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[p. 561] CHAPTER XVII

I. Differences of the sexes in strength, mortality, brain, senses, agility, mental traits, crime, disposition, variability, conservation, progressive sexual divergence. II. Medical and biological views in other lands and in this country since Dr. E. H. Clarke. III. Health and its tests -- Danger of overdrawing reserves. IV. Marriage of educated women -- latest statistics or nubility rates of male and female colleges -- Comparisons and lessons. V. Fecundity in earlier generations in America -- Sterility in this and other countries, and its causes and stages -- Best age for parenthood in mother and in father -- Effects of over-nutrition and mental strain -- Statistics of children of graduates of girls' colleges compared with rate of reproduction of male graduates -- Dangers of late marriages and of only children -- Fertility as a test of civilization -- Individuation versus genesis -- Dominance of the instinct for marriage and motherhood in normal women and substitutes provided for it. VI. Education -- New English opinions -- Coeducation of various degrees -- Its advantages and dangers for both boys and girls -- The age of eighteen -- Changes to the dollish, disappointed, and devotee type -- Dangers of aping man-made education and of complacency -- Arrest in the first stages of a movement just begun -- Training for spinsterhood and self-support versus for maternity -- Hints and general outlines of a higher education for girls based on their nature and needs and not on convention or the demands of feminists -- Branches of such a curriculum -- Methods -- Hygiene.

I. The Biological and Anthropological Standpoint. -- Our modern knowledge of woman represents her as having characteristic differences from man in every organ and tissue, as conservative in body and mind, fulfilling the function of seeing to it that no acquired good be lost to mankind, as anabolic rather than katabolic, or disposed to assimilate or digest on a higher plane, as normally representing childhood and youth in the full meridian of its glory in all her dimensions and nature so that she is at the top of the human curve from which the higher super-man of the future is to evolve, while man is phylogenetically by comparison a trifle senile, if not decadent. Her sympathetic and ganglionic system is relatively to the cerebro-spinal more dominant. Her whole soul, conscious and [p. 562] unconscious, is best conceived as a magnificent organ of heredity, and to its laws all her psychic activities, if unperverted, are true. She is by nature more typical and a better representative of the race and less prone to specialization. Her peculiar organs, while constituting a far larger proportion of her body than those of man, are hidden and their psychic reverberations are dim, less-localized, more all-pervasive. She works by intuition and feeling; fear, anger, pity, love, and most of the emotions have a wider range and greater intensity. If she abandons her natural naïveté and takes up the burden of guiding and accounting for her life by consciousness, she is likely to lose more than she gains, according to the old saw that she who deliberates is lost. Secondary, tertiary, and quaternary sex qualities are developed far beyond her ken or that of science, in a way that the latter is only beginning to glimpse. While she needs tension that only the most advanced modern psychology sees to be sexual at root, we shall never know the true key to her nature until we understand, how the nest and the cradle are larger wombs; the home, a larger nest; the tribe, state, church, and school, larger homes and irradiations from it. Biological psychology already dreams of a new philosophy of sex which places the wife and mother at the heart of a new world and makes her the object of a new religion and almost of a new worship, that will give her reverent exemption from sex competition and reconsecrate her to the higher responsibilities of the human race, into the past and future of which the roots of her being penetrate; where the blind worship of mere mental illumination has no place; and where her real superiority to man will have free course and be glorified and the ideals of the old matriarchates again find embodiment in fit and due degree.

Patrick [1] has summarized the salient points of difference between men and women as follows: The latter are shorter and lighter save for a brief period at about thirteen, as we have shown in Chapter I. Her adult height to that of man is as about 16 to 17, and her weight as 9 to 10. Her form is rounder, she has more fat, more water, less muscle; her dyna-[p. 563]mometer strength foots up about two-thirds that of man; her trunk is relatively slightly longer; the pelvic bend makes her a little less erect; the head is less upright, and her gait slightly less steady; her plantar arch is flatter; her forefinger is relatively longer than the other three; the thyroid larger; the lung capacity relatively less; the blood has less red corpuscles; her bones a little less specific gravity; she is more anemic, and her pulse is faster. In the United States about 105 boys are born to 100 girls, but through life the male death-rate is higher, so that in nearly every land, after the first year or two, there are more females than males. She is more liable to whooping-cough, scarlet fever, phthisis, diphtheria, but resists diseases best and dies less often than man at nearly every age. Ballod [2] shows that the average increased duration of life in the last decennium is for women and not for men, and that large cities and factories tend to shorten average male longevity. Hegar (Geschlechtstrieb) concludes that before forty, married, and after forty, unmarried, women are more liable to die, but that married outlive unmarried men. He is more prone than she to rheumatism, cancer, brain troubles, sudden death from internal or external causes, can less survive severe surgical operations and grows old more rapidly; his hair is gray earlier and he is more prone to loss of sight, hearing, memory, senile irritability, to deformities and anomalies, is less hardy and less resembles children. Woman's skull is smaller, especially at the base, but large in circumference at the crown, which is flatter and more angular; her forehead is more vertical; the glabella and superorbital ridges are less, as are the occipital and mastoid prominences and the parietal prominence; her face is smaller and a little lower, and she is slightly more prognathic. Her absolute brain weight to that of man is about as 9 to 10, but her smaller size makes her brain about equal, if not heavier, in weight. The lower centers are larger in women, and in nearly all these respects women differ less among themselves than do men. Martin and Clouston found the female brain slightly better irrigated by blood, especially in the occipital regions, although the number of its corpuscles as compared to those of man was as 9 [p. 564] to 10. The anterior regions of the brain were best supplied in man. The specific gravity of the gray matter of all parts of the brain was less in women, but in the white matter there was no difference. The female brain has more bilateral symmetry, i. e., its right and left hemispheres are more alike. In all save the occipital regions the male has more secondary gyri and probably the convolutions are deeper. In most forms of lunacy the male brain is most wasted at death, and four men to one woman die of general paralysis between thirty and fifty. Women are more often insane, but men most often die of insanity, while women who die in lunatic asylums more often die of body diseases. Mental stimulus, according to Warner, more readily lowers their general nutrition. Möbius,[3] on the other hand, who sees danger in the emancipation movement of the feminists, thinks that the fact that they have accomplished so little in the world of art and science is not due to subjection but to inferiority. He lays stress on Rödinger's results, viz., that in infants the convolutions about the Sylvian fissures are simpler, with fewer bends, that the island of Keil is smaller, less convex, and simpler, as is the third frontal gyrus, and the whole parietal lobe is inferior in females at all ages to that of men, these being the portions most closely connected with mentation. The sexes have the same convolutions, but of different sizes, and the same powers, but in differing degrees.

