CHAPTER XI
THE EDUCATION OF GIRLS
Equal opportunities of higher education now open—Brings new dangers to
women—Ineradicable sex differences begin at puberty, when the sexes should
and do diverge—Different interests—Sex tension—Girls more mature than boys
at the same age—Radical psychic and physiological differences between the
sexes—The bachelor women—Needed reconstruction—Food—Sleep—
Regimen—Manners—Religion—Regularity—The topics for a girls' curriculum
—The eternal womanly.
The long battle of woman and her friends for equal educational and other
opportunities is essentially won all along the line. Her academic achievements
have forced conservative minds to admit that her intellect is not inferior to that
of man. The old cloistral seclusion and exclusion is forever gone and new ideals
are arising. It has been a noble movement and is a necessary first stage of
woman's emancipation. The caricatured maidens "as beautiful as an angel but as
silly as a goose" who come from the kitchen to the husband's study to ask how
much is two times two, and are told it is four for a man and three for a woman,
and go back with a happy "Thank you, my dear"; those who love to be called
baby, and appeal to instincts half parental in their lovers and husbands; those
who find all the sphere they desire in a doll's house, like Nora's, and are content
to be men's pets; whose ideal is the clinging vine, and who take no interest in the
field where their husbands struggle, will perhaps soon survive only as a
diminishing remainder. Marriages do still occur where woman's ignorance and
helplessness seem to be the chief charm to men, and may be happy, but such
cases are no farther from the present ideal and tendency on the one hand than on
the other are those which consist in intellectual partnerships, in which there is no