schools, where evenings, food, and regimen are controlled, are in better health
than day pupils with social, church, and domestic duties and perhaps worries to
which boys are less subject. This is the nascent stage of periodicity to the slow
normalization of which, during these few critical years, everything that interferes
should yield. Some kind of tacit recognition of this is indispensable, but in
mixed classes every form of such concession is baffling and demoralizing to
boys.
The women who really achieve the higher culture should make it their "cause" or
"mission" to work out the new humanistic or liberal education which the old
college claimed to stand for and which now needs radical reconstruction to meet
the demands of modern life. In science they should aim to restore the humanistic
elements of its history, biography, its popular features at their best, and its
applications in all the more non-technical fields, as described in Chapter XII, and
feel responsibility not to let the moral, religious, and poetic aspects of nature be
lost in utilities. Woman should be true to her generic nature and take her stand
against all premature specialization, and when the Zeitgeist [Spirit of the Times]
insists on specialized training for occupative pursuits without waiting for broad
foundations to be laid, she should resist all these influences that make for
psychological precocity. Das Ewig-Weibliche [The eternal womanly] is no
iridescent fiction but a very definable reality, and means perennial youth. It
means that woman at her best never outgrows adolescence as man does, but
lingers in, magnifies and glorifies this culminating stage of life with its all-sided
interests, its convertibility of emotions, its enthusiasm, and zest for all that is
good, beautiful, true, and heroic. This constitutes her freshness and charm, even
in age, and makes her by nature more humanistic than man, more sympathetic
and appreciative. It is not chiefly the 70,000 superfluous Massachusetts women
of the last census, but representatives of every class and age in the 4,000
women's clubs of this country that now find some leisure for general culture in
all fields, and in which most of them no doubt surpass their husbands. Those
who still say that men do not like women to be their mental superiors and that no
man was ever won by the attraction of intellect, on the one hand, and those who
urge that women really want husbands to be their intellectual superiors, both
misapprehend. The male in all the orders of life is the agent of variation and
tends by nature to expertness and specialisation, without which his individuality
is incomplete. In his chosen line he would lead and be authoritative, and he
rarely seeks partnership in it in marriage. This is no subjection, but woman
instinctively respects and even reveres, and perhaps educated woman coming to
demand, it in the man of her whole-hearted choice. This granted, man was never