men because their careers depend upon it. Hence their studies are more objective
and face the world as it is. In college the women do as well as men, but not in
the university. The half-educated woman as a social factor has produced many
soft lecture courses and cheap books. This is an argument for the higher
education of the sex. Finally, Jordan insists that coeducation leads to marriage,
and he believes that its best basis is common interest and intellectual friendship.
From the available data it seems, however, that the more scholastic the education
of women, the fewer children and the harder, more dangerous, and more dreaded
is parturition, and the less the ability to nurse children. Not intelligence, but
education by present man-made ways, is inversely as fecundity. The sooner and
the more clearly this is recognized as a universal rule, not, of course, without
many notable and much vaunted exceptions, the better for our civilization. For
one, I plead with no whit less earnestness and conviction than any of the
feminists, and indeed with more fervor because on nearly all their grounds and
also on others, for the higher education of women, and would welcome them to
every opportunity available to men if they can not do better; but I would open to
their election another education, which every competent judge would pronounce
more favorable to motherhood, under the influence of female principals who do
not publicly say that it is "not desirable" that women students should study
motherhood, because they do not know whether they will marry; who encourage
them to elect "no special subjects because they are women," and who think
infant psychology "foolish."
Various interesting experiments in coeducation are now being made in England.
[2] Some are whole-hearted and encourage the girls to do almost everything that
the boys do in both study and play. There are girl prefects; cricket teams are
formed sometimes of both sexes, but often the sexes matched against each other;
one play-yard, a dual staff of teachers, and friendships between the boys and
girls are not tabooed, etc. In other schools the sexes meet perhaps in recitation
only, have separate rooms for study, entrances, play-grounds, and their relations
are otherwise restricted. The opinion of English writers generally favors
coeducation up to about the beginning of the teens, and from there on views are
more divided. It is admitted that, if there is a very great preponderance of either
sex over the other, the latter is likely to lose its characteristic qualities, and
something of this occurs where the average age of one sex is distinctly greater
than that of the other. On the other hand, several urge that, where age and
numbers are equal, each sex is more inclined to develop the best qualities
peculiar to itself in the presence of the other.