Women seem slightly more obtuse in sight, touch, and hearing, and less sensitive to pain. Concerning taste discriminations, investigators differ. Ellis and Galton conclude that she has less sensibility but more affectibility and nervous irritability. Only about four-tenths of one per cent of women are color blind as against three and a half per cent of men. In visual discriminations in the indirect field of vision, she excels, indicating that the retinal function is less focused in the fovea. With her eyes fixed straight ahead on the streets she observes persons and things farther right and left than man can do Bryan found that in rapid movements, she excelled from five to sixteen, except at about thirteen, while in precision boys slightly excel. Gilbert concludes that boys tap fastest at every [p. 565] age, and that reaction time is less at all ages for boys. Ellis concludes that in dexterity, as shown in cotton spinning, woolen weaving, cigar and cigarette making, and other fine work, man excels where opportunity and numbers are equal. In quick reading, where the sense of a paragraph is to be grasped in minimal time and with equal knowledge of the subject, woman excels in quick apprehension of wholes. Women go in flocks, and in social matters are less prone to stand out with salient individuality. They are more emotional, altruistic, intuitive, less judicial, and less able to make disinterested and impersonal judgment. Girls are most likely to know their environment, while the boys oftenest show surprising gaps in knowledge of what is right about them and unexpected acquaintance with something afar, special or unusual.

Miss Thompson [4] found from laboratory tests that men excel women in strength, rapidity, and in rate of fatigue, and slightly in accuracy, but the latter are superior in new motor combinations; that men have the lower sensory threshold for light, and women for distinguishing two points on the skin, in sweet, salt, sour, and bitter taste, in smell, color, and pain by pressure, and in discriminative pitch and color. Men excel in distinguishing lifted weights, sweet, sour, and bitter. Women excel in memory. This writer becomes feministic in crediting abstract deductions and taking Lourbet's jesting remark that the smaller and more agile male cell might better represent the female and the larger ovum the male, seriously, and defies Weismannism by ascribing sexual differences of type of mental action to the differences of the influences that surround the sexes in early years.

Her thought is more concrete and individual and she is more prone to associations in space, and man in time. Men are more prone to bring things under general rules and with regard to symmetry. Her logical thought is slower, but her associations quicker than those of man, she is less troubled by inconsistencies, and has less patience with the analysis involved in science and invention.

Of 483,517 patents recorded in Washington up to October,[p. 566] 1892, 3,458 were by women. In education men have made most of the reforms, while recent developments show that they can excel even in dressmaking and cooking. Woman has rapid tact in extricating herself from difficulties; girls speak quicker than boys; old women are likely to be talkative, old men glum; men progress most after graduation; women are very prone to lose accomplishments and special culture and training, are more punctual in school and college, more regular in attendance, and in higher grades have the best marks, but vary less from the average; they excel in mental reproduction rather than in production; are superior in arts of conversation, more conservative and less radical; their vasomotor system is more excitable; they are more emotional, blush and cry easier; are more often hypnotized; quicker to take suggestions; have most sympathy, pity, charity, generosity, and superstitions. Male crime to female is as 6 to 1, woman exceeding only in poisoning, domestic theft, and infanticide. She is about as superior to man in altruism as she is behind him in truth-telling, being more prone to ruse and deception. She is more credulous and less skeptical, more prone to fear and timidity, and has greater fidelity, dependence, reverence, and devotion. She dresses for adornment rather than use. In savage and civilized life, her body is more often mutilated and she is more primitive. Her hair is long; she is more prone to wear ornaments which show wealth rather than to dress solely for protection or concealment; is still fond of feathers, skin, and fur, flowing garments, and partial exposure of person, so that she betrays rank and wealth more often than men. She still pinches her waist and feet; uses pins, powders, and perfumes, neck ornaments, beads, overshoes, and sometimes shoes that are not rights and lefts; is more subject to fashion; her work is far less specialized than that of man and less reduced to mechanism or machinery. Man is best adapted to the present; woman is more rooted in the past and the future, closer to the race and a more generic past. Thus again, in very many of the above traits, woman is far nearer childhood than man, and therefore in mind and body more prophetic of the future as well as reminiscent of the past.[p. 567]

