No Sex in Education/Chapter 5

DR. CLARKE gives us in a chapter entitled "Chiefly Clinical" several cases from his note-book, of girls who have become invalids from the exigences of school-life. How are his readers to know that what he assumes to be the causes are the real causes? He gives no further particulars concerning them—nothing of their training during childhood, nothing of their modes of dress or living or their habits of exercise. He admits in one case that the girl was so wholly absorbed in her studies that she would give no time or thought to any​thing else, and was assigned extra tasks in school because she acquitted herself so well. Of course she broke down. This breaking down was not because she received a boy's training. A boy would have broken down just as quick—perhaps quicker.

That is the whole fault of the doctor's reasoning. He has put in the same category overstudy and fair, moderate, legitimate study. He entirely overlooks the further fact that even in the so-called attempts at co- and identical education a young woman is hurried through to graduation day four or five years sooner than a young man; so that, instead of the race being an equal one between them as far as time goes, extra exertion is required of her.

He entirely ignores the statistics of such of our colleges as have fairly tried co-education, and which prove conclusively that women can compete with men in a hand-to-hand, unabated contest for education without detriment to their health. He sets up his own adverse theories against Oberlin's satisfactory experience of forty years. Antioch has also made the trial ​for nearly half that period. I have seen only a general statement regarding Oberlin, but I have before me a table of statistics of Antioch College. Out of 41 girl graduates, 36 are now living; 11 of these are in "very good" health, 19 in "good" health, 1 in "fair," 1 uncertain, 1 not good and 3 unknown. The one not in good health dates back her invalidism to a time previous to school-life. Of the 30 married, 24 have children. Of the 6 childless, 3 are recently married. It would be impossible to take haphazard 41 other women who should present so fair a record in regard to health. But says our author:

"Two or three generations at least of the female college graduates of this sort of co-education must come and go before any sufficient idea can be formed of the harvest it will yield."

Again he says, on another page:

"Deluded by strange theories, and groping in physiological darkness, our fathers' physicians were too often Sangrados. Nourishing food, pure air and hæmatized blood were stigmatized as the friends of disease and the enemies of convalescence. Oxygen ​was shut out from and carbonic acid shut into the chambers of phthisis and fever, and veins were opened that the currents of blood and disease might flow out together. Happily, those days of ignorance, which God winked at, and which the race survived, have passed by."

If two or three generations at least are needed to try an experiment of any sort upon the human race, and if the doctors of those past times were even more deluded than those of the present in their ideas of health and disease, and of course carried out their delusions at the expense of their patients, is it not possible that the ill-health of the women of to-day dates, not to their own school-days, but back to that period when co-education was not yet an idea even, and girls were taught to read passably, write intolerably, not to spell at all, but were encouraged in becoming adepts in housewifery? May it not be those notable grandmothers of ours whom we must thank for the present degeneracy of the race? I know my own mother, New England born and bred, ended her school-days when she had mastered the single rule of ​three, that being considered all that was necessary for a woman to know in those early days, and I suspect that was a liberal education compared with what her mother received. I do not see that I am any the stronger for it. On the other hand, I firmly believe if she and her mother had worked less and studied more I should not be the sufferer I am to-day from "nerves."

Speaking of nerves reminds me that Dr. Clarke lays great stress upon the results of co-education in diseases of the nerves and insanity. Over-study may no doubt produce these. But the danger is quite as great to men as to women. I have before me the statistical tables of the State Lunatic Asylum of Pennsylvania, in which men and women are shown as becoming insane from "excessive study" in the ratio of 3 to 1, and only 4 all told since the opening of the institution a number of years ago. So it seems, judging from this report, as though the doctor was hardly sustained by facts in his theories regarding the dangers of insanity from excessive and unremitting study. As a counter​balancing fact, there are 23 farmers who have become insane in a single year to 47 farmers' wives and daughters during the same length of time—the class of people who, in Pennsylvania at least, are as little likely as any class I know to be affected by any system of thorough co-education, while the wives and daughters are engaged in the exact performance of that line of duties set down as the most womanly—namely, housework. Will Dr. Clarke please rise and explain?

