girls' weakness is usually imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for
suggesting illness and for intimating that men will have to choose between a
healthy animal and an educated invalid for a wife.
Without specifying here details or curricula, the ideals that should be striven
toward in the intermediate and collegiate education of adolescent girls with the
proper presupposition of motherhood, and which are already just as practicable
as Abbotsholme[8] or L'Ecole des Roches,[9] may be rudely indicated somewhat
as follows.
First, the ideal institution for the training of girls from twelve or thirteen on into
the twenties, when the period most favorable to motherhood begins, should be in
the country in the midst of hills, the climbing of which is the best stimulus for
heart and lungs, and tends to mental elevation and breadth of view. There should
be water for boating, bathing, and skating, aquaria and aquatic life; gardens both
for kitchen vegetables and horticulture; forests for their seclusion and religious
awe; good roads, walks, and paths that tempt to walking and wheeling:
playgrounds and space for golf and tennis, with large covered but unheated
space favorable for recreations in weather really too bad for out-of-door life and
for those indisposed; and plenty of nooks that permit each to be alone with
nature, for this develops inwardness, poise, and character, yet not too great
remoteness from the city for a wise utilization of its advantages at intervals. All
that can be called environment is even more important for girls than boys,
significant as it is for the latter.
The first aim, which should dominate every item, pedagogic method and matter,
should be health—a momentous word that looms up beside holiness, to which it
is etymologically akin. The new hygiene of the last few years should be supreme
and make these academic areas soared to the cult of the goddess Hygeia. Only
those who realize what advances have been made in health culture and know
something of its vast new literature can realize all that this means. The health of
woman is, as we have seen, if possible even more important for the welfare of
the race than that of man; and the influence of her body upon her mind is, in a
sense, greater, so that its needs should be supreme and primary. Foods should
favor the completest digestion, so that metabolism be on the highest plane. The
dietary should be abundant, plain, and varied, and cooked with all the
refinements possible in the modern cooking-school, which should be one of its
departments, with limited use of rich foods or desserts and stimulating drinks,
but with wholesome proximity to dairy and farm. Nutrition is the first law of