Professor Pearson [5] condemns as a superstition the current idea of the greater variability of man than of woman. He first eliminates everything characteristic of sex and all that is pathological, and focuses on size alone. Even color blindness, which is characteristic of sex, he sets aside. By so doing and measuring the limited number of persons, he finds slightly more variation in females than in males and so excoriates the common belief that the reverse is true. That his method is profoundly mistaken, if it does not indeed prove the contrary, will, I think, be plain to all biologists. Some have thought that every variation from the parental type was slightly abnormal. Certainly, normal and pathological shade into each other by imperceptible degrees, and Professor Pearson merely eliminates those classes of facts on which the whole question rests. As Ellis [6] well says, the real question of organic variational tendencies is untouched. If in size woman is more variable, it may be due to her less severe struggle for existence, or to the fact that male children being larger make greater demands on the mother and, therefore, have harder conditions to surmount. The biometric method, which Pearson so ably represents, miscarries here because the preliminary basis in the selection of facts is fundamentally wrong.

W. K. Brooks,[7] approaching the subject from the standpoint of biology, characterized the female body, instincts, and habits as conservative, devoted to keeping what has been acquired by successive generations as new layers of snow are added to glaciers. Thus woman is best in acting and judging in ordinary matters; man in those that are extraordinary. The male is the agent of variation and progress, and transmits variations best, so that perhaps the male cell and sex itself originated in order to produce variation. Influence is more potent than argument with women. An ideal or typical male is hard to define, but there is a standard ideal woman. Because her mind is, more than that of man, essentially an organ of heredity, we find that, although she may sometimes seem volatile and desultory, the fact that her processes seem to be unconscious emancipates her from nature less than is the case with man. Her thought is a mode of thinking. Brooks presents the following suggestive scheme: [p. 568]

II. The Medical Standpoint. -- Even the demands of the new-school hygiene now represented by so many experts, new journals, conferences, etc., have revealed no point of such wide divergence between doctors and current methods and ideals as in the education of adolescent girls. We have no space for even the outline of or history of this holy war, one of the most important of many that physiology and biology have had to wage with ignorance and well-entrenched custom, but must be content with sampling a few of the most representative medical opinions in chronological order since this issue was so fairly and opportunely raised. What follows in this section is immediately connected with Chapter VII.

Dr. Storer,[9] one of the first and most sagacious American writers in this field, urged that girls should be educated far more in body and less in mind, and thought delicate girls frequently ruined in both body and mind by school. He was not only one of the first to urge that surgery should be performed at the uterine ebb which affected the system even during pregnancy, but to hold that education should be regulated throughout with reference to monthly changes. An epoch, however, was marked by Dr. Clarke's [10] book in 1873, and the reply to it by Miss Brackett [11] and twelve other ladies eminent in the movement for the higher education of girls. The former was a not very scholarly, but a simple and sensible, plea by a practitioner of experience that woman's periods must be more respected. It appeared at the height of the movement to secure collegiate opportunities for girls, was suspected of being unofficially inspired by the unwillingness of Harvard College to receive them, and reached a seventeenth edition [p. 570] in a few years. The women who replied took very diverse views. To one it was an intrusion into the sacred domain of womanly privacy. To another it seemed insolent and coarse, an affront to the sex. To another it was only a sneer, not doing as men would be done by, for the vices of men were worse, twitting them of their sex, throwing sex in their teeth; "these things must not be thought of in this wise." One writer deplored that women had not said this for and of themselves, and advised that they study physiology, etc. On the whole, Dr. Clarke raised the most important issue in the history of female education, and his book is still a shibboleth of a woman's attitude on most questions pertaining to her sex and its so-called sphere. The misery of being a girl, said Byford,[12] consists in feeling at this age that she is prone to pain, depression of spirits, bears a badge of inferiority which must be endured, must wear corsets, pads, and long clothes that impede her movements and that must never be soiled or rumpled by free activity to which she was accustomed as a girl. Her studies are laid on her sensitive consciousness and her pride and self-respect prompt her to overwork. Girls' schools are governed too much, for girls need now not less but far more freedom than boys. Some parts of the body are clothed too thickly, and some too little for health. Nowhere in the world do men work so hard or girls and women do so little useful work or render so little real service to the community as in this country. Young men are often fastidious and unpractical, and are attracted by accomplishments that fall off and are lost soon after marriage, while they do not know how to seek or recognize what is useful, and thus defer matrimony as a too expensive luxury. In this self-imposed celibacy they become dangerous to the virtue of the debilitated if not degenerate girls in the community.

