The Education of American Girls Part 11

Kalamazoo College, against the opinion of many educated and educational men, admitted women to a full curriculum, twenty years ago. And cla.s.ses, about equally divided, have been graduating from the college ever since, confirming the authors of the movement and the whole Faculty, during these twenty years, in the practicability and the many advantages of the plan. The young women have always averaged as good scholars.h.i.+p and health as the young men. A _smaller_ number of women than [Transcriber's Note: missing word "men"? ]have abandoned their course on account of ill health. During the period of my own connection with this inst.i.tution, many young women pursued there an extended elective course of study, who did not graduate. It was not their plan to do so when they entered the preparatory department. Many graduated from a course quite as extensive, requiring as persistent study, though not in all respects like that of the young men. They did not usually study Greek, though some did, and were leaders of their cla.s.ses. They did not pursue Latin quite so far, but more than made up for this in a far more thorough study of French and German, History and Literature. There is scarcely a week in the year but I receive communications in some way from some of these old pupils.

They are among my most enjoyable, intellectual, and literary correspondents. With few exceptions, they are _growing_ women. Having learned how to learn--which they will all remember, was the most I ever professed to be able to teach them--they have inst.i.tuted schools for themselves, compelled sometimes very hard circ.u.mstances to become their best teachers, and learned to draw lessons, as Mr. Emerson once said in a lecture to them, from "frost and fire."

Some have learned to use the world as not abusing it, and are turning wealth and its advantages that have come to them, to useful, n.o.ble purposes. A few, but very few, of the large number, are invalids, but there is not one whose case does not furnish me with abundant evidence of many more probable causes of invalidism, than over-study. There is not one, of whom I have heard, whose case does not wear on the face of it decidedly other causes than "persistent study."

Dr. Mahan, who was the first, and for fifteen years, President of Oberlin College, has since been for nearly as long a period the President of Adrian College, in this State. He says that, during his connection with Oberlin, the proportion of young men to young women who entered upon the course, and failed to complete it on account of failure of health, under the strain of thought and study, was at least _two to one_. The proportion was not quite so great in Adrian; but many more young men than young women--and, as far as he was acquainted with colleges, everywhere--succ.u.mbed under the change from their former life to one of study.

Dr. Mahan also says that, owing to the peculiar circ.u.mstances under which Oberlin College was established, he has, through subsequent years, maintained a far more familiar acquaintance with his former students than is common for old teachers to do; and that he can count many more broken-down men, among his old graduates, than broken-down women. It would be impossible for one now to conceive the obstacles in the way of the girls who were first admitted to study at Oberlin. Every step was achieved through a moral battle with public opinion and popular prejudice, the depressing effects of which cannot now be estimated. And yet they did go through--stood as high during their whole course, and in their graduating exercises, as the young men. They are all of them married, mothers of families of children, and are strong and healthy, far above the average of American women.

During almost thirty years that he has been president of college faculty meetings, he has never _once_ heard, from any member of the Faculty, any intimation that the girls in the cla.s.s were in any way whatever a drag upon the cla.s.s. They invariably keep up, and oftener come out ahead than they lag behind. Nor is this more characteristic in one branch of study than another. Languages, science, philosophy, they grasp as clearly, strongly, and comprehensively as men; and as the result of his observation and of his experience, which, he says, in co-education in a higher course of study, has perhaps been greater than that of any man in the world, he thinks that while it is just as much better for men to be so educated as it is for women, the result to the latter is to make them more practical, more natural, less given to effeminate, rather than feminine affectations, and more readily adaptive to anything life may demand of them than any cla.s.s of women he has ever known. Also, in the particular of health, he has carefully observed the effects of close and continued study, not only during the course, but in subsequent life, and he will risk his reputation for truthful statements, in saying that he believes--that he knows--the most careful statistics would show among the women who are college graduates, whom he has known, a higher standard of health than among the same number of women from any cla.s.s of society--working women, fas.h.i.+onable women, or women of merely quiet, domestic habits. And yet, "every well-developed, well-balanced woman who is a graduate from our colleges has actually performed one-fourth _more_ labor than a man who has stood by her side, and she is ent.i.tled to one-fourth more credit."

