No Sex in Education/Chapter 3

DR. CLARKE'S book is the last struggle of the opponents of co-education. It is a desperate struggle, but one in which they trust to craft rather than to strength. Forced to yield all the points which they have so long held in dispute, they make a show of giving them up with a good grace, as though they ​were of no account whatever in the matter, and have fortified themselves behind what they choose to consider an impregnable barrier—the weakness and invalidism of women. They trust to the ignorance of the community in maintaining their position, knowing too well how readily women accept what is told them concerning themselves by a man, and a physician at that, even when they know better.

Strange as it may seem, there can be but little doubt that a careful and unprejudiced study of facts will lead one to the conclusion that by far the largest proportion of the ill-health of girls results, not from their education being conducted in the same manner as boys', but from the divergence from that plan of education. In using the word education I accept Dr. Clarke's definition:

"Education is here intended to include what its etymology indicates—the drawing out and development of every part of the system; and this necessarily includes the whole manner of life, physical and psychical, during the educational period."

​It is an established fact that female infants are endowed with stronger and more tenacious vitality than male infants. More males are born than females; yet during the first year of life more males die than females in the ratio of 123 to 100, and during the first five years in the ratio of 116 to 100. Why nature should have been thus lavish with this gift of vitality to girls at a time when there seems no real call for it it is difficult to understand, unless it is intended that this surplus strength shall last until there is occasion for its use.

During the first few years of their lives male and female infants are treated exactly alike, and the girls not only survive, but actually thrive better than, the boys.

The first departure from the principle of co-education is when the girl-baby is given a doll and the boy-baby some plaything more suited to his "manly" nature. Having given the doll to the girl, and not having given it to the boy, the doctor says:

"Inspired by the divine instinct of motherhood, the girl that can only creep to her ​mother's knees will crave a doll that her tottling brother looks coldly upon."

Try the boy with the doll, and see. Is there, then, no divine instinct of fatherhood? These theorists would say not. Facts say a boy will take just as kindly and as lovingly to a doll as does his sister, if you will only give him the chance. He is some day to be a father, and, thank God! the instinct of parentage is something that stirs his soul as deeply as hers. Here the deviation from strict co-education is unfair to the boy. It smothers this instinct by ridicule and by adverse training, and that is why we have so few really worthy, good and loving fathers in the land.

Even as I am penning this my "infant Achilles" of a year and a half spies his sister's doll; and opportunity favoring him, he confiscates it, and stands with the effigy of humanity clasped in his arms, viewing it with eyes filled with loving admiration, and caressing and talking to it just as any girl-baby might do. He is not yet old enough to read Dr. Clarke's book, or he would know better than to so belie his ​future manhood. Nor is he an exception to the general rule regarding boy-babies. I have witnessed the same scene enacted repeatedly on the part of the male infants, and the testimony of other mothers coincides with mine.

As infancy begins to give place to childhood, then the distinctive training commences in earnest. The boy is allowed to be natural, the girl is forced to be artificial. Some girls break through all restraints and romp, but they are not the model girls whom mothers delight in and visitors praise for being "lady-like." Boy and girl as they are, with the same life pulsing in their veins and drawing its sustenance in precisely the same manner, with the same physical and mental needs, nature calls imperatively for an equally active life for both. They both want the air and the sunshine. They need equally to be hardened by the storms, tanned by the winds and have limbs strengthened by unrestrained exercise. But instead of this equality, while boys have their liberty more or less freely granted them, girls must stay at home and sew and read, and play ​prettily and quietly, and take demure walks. I am not speaking of girls in a single stratum of society, but of girls everywhere, from the highest down almost to the lowest, wherever the word "lady" is sufficiently reverenced and misunderstood. The boy may run, the girl must walk. The boy may strengthen his lungs by using them to his utmost power, the girl must always speak in mild and subdued tones.

Then they are both sent to school. I wish Dr. Clarke had turned his attention to the evils of this early school-life. Shut up for six hours in a day within an unventilated school-room, the boy and girl equally suffer, though perhaps not in the same manner. The former, used to his restless life outside of the school-room, is more impatient of restraint than his sister, who is already somewhat broken to harness; consequently, he does not suffer in the same degree that his sister does. The freedom of his life out of school makes amends in some measure for the irksome restraint in school, and the rebound which his nature is permitted to take in this freedom greatly serves his physical health. ​Still, there can be no doubt that this life is not good for him. He rushes into greater rudeness and positive savagery when the hours of restraint are over. A writer in Hearth and Home says on this point:

"Boys cannot spend a number of hours together as closely packed as sardines in a box, in air which is likely to be more or less vitiated, forbidden to move, to turn the head, to whisper, in any way to give vent to the restlessness that comes over healthy flesh and blood when condemned to rigid sameness of position and rigid straightness of face, without there being danger of reaction, and even of violence, when they get into fresh air and out of sight of the teacher's argus eyes."