With the exception of laborers, of whom there are 13, the highest number of insane persons from any other occupation is 5.

So it is to be seen that there are other causes for ill-health and insanity besides co-education, or boys' education for girls.

I have even seen it hinted that it is not always over-study which breaks down young men in our colleges. The Washington Chronicle says on this point:

"It is a commonly received notion that hard study is the unhealthy element of college life. But from tables of the mortality of Harvard University, collected ​by Professor Pierce from the last triennial catalogue, it is clearly demonstrated that the excess of deaths for the first ten years after graduation is found in that portion of the class of inferior scholarship. Every one who has seen the curriculum knows that where Æschylus and political economy injure one, late hours and rum-punches use up a dozen, and two little fingers are heavier than the loins of Euclid. Dissipation is a sure destroyer, and every young man who follows it is as the early flower exposed to an untimely frost. Those who have been inveigled into the path of vice are named legion. A few hours' sleep each night, high living and plenty of 'smashes' make war upon every function of the body. The brain, the heart, the nerves, the lungs, the liver, the spine, the limbs, the bones, the flesh and every part and faculty are overtasked and weakened by the terrific energy of passion loosened from restraint, until, like a dilapidated mansion, the 'earthly house of this tabernacle' falls into ruinous decay. Fast young men, right about!"

So it is equally possible that it is not always study which breaks down young women. Looking down my somewhat narrow vista of the world, I find, as a general rule, those women of the largest and most liberal education after a "man's method" (if Dr. Clarke chooses so to ​call a method which means consecutiveness and thoroughness) are those women who enjoy the best health and are the most active and useful members of the family and of society. On the other hand, those women who are useless through a feminine invalidism are those who would scout the idea of associating with men in study or rational intercourse, or anywhere else except in the lightest, loosest, most frivolous society. If they have any education at all, it has been obtained at the most feminine of female seminaries, where superficiality was all that was attempted; but no education has been the rule, and their chosen literature not often above the plane of the sensational weeklies.

There can scarcely be a doubt that the greatest invalidism among women is found, not among the studious, but among the devotees of fashion. These women may or may not have been educated. Their invalidism is not due to over-study, but to the dissipations of society.

Let us go back to our girl just budding into womanhood. She has hitherto been free and untrammeled, but now she is a young lady. ​She must be put into corsets to give her a good shape. She must wear trailing robes to give her dignity. Her corsets pinch her and cramp her and prevent the full development and free play of her organs, the digestive, the nervous and the reproductive. She gets dyspepsia and headache. Her face flushes. The natural instinct for exercise which puts the blood in motion, so excites the system, beyond its power of endurance, underneath the terrible straitjacket of this corset, that she at once becomes subject to palpitation of the heart and hysteria. That which would have contributed to make a magnificent womanhood is perverted and becomes its curse. And the parents say, "It is such a critical time with her, and all is going wrong." "Critical" fudge! Let Nature have fair play, and she is perfectly capable of managing the child without repressing physical manifestations of activity or checking mental ones. She tries to study, but she cannot. It is not the "boy's education," but the corset, that is breaking her down. The headache, the dyspepsia, the nervous paroxysms, are so many ​protests of nature against the compressment and confinement—in direct words, against the unnaturalness of her life. It is even worse for her now than though she had been subjected to a "girl's training" from her babyhood up. She would become a full-developed woman, with perfect capability for endurance of all natural burdens; but in the superfluity of life which bounds through her veins there is an ever-raging rebellion against the false modes of existence with which she is surrounded, and she soon becomes an invalid of the most unmanageable type. Does not every one know am telling the truth in this matter? I am giving an exact description of a companion of my daughters, who makes excellent promise of becoming an exemplification of Dr. Clarke's pet theory of the evils of a "boy's education" for girls, whose parents have already forbidden her to indulge in the least exercise, and have sent word to her teacher that she is not to study too hard, but who has nothing in the world the matter with her but tight-lacing.