A girl should be as free to choose for herself as a boy is. She can never truly know herself, nor be known by others, as the power in the world, greater or less, which she was ordained by G.o.d to be, until these thousand restrictions that limit and dwarf her intellectual life are removed.

"Let her make herself her own To give or keep, to live, and learn, and be All that not harms distinctive womanhood."

I have recently been a.s.sured by one of the best students that have ever graduated from our University, and by another who graduated from Hillsdale College in this State, from precisely the same course as the gentlemen students, that to girls of average capacity, the college course, all that is required of the young men--and all that _they_ are accustomed to perform--is not by any means difficult, and will not over-tax any girl of average health and abilities, who is properly prepared when she enters. But the trouble is that while girls like the studies in the regular course, and study with a real relish, they want more. They are not satisfied with the French and German of a course, they want to speak and write these languages, and add extra private lessons to those of the regular cla.s.ses. The few lessons of the course in perspective drawing have, in some, awakened an artistic taste, and they want to pursue drawing farther. There are better teachers to be found in the vicinity of a University than they will find at home, and they are constantly tempted to do too much. A number of girls in the literary course of the University attend the medical lectures in certain departments, some teach students who are "conditioned" in certain branches. From all the colleges, the report in this respect is the same--girls can easily do all that is required of the young men, but they will do more. And yet the report from every college is--_more young men break down during a course, and are obliged, from ill health, to abandon their studies, than young women_. This certainly does not threaten danger to girls who attempt only the same that the young men do. The tendency in our colleges towards elective courses of study is in the right direction to remove the dangerous temptation into which girls are liable to fall--of taking studies outside the course. I hope to see even greater freedom of choice.

From a woman, a mother, and lover of little children, a few words about school buildings and school methods may not be out of place.

Americans are proverbially giving to boasting. People of the older world tell us that this is an expression of our undeveloped youth--a kind of _Soph.o.m.orism_ denoting that we are yet not very far advanced. Be that as it may, I have observed that there is no more common subject for boasting than our schools and our school system.

"There are our King's Palaces, where we are training our future monarchs! Those are the towers of our defence--the bulwarks of our republic!" I heard a western Congressman exclaim, as the railway train whizzed past one of those immense school edifices which so closely dot the area of many of our western States, that one scarcely loses sight of one ere the high towers and ornate roofs of another come into view. "I will acknowledge that I am proud--feel like boasting, when I can point a foreigner to such buildings as those, and tell him they are but our common free schools, open to every child in the land, rich and poor, alike."

The friend addressed, an intelligent, shrewd, naturalized Scotchman, replied that he was "a little old fogy," he supposed, but that those great high buildings, where six or eight hundred children were gathered in one school, were like great cities, where too many people were gathered together. School life, no more than city life, could be healthy, nor just what life ought to be, under such conditions. To carry out these great union school plans, made a necessity for too much machinery. This it was which was grinding out the education of our children, rather than developing thought, and the result would be machine education. He said that school was a continual worry at home.

One child was kept after school one day for one thing, and another the next day for some other thing, and there was a deal of worry and fretting about how they were marked, and a good deal more talk about the marks for the lesson, than there was about what was in the lesson itself. One little girl, a delicate la.s.sie, they had been obliged to take out of school. The child didn't eat, couldn't sleep, and was getting in a bad way altogether.

"There is no more color in L----'s face when she is getting off to school in the morning, than there is in my handkerchief, she is so afraid of being marked," said a mother to me a day or two since.