Dr. Beard [13] says, after sending many circulars and studying the returns they brought: "Nearly everything about the conduct of the schools was wrong, unphysiological and unpsychological, and they were conducted so as to make very sad and sorrowing the lives of those who were forced to attend [p. 571] them. It was clear that the teachers and managers of these schools knew nothing of and cared nothing for those matters relating to education that are of the highest importance, and that the routine of the schools was such as would have been devised by some evil deity who wished to take vengeance on the race and the nation. . . . Everything pushed in an unscientific and distressing manner, nature violated at every step, endless reciting and lecturing and striving to be first -- such are the female schools of America at this hour. The first signs of ascension or of declension in nations are seen in women. As the foliage of delicate plants first shows the early warmth of spring, and the earliest frosts of autumn, so the impressible, susceptive organization of woman appreciates and exhibits far sooner than that of man the manifestation of national progress or decay." Nathan Allen [14] urged that while in men everything depended upon bodily vigor, this was even more important for girls, for in them we were educating the race. The best balance for weak nerves or other organs was well-developed muscles, and in this at proper periods he saw the way of safety for the well and of salvation for the sickly. Stated and out-of-door and not excessive physical culture he thought had a normative influence upon the monthly function, and he, too, held to periodic remission of work for mind, heart, and muscles.

The current prejudices that menstruation is a disagreeable function or a badge of inferiority, Dr. Galippe [15] thinks arose from educational establishments for girls. The sentiment, which prevails in these schools, is that it is somewhat shameful and at least not worthy of serious and respectful consideration by well-bred minds. Instead of indicating her state to some person selected for that purpose and receiving from her the delicate, hygienic instruction and consideration needed, the pubescent girl conceals it and is left to herself, and metrorrhagia or anemia and often local states result which are simply pathetic. Girls do not complain of easily removable suffering, thinking often that pain is inseparable from [p. 572] this function, and take part in all the exercises of the school, both physical and mental, when they have crying need of all the highest functions of true motherhood to teach them the effects of fatigue and excitement, the need of rest, and proper regimen and toilet. It is vain to assume that because savages or peasants can live in a state of nature, that well-born girls at school can be thus abandoned. Civilization in some respects is an artificial state and needs new habits and functions because it involves greater susceptibility.

Dr. F. C. Taylor [16] presents some pertinent considerations as follows: Civilization is hard on woman, and constantly stimulates her beyond her strength, fires her with ambitions she can not realize, and robs her of the tranquillity she needs. Imperfect sexual hygiene is a prolific source of evil to the individual woman and to the race. If the latter deteriorates it will be through the degeneration of woman. In her, sex and its wider irradiations overshadow all else during her ripening period, is an ever-present influence controlling mind and body, and in old age is the glory of the declining day of life. If the sexual life is lowered or suppressed, a tonic needed for vigor in all directions is lost. Owing in part to the fact that her organs are internal and therefore less or later known, they are less often consciously connected with impressions that are indirectly if not directly sexual, and there is greater convertibility of emotions. Women can remain in what is really a suppressed semi-erotic state with never-culminating feeling, so scattered in their interests and enthusiasms that they can not fix their affections permanently. Particularly repressed molimina may become vicarious and issue in estheticism and all kinds of noble or ignoble interests. Women are sometimes led astray when their feelings are made especially delicate by bereavement, and on the other hand, excessive erotic sensations sometimes cause loss of power in the limbs. Unmarried women are, and ought to be, great walkers, but wives and mothers expend the same energy normally in other ways. Where the normal exercise of functions is unduly restrained, it finds, therefore, many other outlets. Dr. [p. 573] Taylor thinks, however, that the difference between boys and girls in learning self-abuse on account of the more obvious anatomy of the former is overestimated, and that the latter, more commonly than is thought, not only find their organs and use them improperly, but are more difficult to cure of this vice.

Clouston, in various articles and books, has expressed himself in very trenchant terms. Each generation, he premises, can use up more than its share of energy, and women have a peculiar power of taking out of themselves more than they can bear. All should carry a reserve to meet emergencies and not use up all their power, and thus rob future generations.[17] His conception is also that human life is divided into stages, each of which must be lived out in such a way as not to draw upon the later stages. We should ask what nature aims at in each period and surround each by its own ideal conditions, and see to it that in no stage we strive for what belongs to another later one. Again, any organ like the brain or reproductive parts, if overworked, may draw upon the vigor of others. Each individual stage and organ has just so much energy. We should strive sedulously to keep the mental back in all and especially in females, and not "spoil a good mother to make a grammarian." In the United States, Clouston thinks that most families have more or less nervous taint or disease; that heredity is weak because woman has lost her cue, although nature is benign and always tends to a cure if we have not gone too far astray. Adolescence is more important for girls than for boys. Science and learning are happily less likely to take a dominating hold of woman's nature, because they are not along the lines on which it was built. Clouston is fond of reminding us that none of Shakespeare's women were learned, that even Portia describes herself as "an unlettered girl, unschooled, unpractised." Most great men's mothers were women of strong mind, but not highly educated. Would their sons have been better, he asks, had the mothers been schooled? Would they have been really better companions for men, and is learning bought at the [p. 574] expense of any degree of cheerfulness, which is the best sign of health, not too costly? "There is no time or place of organic repentance provided by nature for sins of the schoolmaster." A man can work if he is one-sided or defective, but not so a woman. "If she is not more or less finished and happy at twenty-five, she will never be." Parents want children to work in order to tone down their animal spirits, and it almost seems to Clouston as if the devil invented the school for spite. He quotes approvingly Oliver Wendell Holmes, who refers to the "American female constitution which collapses just in the middle third of life and comes out vulcanized India-rubber, if it happens to live through the period when health and strength are most wanted," and thinks girls' brains should be put to grass for a few generations. Fun is to the mind what fat is to the body. A large part of study should be what to omit and skip and not to know. Possibly we may be developing an unique kind of girl, a different species. A true fully developed woman is very hard to mature, but when ripe can stand very much.