Dr. Clarke admits, rather reluctantly, it seems ​to me, that there may be other causes besides improper modes of education for producing ill-health in young girls:

"We live in the zone of perpetual pie and doughnut; and our girls revel in these unassimilable abominations. Much also may be credited to artificial deformities strapped on the spine or piled on the head, much to corsets and skirts, and as much to the omission of clothing where it is needed as to excess where the body does not require it."

But he goes on as though he did not believe his own admission, or, rather, as though he did not expect to make it, as the following quotation precedes the last one:

"To a large extent our present system of educating girls is the cause of this pallor and weakness. How our schools, through their methods of education, contribute to this unfortunate result, and how our colleges that have undertaken to educate girls like boys—that is, in the same way—have succeeded in intensifying the evils of the schools, will be pointed out in another place."

The greater mortality of girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen to which he refers can be easily traceable to other things than ​education. I do not need to remind the intelligent reader that a large amount of weakness and suffering in both sexes results directly from improper habits in eating and drinking. The "zone of perpetual pie and doughnut" of which Dr. Clarke speaks has far more to answer for than the zone of perpetual, unremitted study. Over-stimulating, innutritive and unhealthful food deranges the stomach, impoverishes the blood, and as a necessary result weakens the brain and disorders the nervous system and all the organs of the body. I am not one of those people who recommend a bran-mash as the most desirable food for human beings and horses alike; but as long as fine flour is the basis of the food of boys and girls—as long as rich pie and cake, strong meats, tea and coffee and not infrequently wines and even stronger liquors form the food of the young and are indulged in at all sorts of irregular periods—they will fail in health and strength, energy and endurance, as they grow older. Their brains will weaken, and they will lose both physical and mental stamina, and in conse​quence fall behind in the race of life, or perish altogether.

There is one prolific cause of ill-health among girls which Dr. Clarke does not refer to at all, or at least only under a general head and in a single sentence as "modern social customs," which is just the reverse in its nature and effects of that system of education against which he argues so strenuously. It is the social life of the young girl in America. From earliest young ladyhood—in our large cities and at our watering-places it begins from earliest childhood—the girl is introduced to all the follies and dissipations of fashionable society. She is allowed to keep late hours; is encouraged in extravagant, unhealthful and immodest modes of dressing; meets without hindrance or check of any sort members of the other sex, not under the healthful stimulus of the school which awakens and excites the higher and loftier faculties and emotions, but under circumstances which develop their sexual natures prematurely and unnaturally, bringing an early bloom presaging an early decay. The young girl who ​cannot possibly keep up with a young man in the class at school will spend the midnight hour in revelry, in a heated and vitiated air, and fairly out-dance him. Clasped in each other's arms, cheek to cheek and breath mingling with breath, every sensuous feeling of both young man and young woman is perniciously stimulated. Added to this, the girl's life of inaction at home, irregular and insufficient sleep and the stimulus of sensational literature of the Ouida and Rhoda Broughton type will early develop her into a sexual monster unfit for wifehood or motherhood. I am thankful for the sake of future generations that fashion causes her to shirk, as far as she may, the responsibilities of motherhood. I am not describing exceptional cases; I am depicting what is the life of a majority of our girls in a greater or less degree, whatever their social station. The young man of to-day is spendthrift of his manhood in drunkenness and profligacy. The young woman, in irregular hours, insufficient sleep, improper food, pernicious modes of dress and often wanton behavior, wastes her woman​hood away until she is but a pitiful caricature of what she should be.