"Yesterday morning was especially one of trial to the child. I wish you could have seen her when she got off, or rather when she got home at night, and have heard her story. I had charged her not to hurry so, but come back if she was going to fail; I would rather she would lose the day than to gain her school through such an effort." The child reached the school, and came home at night to tell how. Rus.h.i.+ng into the house, the delicately organized, nervous little girl exclaimed: "Oh, mamma, I did get there; and the best of it was, I overtook G---- S---- (another as delicate child); she was as late as I was, and we both ran every step. We managed to get our things off in the wardrobe and get into our seats, but G---- could not get her mittens off; and when she at last dropped into her seat, she put both hands up to her face and burst out crying as loud as she could cry. Oh, I did feel so sorry for her!" The effort of getting to school, the fear of the marks, had thrown the delicate child into hysterics, given her physical system a shock, and made demands on her brain that a year's study could not have done. I could fill a volume, as could any observing woman, with instances like this--the occurrences of every day in the year. They cannot, perhaps, be helped. Teachers are not to be blamed for them. Six or eight hundred children cannot be hindered for one child. All are tied to too much machinery.

In some of the public schools which I have visited in Germany, the lessons for children eleven and twelve years old seemed to me more difficult than the lessons set for children of the same age in our public schools; and our children are not in school nearly so many hours in a day as the children in German schools, which are so often referred to, not only as model educational inst.i.tutions, but conservators of health as well. Children in Germany go to school at seven o'clock in the morning. In very early morning walks, I have often met scores of German children, with their little soldier-like knapsack of books strapped to their shoulders, and have stopped them to examine their school-books, and inquire about their schools. In a little valley in Switzerland, seeing a bevy of children starting, so many in one direction, before it was light in the morning, I inquired where all those children were going. "To the school, to be sure," I was answered. "But they cannot see to read or study," I said. "_O, sie mussen Licht mitnehmen_" (they must take a light with them), was the reply.

Our modes of education will be changed; there are defects to be remedied, evils to be cured, which affect both s.e.xes; but women will be educated. All the tendencies of the age are towards a higher intellectual culture for them. Women's clubs, cla.s.ses, library and literary a.s.sociations, are, throughout our cities and villages--in little country neighborhoods, even--furnis.h.i.+ng women with means of intellectual growth and advancement. There is no more marked feature of the age than these a.s.sociations. The Babe of Bethlehem is born, and has even now too far escaped the search of Herod to be overtaken.

Nor is there anything in the spirit of the times which betokens the revival of the nunnery and monastic systems. Women already tread almost every avenue of honest thrift and business, unchallenged. The shrines of Minerva will not be desecrated by their presence. Their intellect will be developed, and their affections will be cultivated, and all truly womanly virtues fostered in the innermost penetralia even, of that temple where all wisdom, and all art, and all science, are taught; whose patron deity was prophetically made by a mythology, wise beyond its own ken, not a man, not a G.o.d--but a G.o.ddess, a typical woman.

As surely as girls persistently breathe the same air their brothers breathe, eat and drink as they do, go with them to church, public lectures, concerts, plays, and social entertainments, so will they, in the new and more truly Christian era that is dawning, come, more and more, to study with them, from youth to old age, in the academy, the sacred groves of philosophy, halls of science, schools of theology--everywhere and "persistently."

LUCINDA H. STONE.

Kalamazoo, Mich.

GIRLS AND WOMEN

IN

ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

GIRLS AND WOMEN

IN

ENGLAND AND AMERICA.

When I was giving, in Dundee, a lecture upon the Education of Women in America, the substance of which appeared in the _Westminster Review_ of October, 1873, the chairman, on introducing me, said, "De Tocqueville, the French philosopher, considered that the chief cause of the great prosperity of the American nation is the superiority of the women; now we are to hear to-night how these women are produced."

Two things uniformly strike foreign travellers in our country; the general intelligence of the people, and the equality of the education and intellectual interests of the men and the women; and few remarks are oftener heard from those who have visited us, or have known our countrymen and women on the Continent than this: "American women seem so much superior to the men."

But a third fact stands just as boldly forth--the thin, unhealthy-looking physique and nervous sensibility of the American people; and the impression of this is deepened by comparing us with our original ancestors, the English, confessedly the finest physical race in the world. These facts--the superior average education in America, and the inferior average physique of the nation--are so striking, that it is strange that they have not oftener and more forcibly been placed together as cause and effect. The education has gone on increasing, and the physique has gone on declining, till now the census returns begin to make us look anxiously about us. Our men are unmuscular and short-lived, the best of them; the men of a physique of the type of Chief Justice Chase rarely live beyond sixty or sixty-five. They are not invalids, but they are subject to fever, congestion, and paralysis, violent crises.

