Sex in Education | Page 5

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 leucorrhoea, amenorrhoea,
dysmenorrhoea, 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