Sex in Education | Page 4

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