Thorburn [18] fears disproportion between the development of muscle and of nerve in women. Girls should do hardly any steady work for one year before and two after puberty. They can not work without peril for about one-fourth of the time, and should adjust themselves to this law of their nature and plan to lie fallow about a quarter of the time. Teachers and others should not wait to be asked before excusing them from their task, but should command it without request. Girls should cultivate the festina lente of poise and develop the dignity and the efficiency of going slow, but this should be in no wise construed as inimical to their education. This problem we shall not have solved until there is no more danger of college unfitting women to be wives than of its unfitting men to be husbands.

Most frequent among all the menstrual disorders of schoolgirls, Dr. Wilson [19] thinks, is dysmenorrhea. Next comes suppression, while [p. 575] menorrhagia is rare at this age. He urges more attention to physical development before puberty. Constipation, headache, sallowness, acne, leucorrhea, insomnia, perversity of appetite, dyspepsia, overtension of nerves, tea-ism, coffee-ism, cold feet, emotional strain, he finds amazingly prevalent in the schools. American girls come to this crisis without having known much control or restraint, and with their habits and actions almost entirely unsystematized. They appear rosy and healthy because energies, that should go to perfecting other parts and functions, have been diverted to cerebration. Influences from those about her tend to make her give up free and girlish sports and romping, and to feel herself a woman too suddenly. Her dress interferes with portal circulation, digestion, respiration, and favors displacement at a time when her entire system is most susceptible to disturbances, which it did not heed before. She is thrown on her own responsibility, is often among strangers, her emotional nature is excited by music and art. From childhood, she is petted, pampered, and spoiled, thought cute and cunning, can not submit to restraint, and often has a small body of misinformation about herself, which is far worse than ignorance. She is made egotistic and superficial, is distracted by the beginnings of many sorts of knowledge. She lays the foundation of invalidism at a time when she should become a mother, has a horror of maternity, partly instinctive and partly induced, hankers for pastry, sweets, and hot bread that insult and vex the stomach, and dreads the recurrence of periods which bring irritation and depression. She does not turn to her mother for care or advice, for unconscious instinct teaches her that there is no help from that source. Probably most American girls now have, Wilson thinks, more or less hereditary tendencies towards functional disorders, so that to inaugurate a proper hygiene that should lead to healthy and vigorous womanhood in most cases needs nothing less than medical supervision; while gynecologists agree in recognizing a steady increase of female troubles, as well as the increased use of drugs or patent nostrums, their own endeavors tend less to specific and more to general regimen.

The views of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell [20] are well known and have been often expressed. Woman, he holds, is physiologically other than man and no education can change her. No one knows woman who does not know sick woman. She takes to being a patient naturally and comfortably, although if long ill she warps morally. Her doctor must often read the riot act to a mob of emotions; must look beyond drugs, for she is prone to think three pills a day easier than diet or regimen. He must listen and sympathize with her ills and with the joy [p. 576] of convalescence in order to be of real use to her. He must recognize how prone nervous and feeble women are to crave pity and love power; how prone, like all who have not learned the great lesson of bearing pain, they are to some narcotic habit. Out-of-door life, the camp cure, sewing for its moral value, and all that pertains to regimen and psychic influence must be at her doctor's command.

Grant Allen [21] insists that there ought to be a woman question and movement, but it must accept the fact that most adult women will be wives and mothers. In any ideal community the greatest possible number of women must be devoted to maternity and marriage, and support by men must be assumed and not female celibacy. The accidental and exceptional must not be the rule or the goal. This is only a pis aller. It is not so much the unmarried minority that need attention as the mothers. We must not abet woman as a sex in rebelling against maternity, quarreling with the moon, or sacrifice wifehood to maidenhood. The whole question of sex must be reconsidered. This woman will never do, nor will she go as far as men in emancipating herself. He even goes so far as to suggest that, wives or not, we must have mothers. Men must be made more virile, women more feminine, and sex distinctions must be pushed to the uttermost. Woman must not be allowed to cramp her intellect or her waist. What seem to men feminine idiosyncrasies must be unfolded. She must be set free from her craven fear of the Grundian goddess. Her sexuality is in danger of enfeeblement. She eschews marriage often from the want of a normal physical impulse. Instead of the ideal of becoming a self-supporting spinster, she ought to be married at twenty-five and plan to be. It is a shame to any normal woman not to long to be a wife and mother, and not to glory in her femininity, or to prate of those who insist on the laws of nature "as traitors to their sex," and "casting sex in their teeth." Allen estimates that about six children per marriage are necessary to keep up the population, as more than one-half die before maturity. If the best abstain from child-bearing, then the population is kept up by the lowest. Savages make but little provision for their [p. 577] women, so that analogy would lead us to suppose with Comte that in the highest state women will care only for children, and men do all the work.