In view of all these crying evils of our age, a physician comes forward, and speaking ex cathedrá, says that it is because our girls are educated like boys that the sex is retrograding and the race degenerating. Can he not see that the only hope for them lies in putting them through the same mental drill, without intermission or remission, as is considered best for the other sex? Does he not know that there is an energy in girlhood that will not be repressed, that will always indulge in some sort of activity? It is in the girl's very nature, having been implanted there at her birth by the wise mother of us all, who knew far better than doctors what she was about, who never calls on her daughters to rest, and who through this surplus energy spurs them on every moment toward something—something? Shall it be study? Shall it be fashionable folly? Take away a girl from her lessons entirely through this susceptible and active age, and do you not see—have you not seen in a thousand cases—​you give her permission and opportunity—nay, compel her through the very activity of her nature—to fix her whole soul on flowers and ribbons, three-buttoned gloves and jewelry? A girl at this age never does anything by halves. It is the time for a life-choice with her, and what is chosen is chosen. She will throw all her energies into flirtation and turn out a coquette of the first water. Or, if she have not strength of character to do any of these wholesale things, she will fritter away her time in small nothings, and so fix herself in the habit of inactivity that when her years of enforced rest are passed she cannot be aroused to effort of any sort. It is a significant fact that in the table of statistics of the lunatic asylum before referred to the highest list of insane after those previously quoted were women, seven in number, who had nothing to do ("no occupation" the table called it). The number for the whole time from this cause was 135 men and 509 women—a majority of the latter sufficient, I should think, to warrant immediate remedial measures being taken. As has already ​been stated, only four males and females, all told, are recorded in this report as having during the same extended period of years become insane through excessive study. Thus it will be seen Dr. Clarke has not looked far enough or deep enough for the causes of the evils he deplores.

If the suspension of study is to be only temporary—the three or six days a month suggested—does our author not know that these hours of repose will, nine cases out of ten, be spent in the reading of some foolish and exciting romance that will do more harm to both the girl's physical and moral natures than could the closest application to study? Or if a watchful mother baulk this possibility, an active girl will so fret and chafe at the enforced inaction for which she feels no need that her nerves will suffer in consequence.

Nature does not call for this proposed rest. A healthy, normally developed girl feels no need of it whatever. She will laugh at the doctor for telling her she ought to take it, and grow restless and unmanageable at any attempt ​to enforce the recommendation. Now, it seems to me that Nature, who has been so wise and careful in most matters which concern the sexual functions, can be safely trusted in this. She says that the catamenia is not a disease in woman. If all her laws have been fully obeyed—that is, if the two sexes have received a coequal and like education up to the point of puberty—the sister can walk beside her brother without tiring and without faltering, and he will have to look sharp if she do not step up to the goal ahead of him. This stock of surplus energy is saved especially for the emergencies of motherhood, and it ought not to show exhaustion in any lesser contingency. The principal is safe till then; the interest alone will carry the girl surely and triumphantly through maidenhood.

In the chapter "Chiefly Clinical," to which I have already referred, we are given the example of a young girl who, entering a female seminary in the possession of excellent health, was obliged twice to leave it on account of this health failing her, and finally graduated an in​valid. Her menstrual flow became deranged through standing at recitations. In this case several facts are given, any number omitted. She went to school, studied unremittingly, stood at recitations, graduated an invalid. Dr. Clarke does not tell us whether she laced even moderately, whether she wore her skirts suspended from her hips, whether she allowed herself sufficient exercise and sufficient sleep. Very possibly the doctor knew nothing about these points himself, yet they are all most important ones; and until the reader is enlightened on them it seems unreasonable to ask him to accept the doctor's conclusions.

With a very full personal experience in the matter which allows me, on this point at least, to speak as authoritatively as the doctor himself—if not more so, as I am a woman and he is not—I will venture to assert that this girl's skirts were all bound somewhat tightly around her waist, hanging there without any support whatever from her shoulders. If this was the case—and I have but little doubt of it—it is sufficient to account for all the trouble she ex​perienced; the only wonder is she didn't suffer more. I know a young woman who performs the menstrual function naturally and healthfully is perfectly able to stand on her feet all day long without the slightest inconvenience or injury to herself. Remember, I am speaking from personal experience in this matter. I am far from being a normally healthy woman myself. I have run the gamut of female weaknesses, and have been able to trace every one of them back to its original cause, which was in no case from standing, except as I did so with improper arrangement of clothing, although I stood upon my feet at least ten hours a day for five years of my life, and scorned a seat when it was offered me by my male companions, who were only too glad to avail themselves of one whenever opportunity offered. In fact, I could endure standing better than they. I felt less fatigue. My weaknesses dated back to causes originating before this period of standing, and the last of these five years was signalized by the nearest approach to perfection in health I have ever enjoyed.

