No Sex in Education/Chapter 4
"A man's mind—what there is of it—has always the advantage of being masculine, as the smallest birch tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm, and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality."—George Eliot.
"Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man could choose not only his wife, but his wife's husband! Or as if he were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own person!"—George Eliot.
DURING the first fifteen years of life is laid the basis of the future health, be it good or bad—a basis which can only be destroyed or modified by culpable neglect of sanitary rules. on the one hand and the utmost care on the other. A girl never enters upon a feeble menstrual life without a cause, and this cause can usually be traced up either to inherited traits or more commonly to some neglect or mismanagement of parents during childhood.
We will imagine our girl has been allowed the full exercise of her rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness up to the age of fourteen—at least as full as it is possible under existing social regulations—and that she has come into her heritage of womanhood. Just so far as all idea of sex has been abolished has she been enabled to reach that point with unimpaired vigor, and with that surplus of vitality with which nature endowed her from the beginning undrawn upon, ready for this certain emergency, ready to keep pace with her brother though the odds seem against her. Now says Dr. Clarke:
"It is equally obvious that a girl upon whom nature, for a limited period and for a definite purpose, imposes so great a physiological task, will not have as much power left for the tasks of the school as the boy of whom nature requires less at the corresponding epoch."
I deny that it is obvious. Nature, I have already said, has supplied her with the extra force and the extra vitality for this very purpose.
"The cerebral processes by which the acquisition of knowledge is made are the same for each sex; but the mode of life which gives the finest nurture to the brain, and so enables those processes to yield their best result, is not the same for each sex."
How does Dr. Clarke know that? It seems to me he contradicts himself on another page when he admits:
"The sacred number, three, dominates the human frame. There is a trinity in our anatomy. Three systems, to which all the organs are directly or indirectly subsidiary, divide and control the body. First, there is the nutritive system, composed of stomach, intestines, liver, pancreas, glands and vessels by which food is elaborated, effete matter removed, the blood manufactured and the whole organization nourished. This is the commissariat. Secondly, there is the nervous system, which co-ordinates all the organs and functions, which enables man to entertain relations with the world around him and with his fellows, and through which intellectual power is manifested and human thought and reason made possible. Thirdly, there is the reproductive system, by which the race is continued and its grasp on the earth assured. The first two of these systems are alike in each sex. They are 80 alike that they require a similar training in each, and yield in each a similar result. The machinery of them is the same. No scalpel has discovered any difference between a man's and a woman's liver. No microscope has revealed any structure, fibre or cell in the brain of man or woman that is not common to both. No analysis or dynametic has discovered or measured any chemical action or nerve-force that stamps either of these systems as male or female. From these anatomical and physiological data alone the inference is legitimate that intellectual power, the correlative and measure of cerebral structure and metamorphosis, is capable of equal development in both sexes. With regard to the reproductive system, the case is altogether different."
If education was a sexual matter, if it was the reproductive system which was directly engaged in this process of education, Dr. Clarke's reasoning would be correct. But while the nutritive system is to be treated alike in both sexes because it is alike, it is difficult to understand why there should be any difference in the treatment of the nervous system, which has its seat in the brain, and which is equally alike in both sexes, simply because the reproductive systems happen to differ. It is only the reproductive systems which differ, and we treat them differently because nature has made it utterly impossible that we should treat them alike. The difference is so plainly indicated that no mistake can be made. Shall we not draw the inference from this that if nature required there should be any difference in the methods of developing the male and female brain, she would have so hedged in the roads of the two sexes that there should be no possibility of passing from one to the other? But says the doctor:
"The growth of this peculiar and marvelous apparatus (the female reproductive system), in the perfect development of which humanity has so large an interest, occurs during the few years of a girl's educational life. No such extraordinary task, calling for such rapid expenditure of force, building up such a delicate and extensive mechanism within the organism—a house within a house, an engine within an engine—is imposed upon the male physique at the same epoch."
Is this statement strictly true? If so, I have been reading all the signs of manhood wrongly. At a period corresponding with, though a little later in life than, the sexual development of the girl, the boy also undergoes his sexual development. The outer characteristics are quite as striking in him as in her. The voice changes, the form fills out, the beard makes its appearance, and corresponding with the menstrual secretion, and quite as important in the sexual economy, there is the seminal secretion; and upon the normal and proper production and retention of this secretion depends all the young man's after health.