Le Bon [22] pleaded that the education we now give to girls consists of instruction that fits brains otherwise constructed, perverts womanly instincts, falsifies the spirit and judgment, enfeebles the constitution, confuses their moods concerning their duties and their happiness, and generally disequilibrates them. It charges the brain with too much information that is useless, fails to give what can be applied, and fits them neither for domesticity nor for gaining their livelihood. It makes them misconceive their role in society and in the family, and often jealous of man and at heart inimical to the social order, and threatens future degeneration of the race.

In a suggestive series of ten articles, Dr. James Crichton Browne [23] defies Weismannism if it mitigates the woe that impends to a land if mothers decay. Girls, he says, suffer far more change and instability at the onset of puberty than boys, and he deprecates sowing the tares of ambition for careers in girls. He finds headaches far too common among young girls from ten to seventeen; advocates the abolition of evening study; finds danger that the ovum and sperm cell may have their activity so reduced before meeting that the infant comes to life old and without a fair chance. Despite the average increase of life for men, and still more for women, during the last forty years, he finds that beyond middle life there is little reduction of death-rate and that wear-and-tear diseases are increased; that even cancer is perhaps coming to have a nervous element; that neurasthenia and functional nerve troubles are augmenting; he thinks all "voluminous states" of nerves or souls are harbingers of epilepsy and especially deplores the propensity to take short-sighted views seeking immediate causes ("the lobster salad did it") for the outcrops of troubles of long and perhaps of ancestral incubation.

He [24] also holds that differences between sexes are involved in every organ and tissue, and deprecates the present relentless [p. 578] zeal of intersexual competition, concerning the results of which it is appalling to speculate from a medical point of view. When the University of St. Andrews opened its theological department to woman, it was not a retrograde movement, because our ancestors did no such thing, but a downhill step fraught with confusion and disaster. He quotes with approval Huxley's phrase that "what has been decided among prehistoric protozoa can not be annulled by an act of Parliament." This is a condition that no senatus academicum can obliterate by pen strokes. In unicellular organisms the conjugating cells are alike, but forms become more and more dimorphic. As we go higher sexes diverge not only in primary and secondary sex characteristics, but in functions not associated with sex. Reciprocal dependence increases as does harmony, and each is in some respects higher and each lower. In union they are strong; in competition mutually destructive. Warner, he thinks, is right in saying that "mental stimulus applied to children lowers their general nutrition." Gastric troubles and anorexia scholastica increase, and all the abdominal viscera become more or less exhausted until often apathy passes into mild coma, "the cyclone of mania, the anti-cyclone of melancholia, the hurricane of morbid impulse, or the settled bad weather of moral perversion." Work is man's greatest enemy when he is worn out or fatigued. On this point he believes there is a growing consensus of opinion, although admitting that direct and trusty evidence is hard to obtain.

Valuable, too, is the observation [25] that women are prone from their physical constitution and their lives to desire what they have not, and for that reason alone they particularly need absorbing occupations, and are spoiled by idleness and vacuity of mind, which makes them either lazy, phlegmatic, and unambitious, or else restless. Their education should not aim to cultivate the thinking powers alone or chiefly. Woman's work is all-round work, but friendship between men and women is a great power, and intellectual oneness increases all the fruitions of married life. Men are at fault because they do not realize this possibility and are prone to be less [p. 579] interested in the minds than in the bodies of women. Love should be less haphazard and less purely sentimental, and happy marriages should be bulwarked by mental affinity, but this does not mean the higher education as now administered for women. Women are weaker in body and mind than men, but they can achieve great things even intellectually, and might take courage from examples like that of Darwin, who did much of his best work in years of such weakness that he could apply himself for only an hour or two a day. Some men, however, will perhaps always respond to the charm of weakness and even ignorance in women.

Edson [26] avers that if our race is to go on and up, no matter what our ideals, the animal basis must be kept pure and wholesome. >From 1880-'90 the birth-rate in the United States decreased from 36 per thousand inhabitants to 30, and Billings thinks the chief factor in this decline is the voluntary avoidance of child-bearing. From 1875-'85 in Massachusetts this decline was from 20.6 to 18.47. In the United States as a whole from 1860-'90 the birth-rate declined from 25.61 to 19.22. Many women are so exhausted before marriage that after bearing one or two children they become wrecks, and while there is perhaps a growing dread of parturition or of the bother of children, many of the best women feel that they have not stamina enough and are embarrassed to know what to do with their leisure. Perhaps there will have to be a "new rape of the Sabines," and if women do not improve, men will have recourse to emigrant wives, or healthy girls with stamina will have an advantage equal to that of pretty girls now.