​If a mother wishes to weaken and enfeeble her daughter and make her a periodical invalid through life, to the inconvenience and discomfort of all connected with her, let her insist upon this periodic remission from labor and study and this enforced idleness. Nature, though perfectly to be depended upon when left to take her own course, is very easily perverted; and the girl who begins by imagining. she is sick or ought to be at such times will end by being really so. Action brings strength, inaction weakness, in the muscles of the sexual organs as well as in all others.

The girl who has had the right training in infancy and childhood may, "barring disease or infirmity, be punctual in attendance upon the hours of recitation and upon all other duties in their season and order;" this may be required of her "continuously, in spite of ennui, inclement weather or fatigue;" "there is no week in the month or day in the week or hour in the day when it is a physical necessity to relieve her from standing or from studying, from physical effort or mental labor;" "the chapel-bell ​may safely call her to morning prayer from New Year to Christmas, with the assurance that, if the going does not add to her stock of piety, it will not diminish her stock of health;" "in short, that she will develop health and strength, blood and nerve, intellect and life, by a regular, uninterrupted and sustained course of work. And all this is justified by both experience and physiology."

This is a quotation from Dr. Clarke, only I have substituted "she" and "her" in the place of "he" and "his."

She may even stand during the morning prayers, if that is an absolute requirement of college discipline; though really I cannot see, if there are girls whom it might injure to stand—and as all girls are not in perfect health, perhaps there are—why the college to which they pay their fees should not go to the small expense of providing them seats, and thus obviating that difficulty. These seats, sufficiently comfortable for the purpose, certainly would not cost the two millions of dollars which Dr. Clarke mentions as requisite to make Har​vard College equally available to girls and boys.

As all girls are not perfect specimens of health owing to causes already enumerated, I do not hesitate to admit that some of them would find the rigid and unremitting exercise and study I have described as possible to the normally developed girl somewhat severe upon them. In view of this fact, it is possible and practicable that they should take the partial physical and mental rest which such girls indulge themselves in now, under the existing systems of education, without in the least compromising their standing in their classes or retarding the progress of those classes.

Again, in the matter of standing at recitations, I cannot see why that also is not easily arranged. It is something I have never seen done in any school or college, and I learn for the first time, in reading Dr. Clarke's book, that such a thing is in general practice. I think it would be well—not to forbid girls going to school at all, or at best only three weeks in a month—to simply adopt the more ​sensible plan of substituting sitting for standing. This standing is a grave matter no doubt when we wish to give invalids a chance; but it is so easily remedied I for one should never I have thought of writing a book on the matter, and on its account attacking the whole system of co-education.

But I am forgetting our clinical cases.

Number two is a young actress who, spurred on by ambition and a commendable desire to excel in her profession, overtaxed muscle and brain in her calling. Dr. Clarke says "she worked steadily on in a man's way," and the result was invalidism. For a girl of fifteen to begin and work steadily on in a "man's way" and expect to retain health and strength is something truly surprising. No boy of that age could have done it, and kept it up for ten or fifteen years. It would have been simply impossible. So I think this case rather argues in favor of the superior powers of steady and prolonged endurance in woman—endurance overtaxed at last, to be sure.

Number three is a case similar to the first, ​only this time it is a clerk instead of a student, and the question of education seems to drop out altogether. The evils here resulted from standing merely. Still, the same questions might be put as in the first instance in regard to heavy skirts, lacing, etc., before the reader need feel obliged to accept the doctor's conclusions.

Number four was a student in Vassar College, whose case seems to present arguments against the injudicious use of the gymnasium for girls. Though the doctor is chary of the relative facts, we may accept the case as he represents it, and admit that girls should at certain periods be excused from the exercises of the gymnasium—something easily accomplished under the management of a judicious female teacher—without maintaining separate colleges for the two sexes, or the entire temporary withdrawal from studies which do not involve physical exercise.