Girls, whose energies are still the most powerful, have no opportunity for working off their surplus vitality in rude and boisterous ways, for the restraint is never lifted from them. So they enter with the whole force of their natures into their studies, and, as every teacher will bear testimony, soon far outstrip their brothers. To be at the head of their class, to receive the highest mark of merit, is their ruling ambition. Their minds are prematurely developed ​at the expense of their bodies. This does not result because they are educated as boys, but because both are educated wrongly, and the girl far more wrongly than the boy, inasmuch and Just so far as her education in the general discipline of her life differs from that of the boy.

If boys are to be kept at high pressure until every nerve and muscle and membrane of the body is taxed to support the precociously developing brain—if they are to be forbidden exercise, to be improperly and insufficiently clothed, to be allowed to stuff themselves at all times with sweetmeats and indigestible food—if their recreation is to consist of the tamest and most insipid of plays,—then, if this be a boy's education, let us by all means forbid it to our girls. It is just the kind of education we have been giving them, and just the kind that is paling their checks, dwarfing their physical capabilities, and in their childhood most surely stunting their future womanly development and laying the seeds of life-long disease. This sort of education does not even do what Dr. Clarke insinuates that our female system of ​education does—develop and strengthen the mind at the expense of the body; for a mind thus precociously developed possesses only a superficial brilliancy without strength, and is surely predestined to an early decay.

If, on the contrary, a boy's way of study means a limited number of hours per day devoted to lessons, these hours well divided by opportunities for rest and recreation—if he is permitted and encouraged to strengthen his muscular system by frequent and vigorous exercise in the open air—if his dress serves the purpose of warmth and covering and nowhere cramps and pinches, nor by its fineness and flimsiness of texture and liability to become soiled hinders or impedes him in any way in his healthful play—if he is given plain, nutritious food at proper hours and allowed sufficient sleep,—then, if this be a boy's education, by all means let us allow our girl an equal opportunity with him. No one can doubt that this is the best possible method of educating a boy. Will any one, will even Dr. Clarke, doubt that it is the best possible method for ​the girl also? Is there anything in this method tending to injure her future sexual development? On the contrary, by imparting a healthy, vigorous tone to the whole system, it is just the course to establish a firm foundation for a robust and perfect womanhood.

Our public-school systems are undoubtedly wrong. Let Dr. Clarke write another book and expose them, and I will say, Amen!

Although Dr. Clarke persists in saying that "the best educational training for a boy is not the best for a girl, nor that for a girl best for a boy," I cannot see anything in the latter plan I have described which needs to be modified in order to meet the needs of either.

Oh, Dr. Clarke—doctors and teachers and school trustees all over the land—will you not hear my appeal, and make an effort to stay this massacre of the innocents? I do not want my girl precociously developed intellectually at the cost of a lifetime of weakness and invalidism; neither do I want to see the same result in my boy, or, what is almost as greatly to be lamented, to see that boy developed into a savage.

​Children are put into school at too early a period. Eight or ten years of age is old enough for a child to be subjected to the discipline of study. Two hours a day is sufficient time for restraint for the younger ones, four hours for the older, either boy or girl, with at least a ten minutes' rest at the end of each hour. And there should be no countenancing of lessons out of school.

It seems to me Dr. Clarke is guilty of a grave error when he lays so much stress upon the few years intervening between childhood and womanhood, and entirely overlooks the previous training upon which everything depends.

I am willing to grant that many young women who have passed through the usual experiences of a trammeled girlhood will need to have a one-sided, feminine system of education to meet the exigences of their partially or abnormally developed womanhood. I think, however, even many of them have native vigor sufficient to carry them safely through all ordinary contingencies, in spite of the unfavorable circumstances of their early lives. But I say, ​without fear of contradiction from those who have given the matter a fair trial, that a girl who has been co-educated with a boy from birth to the age of fourteen—by which I mean has been allowed precisely the same opportunity for physical development, and has not had her mental growth encouraged at the expense of this development—"can go to school, pursue all the studies which Dr. Todd enumerates, except ad infinitum; know them, not as well as a chemist knows chemistry or a botanist botany, but as well as they are known by boys of her age and training—as well, indeed, as they are known by many college-taught men; enough, at least, to be a solace and a resource to her; then graduate before she is eighteen, and come out of school as healthy, as fresh, as eager, as she went in." She can do all this and retain uninjured health, and will laugh at Dr. Clarke's suggestion that she should go to bed or at least observe complete quiet and seclusion three days out of every month. On this point, if I must accept authority, I would rather take Gail Hamilton's than Dr. Clarke's.