The women are slight, graceful, impressionable, and active. In the poorer ranks of life they have a nervous, anxious look; in the well-to-do and wealthier ranks, a nervous, spiritual look. They are not invalids, but they are delicate, and are kept under a constant and chafing restraint from want of strength to carry out the plans they set before them, and they give an unsatisfactory prospect for the coming generations. Our census reports are very trustworthy oracles; these give us dark omens, and it is folly to shut our eyes.

Many causes may be a.s.signed as contributing to this physical deterioration, any one of which, with a little ingenuity, may be clearly made to appear responsible for almost the whole; and such, in some degree, is the temporary effect of the very clever feint of Dr.

Clarke--nothing else can it be called. The book gives us the impression that the author is going to attack our effort to produce the kind of women upon which any shrewd observer must see that our unparalleled prosperity to a great degree rests. It makes us believe he is going to attack the very method to which our success in educating women is due; and it makes us fear that he is going to attack the modern doubt concerning the old theory, that "the highest and ultimate aim of a woman is to be the satisfactory wife of one man, and the nouris.h.i.+ng mother of another;" but he does not even try to do any one of these things. He has thrown a calcium light upon one spot, revealing some defects, and many eyes are for a time drawn towards it. His feint has created a sensation, and brought an important subject up to a grade of familiarity and openness where it can be talked of and examined, and I closed the book with a great sense of obligation on behalf of my nation.

I have long felt that physicians, themselves, have no adequate impression of the danger we are incurring in the average neglect that attends the physical rearing of American girls, and subsequent care of young women, nor adequate knowledge of their tendency to weakness in their present condition. Mothers are busy, and girls are left too much to take care of themselves.

From considerable personal knowledge, I am aware that the present state of things ought to occasion anxiety; that girls, ignorant of the consequences, are disposed to conceal any weakness or unnatural condition, through their great aversion to medical attendance, and from a dislike to restrictions upon their social pleasures; and also from the fear that these restrictions would produce suspicion among their friends in regard to their condition. I am sure that I am stating facts that are not appreciated in the degree that they deserve.

Looked at physically, and with a philanthropy that extends beyond our contemporaries, English women do not allow us to feel wholly satisfied with our American women. They make us feel that there is a debit as well as a credit column when we compare our system of social life with theirs. But we must not be so unwise as to attribute the fault to four or five years in the American girl's life; nor must we be so short-sighted as to limit the responsibility to the present generation.

Our own grandmothers did thus and so; but, as Miss Phelps says, this is the very reason that we cannot do it; nor can we afford to be so unjust as to make women bear the whole blame, nor so injudicious as to criminate our society as a whole. Crime implies bad intentions, or mistakes that result from inexcusable neglect of available knowledge.

Our bitterest enemies, the devotees of a "high-bred aristocracy," could not charge us with the first; and as to the second, the past furnishes no experience for our guidance. We do not know just how much work this complex human machine is capable of doing; nor indeed do we know how to adjust the action of the different parts, and to manage the repairs so as to get the best possible work out of it. Some overstrain it, others take needless trouble about the repairs. As yet the capacities of human muscle and nerve have never been adequately tested. We are carrying the experiments in this matter farther than they have ever gone before. We cannot know the full strength of a cord till it is broken; but we grow cautious when we see that the fibres are beginning to give way.

Our astonis.h.i.+ng prosperity is due to the large total of brain-activity that is being applied in the development of the natural resources, industries, and social life of our nation--a total to which women as well as men contribute, and the poorer people as well as the richer.

That they are able to make this common contribution, is due to the fact, that we educate not only men but women, not only the rich but the poor; that they are keenly stimulated to make it, is due to the natural resources of the country, to the mobile conditions of society, and to the peculiar system of educating all cla.s.ses and both s.e.xes together, which conditions combine to afford to the various individuals, inviting possibilities for acquiring wealth and influence. Along with this tremendous brain activity, a very large proportion of our people are carrying on an unusual amount of muscular activity. That is, our active brains multiply things to be done faster than they supply us with mechanical contrivances and organization in industry, to reduce muscular labor.