Number five graduated at twenty-one years of age with high honor and apparent good health. But "Just at this time, however, the ​catamenial function began to show signs of failure of power. No severe or even moderate illness overtook her. She was subjected to no unusual strain," etc., etc. He goes on to tell how her health gradually failed her until finally she became a confirmed invalid, and was at last consigned to an asylum. As all this occurred after she had left school and begun the life of a young lady at home, would it not be well to question what that life was and what its probable effect upon her, before we conclude that it was a course of education passed through successfully and in perfect comfort which caused her failing health?

Number six is a repetition of the last case in all its leading features. In both cases the evils came after school-life had been passed successfully. Is there not a deeper lesson than that the doctor would teach us to be read in these two cases? If prolonged and unremitting study was injuring them, why did they not discover it during the time of this study? They did not discover it, because there was no such thing to discover. It furnished the beneficial ​stimulus which kept them up to the mark of womanly health and activity. When that stimulus was removed, they, probably being, as Dr. Clarke admits, both of them of superior intellectual endowments, fell into the vapid, inane life of American young ladyhood. They found in this life nothing to satisfy their mental needs. They were not to be contented with the tinsel and glitter of society life. No career was open to them. Their energies were forced back upon themselves, and they pined and became invalids because they had nothing else to do. I have seen it. I should surely have felt it if fate had placed me in similar circumstances. It is this accumulating and wasting energy that is causing the unrest among the young women of the present day. It behooves those who have permitted women to learn the alphabet to say whether she shall be allowed to make any use of that alphabet. Some of these young women cry out in bitterness of spirit, "What shall we do?" Others keep silence, and taking their fate in their own hands, seek for occupation in trade or profession hitherto forbidden them. ​Still others who find from any cause this course impossible to them pine away and finally go mad. There would more young women go mad for the same reason if there were more of them with brains. Luckily or unluckily, brains are no plentier in this sex than in the other, and so our lunatic asylums are kept from being overcrowded.

If these young ladies had turned their attention to law, to physics or to theology, and studied as unremittingly as they pleased, so far as daily study is concerned, allowing themselves necessary exercise, recreation and sleep, which men and women equally require, they would never have found their way into the doctor's note-book and thus served to point a moral.

I think I could accurately describe the feelings and emotions which preceded and accompanied their invalidism, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction, the morbidness which finally began to creep over them, the uneasiness, the irritableness, the melancholy amounting to monomania, and the finally positive invalidism. Every woman who has ever "been there" ​knows all about it. Even a printing-office life, with its ten hours a day of standing—anything which furnished occupation and had a definite purpose—might have saved them. Or if they had been obliged to work for a living, it is all the same thing.

Number seven is too indefinitely described. The doctor states that she attempted to "compass man's intellectual attainment in a man's way, and died in the effort." Now, as we do not know the facts of the case, we may conjecture that her intellectual efforts were united with little physical exercise, and not sufficient sleep to counterbalance mental effort and give time and opportunity for brain tissue to form. If so, she tried to "compass man's intellectual attainment" in an idiot's way, and died.

Here Dr. Clarke's own note-book gives out, and he is obliged to borrow that of a brother physician to find cases with which to complete his chapter.

Number eight sank into a low state of health after graduation, which proves nothing for Dr. Clarke's theories and much for mine.

​Number nine "was very ambitious to sustain her reputation, and studied hard out of school, was slow to learn, but had a retentive memory, could seldom be induced to go to parties, and when she did go, studied while dressing and on the way, was assigned extra tasks at school because she performed them so well, was a fine, healthy girl in appearance, but broke down permanently at the end of the second year, and is now a victim of hysteria and depression." A clear case of over-study which would break down boy and girl alike.

Number ten, of a nervous organization, lost her health in school, and is now an inmate of an asylum, subject to hysteria and depression. Very probable. But how about tight-lacing, hanging skirts, food, exercise, and all the rest upon which a girl's good or bad health so much depends?

