when I began to develop the physical, and filled my gymnasium with the
ordinary appliances used in men's gymnasia." There is no sex in mind or in
science, it is said, but it might as well be urged that there is no age, and hence
that all methods adapted to teaching at different stages of development may be
ignored. That woman can do many things as well as man does not prove that she
ought to do the same things, or that man-made ways are the best for her. Mrs.
Alice Freeman Palmer[6] was right in saying that woman's education has all the
perplexities of that of man, and many more, still more difficult and intricate, of
its own.
Hence, we must conclude that, while women's colleges have to a great extent
solved the problem of special technical training, they have done as yet very little
to solve the larger one of the proper education of woman. To assume that the
latter question is settled, as is so often done, is disastrous. I have forced myself
to go through many elaborate reports of meetings where female education was
discussed by those supposed to be competent; but as a rule, not without rare,
striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with the same sterile and
complacent artificiality that was so long the curse of woman's life. I deem it
almost reprehensible that, save a few general statistics, the women's colleges
have not only made no study themselves of the larger problems that impend, but
have often maintained a repellent attitude toward others who wished to do so. No
one that I know of connected with any of these institutions, where the richest
material is going to waste, is making any serious and competent research on
lines calculated to bring out the psycho-physiological differences between the
sexes and those in authority are either conservative by constitution or else
intimidated because public opinion is still liable to panics if discussion here
becomes scientific and fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and the old
habit of ignoring everything that pertains to sex in countenance.
Again, while I sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every
opportunity which she can fill, and yield to none in appreciation of her ability, I
insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college is that it is based upon the
assumption, implied and often expressed, if not almost universally
acknowledged, that girls should primarily be trained to independence and self-
support, and that matrimony and motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself,
or, as some even urge, is thus best provided for. If these colleges are, as the
above statistics indicate, chiefly devoted to the training of those who do not
marry, or if they are to educate for celibacy, this is right. These institutions may
perhaps come to be training stations of a new-old type, the agamic or even