But in a very few years, I believe even in the early twenties with American girls,
along with rapidly in creasing development of capacity there is also observable
the beginnings of loss and deterioration. Unless marriage comes there is
lassitude, subtle symptoms of invalidism, the germs of a rather aimless
dissatisfaction with life, a little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain forms
of self-pampering, the resolution to be happy, though at too great cost; and thus
the clear air of morning begins to haze over and unconsciously she begins to
grope. By thirty, she is perhaps goaded into more or less sourness; has developed
more petty self-indulgences; has come to feel a right to happiness almost as
passionately as the men of the French Revolution and as the women in their late
movement for enfranchisement felt for liberty. Very likely she has turned to
other women and entered into innocent Platonic pairing-off relations with some
one. There is a little more affectation, playing a rôle, and interest in dress and
appearance is either less or more specialized and definite. Perhaps she has
already begun to be a seeker who will perhaps find, lose, and seek again. Her
temper is modified; there is a slight stagnation of soul; a craving for work or
travel; a love of children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or else aversion
to them; an analysis of psychic processes until they are weakened and insight
becomes too clear; sense of responsibility without an object; a slight general
malaise and a sense that society is a false "margarine" affair; revolt against those
that insist that in her child the real value of a woman is revealed. There are
alternations between excessive self-respect which demands something almost
like adoration of the other sex and self-distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries
about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the sexes generally.
A new danger, the greatest in the history of her sex, now impends, viz., arrest,
complacency, and a sense of finality in the most perilous first stage of higher
education for girls, when, after all, little has actually yet been won save only the
right and opportunity to begin reconstructions, so that now, for the first time in
history, methods and matter could be radically transformed to fit the nature and
needs of girls. Now most female faculties, trustees, and students are content to
ape the newest departures in some one or more male institutions as far as their
means or obvious limitations make possible with a servility which is often abject
and with rarely ever a thought of any adjustment, save the most superficial, to
sex. It is the easiest, and therefore the most common, view typically expressed
by the female head of a very successful institution,[5] who was "early convinced
in my teaching experience that the methods for mental development for boys and
girls applied equally without regard to sex, and I have carried the same thought