Dr. Clarke admits that many girls "break down after the excitements of school-life have passed away." Just what I claim. "For sexual reasons they cannot compete with boys, whose out-door habits still further increase the ​difference in their favor." I deny the "sexual reasons." It is for reasons of dress, and habits and customs, and especially for being debarred from that out-door life which the doctor admits works most favorably in the case of boys. Ah! out-of-door habits are everything to men and women, and especially to the student. To him or to her the fresh air brings the very elixir of life. For every hour spent in study, if a perfect equilibrium is to be obtained, at least half an hour should be spent in the open air, though one may possess tolerable health without so much as this.

Now, all these cases prove nothing to the candid mind against a like education of boys and girls. They do prove that girls have broken down and died of over-study, and possibly other bad habits. But until it can be proved that young men do not break down from similar causes, the argument against co-education is worthless.

There is one grave matter that Dr. Clarke never so much as hints at, and which is really a delicate point to touch. But in an earnest, ​thorough and candid investigation of all the causes of ill-health among young women, this one cannot be passed over in complete silence. It has been more than hinted that dissipated and profligate habits are often the cause of the weakness and debility which the male student lays to over-study. Every physician, and every man and woman of extended reading, knows that solitary vice is still oftener the cause of the constitutional breaking up of the same sex. Nor can it be denied that it makes fearful ravages among the other, though, judging from the reports of our lunatic asylums, the insane from this cause are in the proportion of more than 50 males to 1 female. All the evils which Dr. Clarke affixes upon identical education of the sexes may be, every one of them, produced by this vice, which is not so uncommon among the young girls of the land as innocent and ignorant persons may believe. I do not wish to brand young American womanhood with shame; but if any one doubts my words, let him ask the opinion of those who have had broad and extended experience in girls' schools. ​I will not ask him to believe all he is told. I do not myself. I place these people in the same category with physicians, believing them liable to unintentionally magnify the evils with which they become familiar, and in their remembrance of the guilty ones forgetting the innocent. But he will learn enough and believe enough to make him, when he sees a girl paling and wasting, and becoming nervous and hysterical, and failing to become developed in womanly physical characteristics without any apparent cause, to at least scrutinize her conduct in this particular very closely before he heedlessly throws the blame upon any system of education whatever. If this were a book of morals or physiology, I should have more to say on this point, and should try in some measure to exculpate the victims of this vice; but I have already said enough for my present purpose. I shall refer briefly to the matter in a future page.

I have left my imaginary young girl so many pages back that I scarcely know where to find her. Let us suppose that she is subjected to ​all the modern feminine abominations invented for the express purpose of rendering young girls attractive and "lady-like," and very probably she will find it difficult to keep even step with her brother. He would not march off so free and independent if he were fettered hand and foot, his stomach cramped, his lungs not allowed breathing-room, the most important organs of his body crowded out of place, and a heavy weight around the hips dragging him down. And then possibly, some rainy morning, if he were decked out in all a girl's usual toggery, he might be obliged to stay at home, not because the rain would hurt him, but it might penetrate through his cloth or kid gaiters, soak and drabble his thin, trailing dress and ruin his gossamer bonnet. Rather than be caught in such a plight, he would prefer to stay at home. If Dr. Clarke really desires to see the ladies on time at chapel exercises in all weathers, let him propose to them a more sensible mode of dress which shall be comfortable and serviceable, rain or shine. The wonder to me is that under the circumstances girls accomplish ​as much as they do; it is the strongest evidence of their superior powers of endurance.

Let us imagine that our girl has been the victim of a vain and frivolous mother, or a mother after Dr. Clarke's own heart, who, to show her superiority over nature, decides to treat her daughter as a "female" rather than as a human being, and has managed to bring her to puberty dwarfed and delicate. For such girls Dr. Clarke's suggestions are no doubt timely; they are in their normal, or rather in their abnormal, condition invalids. Of course they cannot stand or walk or study. The only trouble is that yielding to this invalidism will surely confirm it, and make it a habit which a lifetime cannot outgrow.