step of devising a scheme that shall fit woman's nature and needs.
For the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first of all distinctly and
ostensively invert the present maxim, and educate primarily and chiefly for
motherhood, assuming that, if that does not come, single life can best take care
of itself, because it is less intricate and lower and its needs far more easily met.
While girls may be trained with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of
adolescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy between the sexes in high
school, if not in college, tends to rub of the bloom and delicacy which can
develop in each, and girls suffer in this respect, let us repeat, far more than boys.
The familiar comradeship that ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. To
the care of their institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals
inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Staël, the Misses Cobb,
Martineau, Fuller, Bronté, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs. Browning;
and while accepting and profiting by what they have done, and acknowledging
every claim for their abilities and achievements, prospective mothers must not be
allowed to forget a still larger class of ideal women, both in history and
literature, from the Holy Mother to Beatrice Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who
have inspired men to great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of
noble mothers.
We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with regimen or
diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she can, from surreptitious or
worthy sources, what she most of all needs to know; must recognize that our
present civilization is hard on woman and that she is not yet adjusted to her
social environment; that as she was of old accused of having given man the
apple of knowledge of good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less
serious indictment of having given her the apple of intellectualism and
encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense of health. We must
recognize that riches are probably harder on her, on the whole, than poverty, and
that poor parents should not labor too hard to exempt her from its wholesome
discipline. The expectancy of change so stamped upon her sex by heredity as she
advances into maturity must not be perverted into uneasiness or her soul sown
with the tares of ambition or fired by intersexual competition and driven on, to
quote Dr. R.T. Edes, "by a tireless sort of energy which is a compound of
conscience, ambition, and desire to please, plus a peculiar female obstinacy." If
she is bright, she must not be overworked in the school factory, studying in a
way which parodies Hood's "Song of the Shirt"; and if dull or feeble, she should
not be worried by preceptresses like a eminent lady principal,[7] who thought