful American girls fade
rapidly; while the German girls, who do not possess the same

natural advantages, do possess, as a rule, good, permanent health,
which goes hand-in-hand with happiness and enjoyment of life.
Believe me,
Very truly yours,
—— ——.

June 21, 1873.

This letter confirms the statement of Dr. Hagen, and shows that the
educational and social regimen of a German school-girl is widely different
from that of her American sister. Perhaps, as is intimated above, the German
way, which is probably the European way also, may err on the side of too
great confinement and caution; and that a medium between that and the
recklessness of the American way would yield a better result than either one
of them.
German peasant girls and women work in the field and shop with and
like men. None who have seen their stout and brawny arms can doubt the
force with which they wield the hoe and axe. I once saw, in the streets of
Coblentz, a woman and a donkey yoked to the same cart, while a man, with
a whip in his hand, drove the team. The bystanders did not seem to look
upon the moving group as if it were an unusual spectacle. The donkey
appeared to be the most intelligent and refined of the three. The sight
symbolized the physical force and infamous degradation of the lower
classes of women in Europe. The urgent problem of modern civilization is
how to retain this force, and get rid of the degradation. Physiology declares
that the solution of it will only be possible when the education of girls is
made appropriate to their organization. A German girl, yoked with a donkey
and dragging a cart, is an exhibition of monstrous muscular and aborted
brain development. An American girl, yoked with a dictionary, and laboring
with the catamenia, is an exhibition of monstrous brain and aborted ovarian
development.
The investigations incident to the preparation of this monograph have
suggested a number of subjects kindred to the one of which it treats, that
ought to be discussed from the physiological standpoint in the interest of
sound education. Some, and perhaps the most important, of them are the

relation of the male organization, so far as it is different from the female, to
the labor of education and of life; the comparative influence of crowding
studies, that is of excessive brain activity, upon the cerebral metamorphosis
of the two sexes; the influence of study, or brain activity, upon sleep, and
through sleep, or the want of it, upon nutrition and development; and, most
important of all, the true relation of education to the just and harmonious
development of every part, both of the male and female organization, in
which the rightful control of the cerebral ganglia over the whole system and
all its functions shall be assured in each sex, and thus each be enabled to
obtain the largest possible amount of intellectual and spiritual power. The
discussion of these subjects at the present time would largely exceed the
natural limits of this essay. They can only be suggested now, with the hope
that other and abler observers may be induced to examine and discuss them.
In conclusion, let us remember that physiology confirms the hope of the
race by asserting that the loftiest heights of intellectual and spiritual vision
and force are free to each sex, and accessible by each; but adds that each
must climb in its own way, and accept its own limitations, and, when this is
done, promises that each will find the doing of it, not to weaken or
diminish, but to develop power. Physiology condemns the identical, and
pleads for the appropriate education of the sexes, so that boys may become
men, and girls women, and both have a fair chance to do and become their
best.

FOOTNOTES:

[36] Bits of Talk. By H.H. Pp. 71-75.
[37] House and Home Papers. By Harriet Beecher Stowe. P. 205.

Typographical errors corrected in text:

Page 62: menorraghic replaced with
menorrhagic
Page 72: dysmenorrhea replaced with
dysmenorrhœa
Page 75: rythmical replaced with rhythmical
Page 117: permantly replaced with
permanently
Page 120: rythmical replaced with rhythmical
page 171: twelth replaced with twelfth
Page 175: knowedge replaced with knowledge

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