Jankau [27] thinks that great suffering and even unhappy marriages are due to lack of knowledge of puberty and sex by teachers and youth, the essentials of which he seeks to supply in an illustrated 68-page book, which he would have the mother and not the father give to pubescent boys. In no way can she secure greater and more lasting gratitude than by very frankly stating normal facts and fully warning of dangers.[p. 580] Every youth, he asserts, indulges at least once in self-abuse, and it depends on his heredity, character, training, and instruction whether or not it becomes a confirmed habit. The symptoms and progress of gonorrhea, syphilis, chancre and its three stages, modes of treatment and even of preventive methods to be employed in intercourse are described; but in every case and stage the young sufferer must turn to his mother, if he has one, and then without delay to the physician, and must not be despised but treated with sympathy and pity. The more the father has himself sinned and suffered, the more severe and the less compassionate a counselor will he be.

Prof. E. Hegar [28] advises definite instruction in sexual hygiene for the pupils of the middle schools, based on demonstration on the cadaver; this he thinks would solemnize all the teaching in both anatomy and physiology necessary for the proper regimen, and check morbid direction of curiosity. Dr. W. Stekel, of Vienna, would have children watched by day, and especially by night, for a few years, and thinks that the sexes should never be taught in the same classes. This, too, Hegar seems to approve.

To prevent the seeds of mischief in girls at this most peculiarly sensitive age, Dr. Playfair [29] says, in substance, we must constantly bear in mind the highly emotional and sensitive nervous organization which distinguishes woman from man and affects the nature and progress of every disease to which she is subject, and especially those of the reproductive functions. Regimen during the settled establishment of the great function of menstruation determines whether she shall have stamina and powers of resistance, or perhaps, with the appearance of health, collapse to invalidism at every strain. The prime and alarming fault of the heads of high schools and colleges for girls is that they, consciously or unconsciously, assume the absolutely untenable theory that the sexual question is of secondary importance, and that there is little real distinction between girls and boys from fourteen to twenty. The distinction caused by the menstrual functions, says Dr. Playfair,[p. 581] is absolute and should be systematically attended to, while in fact the feeling of school-mistresses is directly antagonistic to every such admission. Their point of view is that there is no real difference; that what is good for one sex is good for the other; or if there is a difference, it is a relict of an evil past where woman has been cruelly denied many advantages open to man, and that identity of opportunity and occupation will open a new and happy era, when such differences as remain will vanish. Why is it then that the most characteristic diseases of girls, anemia and chlorosis, associated with menstrual disturbances, are almost never seen in boys? Physical exercise out of doors should be required, foe girls are often listless; muscular activity is the best antidote to the sentimentalism and morbid fancies so liable after puberty. For all schoolgirls, every form of corset should be absolutely forbidden. The first danger signals should be carefully watched for, and when they appear everything should give way till perfect health is restored. The recent expression of a female principal that if the function was in abeyance for a time in the teens, it was of no great consequence, for she had noticed that it came around all right afterward when the girls left school, it is feared represents a point of view far too common, but which bodes the greatest danger for the future. The development of ideal lawn-tennis girls would be a better goal for modern institutions than scholars made at such a cost.

Taylor,[30] who also bases his opinion on large experience, holds that school modesty often promotes habitual constipation, and thinks the enfeeblement, lack of luster, debility, squeamishness about food, lack of interest in life, languid confidence and lack of incentive, clammy hands so common among pubescent girls, should be combated by romping, ball, beanbags, battledore, hoops, running, golf, tennis, bicycling, self-bathing in cold water, deep-breathing exercises once or twice a day, etc., rather than by systematic physical culture; that too early interest in the refinements of life arrests development and that nothing should be undertaken, especially at [p. 582] this age, by girls which can not be entered into with great heartiness and spontaneity. Interesting, too, are his suggestions on the psycho-pedagogy of flattery. Dr. Smith [31] states that "a very large per cent of females in every physician's practise are affected more or less by mental troubles, owing to menstrual disorders."

Henry T. Finck [32] insists that women attach far too much importance to politics; that their sphere is domestic, ninety-four out of every hundred marrying; that they control the all-determining first five years of a child's life and manners, which are almost as important as morals. One of the great functions of motherhood, he says, is to find husbands for daughters. The latter are often neglected, and vanity, which prompts American girls to dress like heiresses, produces, in his opinion, nearly as much unhappiness as whisky. In great cities superfine dressing opens pitfalls of temptation. He thinks the suffragists should take hold of solvable problems like that of servants and of gastronomy, until the kitchen is transformed into an art studio. They should develop the arts of entertainment, none of which are complete without a woman. Instead of becoming greedy money-makers, they should serve as an antidote to our extreme commercialism and politicism. Ten per cent more girls than boys are on the way to college in our high schools. Men's right to decide what women should be like is "inalienable and eternal." Men will continue to make women what they want them to be by marrying those who correspond to their ideals; thus real womanly women are not doomed.

Max O'Rell denies that Paris is a paradise of women, but declares that if he could be born again and select his life, he would be born an American woman. The female is higher than the male and represents more nearly than he the type which man is approaching. Woman's virtues are of a much higher quality than those of the male. In ancient days the virtues most admired were masculine -- courage and patriotism; but now, with Christianity, the female virtues of mod-[p. 583]esty, charity, chastity, etc., take precedence. Finck agrees with Ruskin that there has never been "a loveliness so variably refined, so modestly and kindly virtuous, so innocently fantastic, and so daintily pure as the present girl beauty of our British Isles," who is "nothing but soul and tenderness." Heine's poem "Du bist wie eine Blume," where woman is likened to a flower, Finck says has been set to music nearly two hundred times or more often than any poem in existence. This writer objects strongly to Miss I. H. Harper's statement that most women would gladly devote the years necessary to rearing two or three children, but object to giving up more time to this function. He thinks that sex in mind is no less marked than that in body and is steadily unfolding.