In looking at the conditions of English life we observe:

I. Comparative repose, the absence of an exciting hope and a hurried and worrying activity. A large part of the nation attempt to lead nothing beyond a simple animal life, putting their entire energies into animal force, and using this animal force for the benefit of those above them, almost as completely as the horse or the ox. This statement is so true of the agricultural laborers as to admit of very little palliation, and it is scarcely less true of the unskilled working cla.s.ses in the towns.

In all the lower ranks of society there are great obstacles to advancement in position, because each plane of life is crowded with its own members; because each cla.s.s is educated in schools where only children of that cla.s.s are found, and where the education is especially adapted to that cla.s.s--that is, to their industrial needs and to what is expected in that grade of society--and does not fit them for any other place in society. One-fifth of the nation cannot read, and the education of the great majority of the remainder, when not limited to the "three R's," does not go far enough to create a taste for reading books; and, shut off as they have been from partic.i.p.ation in political life, they have too little interest in public concerns to read the newspapers.

That is, as compared with our life, the possibilities for advancement are limited, the average education is of a low order, and the stimulus that comes from an acquaintance with the habits of those above them is absent. Nearly all the spurs to ambition are wanting, and in consequence there is little tendency to do more work than is necessary to keep along in the old ways. The skilled artisans have in this matter of opportunity for advancement more in common with the circ.u.mstances of our life. This sphere is not overcrowded, but they, too, lack the means for education and a.s.sociation with those above them provided in our public schools.

The result of their better chances for improvement shows itself with them in the same way as with us, in a tendency to overwork, though, as we should expect, not in the same degree. Complaints are made of the physical deterioration of this cla.s.s, and laws are enacted to limit the working hours of children; and in the last session of Parliament, Mr.

Mundella introduced a bill to fix the limit for women below that of men.

The bill did not pa.s.s, but it will be introduced again in the next session.

The large shopkeepers and manufacturers are, again, more a.s.similated to us in their possibilities for rapid changes in financial conditions; but at best they are a small cla.s.s, and efficient help is more easily attainable. With us, as soon as a man becomes conscious that he has good ability for work, he finds for himself an independent place. Here, as a rule, there is no independent place for him, and he is obliged to sell his ability to some other man who has an independent footing. So that the leader of a scheme is not only relieved from puzzling over details, but a large part of the planning is done by able men in his employ, and he need give but little of his time. As a rule, a man must be on a pretty high platform to have much hope of crowding his way up higher.

II. The importance of health is a dominant idea in the whole nation.

This is probably due to the very permanent impress given to English civilization by the feudal system, to the demand made for the permanence of the family, and for the production of warrior barons and warrior retainers. The physical condition, that was formerly a necessity, is now maintained as a matter of aristocratic fas.h.i.+on and pride in ancestry.

The higher cla.s.ses have nothing to do that demands a strong physique, but they devote the best part of their energies to securing it, and set up their own results and methods as a model which the whole nation follow. As evidence of this national interest in health, we may observe the number of Public Health bills that come into Parliament, and it is not strange that they get the most attention from the Conservative side of the House. As farther confirmation we observe the great number of holidays spent, not in merrymaking, but in a stroll in the fresh air of the country, and the fact that nearly all the families of the whole nation make as regular provision for one or more "outings" in the year, as they do for the extra wraps for the winter; and still farther, that almost the poorest cla.s.ses refuse to buy bread and meat of second quality, not from luxurious tastes, but from a belief that it is less healthful. This consideration for health pervades all ranks of the nation.

III. As conducive to the maintenance of health, we find, first, remarkable regularity of habits, which is largely due to the fixedness, or caste state of society, that keeps people in the same grade of life into which they are born; that is, in conditions where they have no occasion to change their habits, and where they have little opportunity for seeing any habits, except those to which they conform. Children naturally fall into the ways in which they are expected to go. This permanence of conditions goes far to insure a degree of regularity that almost converts habits into instincts. Within the last few weeks, I have for the first time heard an Englishman say that he had eaten too much.