The sedentary habits of the student are exceedingly trying and frequently disastrous in their results at this special period of the boy's, or rather young man's, life. Just as great a care, just as watchful precautions, are required in the one sex as in the other; though to the shame of humanity be it spoken, the needs of the young man are overlooked, while his sister attracts all the attention. "The doctor talks," says Mercy B. Jackson, M. D., in a brief yet able criticism of the book, "as if the Creator had made man so perfectly that, without any special care on his part, his whole nature would naturally develop into a perfect and healthy human being, prepared to fulfill all objects of his creation; but that he made woman so imperfectly that her organism would not naturally develop into a perfectly healthy woman, fitted to fulfill the highest hopes of her creation, unless men took charge of her and directed what she must do and how she must live."
Women do not usually read medical works and become cognizant of all the dangers incident to young manhood at this critical period; so doctors think they may with impunity impress upon their minds the overweening importance of their own special sexual functions. But a masculine weakness is quite as deplorable as a feminine one, and quite as disastrous from the economist's point of view, since, though women must undoubtedly be the mothers of the race, men must be the fathers; and imperfect fatherhood is as great a curse as imperfect motherhood, although men, for their own purposes, have not seen fit to so represent it.
Girls doubtless ruin their health by overstudy. Do not boys? Young women graduate from school and seminary semi-invalids. Do not young men also? The following is what a writer whom even Dr. Clarke quotes says on this point:
"Every physician can point to students whose splendid cerebral development has been paid for by emaciated limbs, enfeebled digestion and disordered lungs. Every biography of the intellectual great records the dangers they have encountered, often those to which they have succumbed, in overstepping the ordinary bounds of human capacity; and while beckoning onward to the glories of their almost preternatural achievements, register by way of warning the fearful penalty of disease, suffering and bodily infirmity which nature exacts as the price for this partial and inharmonious grandeur. It cannot be otherwise. The brain cannot take more than its share without injury to other organs. It cannot do more than its share without depriving other organs of that exercise and nourishment which are essential to their health and vigor. It is in the power of the individual to throw, as it were, the whole vigor of the constitution into any one part, and, by giving to this part exclusive or excessive attentions, to develop it at the expense and to the neglect of the others."
It is this proposed exclusive and excessive attention to one single part, developing it at the expense and neglect of all the others, against which I wish to make most earnest protest. The reproductive system of woman already monopolizes too much of her own thought and that of others; and if Dr. Clarke's advice be followed in this matter of special education, woman will be woman no longer, but an exaggerated female, weak and wanting in all other functions and faculties, and abnormally developed in the peculiarly feminine parts of her organization.
Never were truer words spoken than those above quoted. Yet there is no mention made here of women. So it seems that men can ruin themselves physically by over-study. I think I can recall cases. I can recall to mind a young theological student who had to leave his college before he graduated because his health failed him. He married immediately, and became in the shortest possible time the father of a child who did not survive its infancy. Will Dr. Clarke please take up this case and explain it? I can recall a precisely similar case of a young woman. Shall we accept both of these as evidence against identical education? No; they are evidence against over-taxation of the brain and consequent physical derangement and degeneracy—a calamity which is just as likely to occur to a man as to a woman.
President Fairchild of Oberlin, who is certainly as well qualified as any man in the country to testify on the point of the comparative health of male and female students, says:
"Nor is there any manifest inability on the part of young women to endure the required labor. A breaking down in health does not appear to be more frequent than with young men. We have not observed a more frequent interruption of study on this account, nor do statistics show a greater draft upon the vital forces in the case of those who have completed the full college course. Of young ladies who have graduated since 1841, the deaths have been one in twelve; of the young men, a little more than one in eleven."
Thus it is natural to infer that an identical education is favorable to the health of women rather than prejudicial to it. This fact also seems to settle the point which Dr. Clarke brings up in the course of his book—that the ill-effects of college-life are quite as often felt after graduating as during the years of a girl's student life. There is no trace of such effect here. On the contrary, it seems as though the doctor has mistaken the sex which requires his attention, and that it is upon the boys rather than upon the girls that the evils of identical education fall.