Prof. A. W. Small thinks that to train women to compete with men is like poison administered as a medicine, the evils being quite as bad as the disease. He doubts that on the whole women are better than men, because you can not compare things so different, and each have an equal right to do what they can do. The question of voting is merely one of social expediency. "The distinctively social mission of college women is to counterpoise women." The latter is so absorbing that none exclusively devoted to it can lead rounded lives. Women must be stewardesses of the mysteries of appropriate human life, so that aspiration for its adornments be not arrested. Men are weak in spiritual elements which college women may enforce. She is too ready to surrender her leverage.

III. Health and its Tests. -- In view of this consensus of professional opinion, let us turn to the question of the health of educated American women, which is the chief criterion of the value of all institutions which affect it. The first comprehensive statistical investigation [33] on college women was made in 1882 and included 705 graduates of 12 colleges, who answered 40 questions of a circular. Of these, 44 per cent said they did not worry over studies, 60 per cent reported having had some disorder, and those who studied hard had bad health. Of the whole number, 239 abstained from phys-[p. 584]ical, 2 from mental labor, and 73 from both, during their periods. Of the 705, only 169 never had any trouble at these times, and of course more had been sickly during the age of first menstruation than in college.

Professor Dewey found that of 290 college girls,[34] those who reported good health on entering college were 78.1 per cent; those during college, 74.9; those after graduation, 77.9. Again, 19.6 per cent reported deterioration of health during college; 44.4 per cent reported that they did not worry. In the period of pubescence, 53 per cent were troubled by pains, irregularity, etc.; during college life, 66 per cent, and after it, 64 per cent. Of those who entered college one or two years after the commencement of menstruation, 20.5 reported bad health; of those who entered from three to five years after, 17.7 per cent; of those who entered five years or more after, 154 per cent. Of those who entered at sixteen or less, 28 per cent lost in health and 17 per cent gained; of those who entered over twenty, 18 per cent lost and 28.5 per cent gained. After graduation, 83 per cent reported good health and 17 per cent bad. Among female colleges 55 per cent reported abstinence from study or exercises during menstruation, and in coeducational colleges 25 per cent. In coeducational colleges 33 per cent studied seriously, as did 26 in female colleges. On the whole, Dewey concluded that one-third more break down from emotional strain in female colleges than in coeducational institutions.

A later investigator [35] found a far more hopeful state of things. Of over 200 college girls it was found that 57 per cent suffered no prostration; 29.8 per cent were free from pain; 72.7 per cent were regular; and that only 2.75 per cent dropped out from ill health as against 2.85 per cent of college boys from Amherst. Of the causes for the interruption of studies, nervous debility leads, and headaches and imperfect eyesight follow. Of the complaints of 1,000 students who consulted the author during her six years at Smith, 30,8 per cent were for catarrhal disorders, 17 for digestive, 11 for [p. 585] menstrual, 8 for nervous, etc. Scanty was far more common than excessive flow, and this excess is greatest in the autumn, where most of the suppressions fall.[36]

Mrs. Sidgwick in England and Miss Hayes [37] in this country asked 32 and 42 questions respectively, the former addressed to 4 English and the latter to 12 American coeducational institutions. The results show that the Americans are better throughout, although it is possible that the 15 per cent of the English students and the 35 per cent of the American students, who did not answer the questionnaire, may have contained a large proportion of those who were ill. The American girls enter three and a half years younger than the English. The older worry more about personal and family matters. In the United States more improve than deteriorate during college, while the reverse seems true in England. We do not know whether a higher average of health is implied in the desire to go to college. In the following Miss Hayes has shown the [p. 586] relative healthfulness of these women on entering, during, and after college.

Dr. Mary P. Jacobi insists "there is nothing in the nature of menstruation to imply the necessity or even the desirability of rest for a woman whose menstruation is really normal," and advises college girls never to pursue a course of study that can not be kept up during this period. Graduates, it is urged, ought to have superior health, and female colleges should not admit invalids. She coincides with Miss Hayes that there is nothing at all in university education especially injurious to the constitution of women or involving a greater strain than they can ordinarily bear without injury, so that they often pass through college without its affecting their health either way. Colleges probably tend to check rather than favor hysteria. Mental training disciplines the feeling and increases the will power, and sometimes transforms a weak, sentimental girl into an honest, healthy woman. Many claim to be better during their college course than at entrance upon it. This is ascribed partly to change of climate, but more to the influences of interesting employment, freedom from petty home cares, congenial companionship, and learning how to take care of their health. Surprisingly different are the results of Dr. [p. 587] Engelmann's [38] study of 4,873 cases of school and college girls. He found irregularity in about 50 per cent and far more are retarded. His table is as follows:

Engelmann urges that "progress of surgery and reduction of mortality have been considered too much and woman and her morbidity too little." Prevention, which is now the watchword, must be based on a study of conditions which interfere [p. 588] with a healthy performance of the female function during the great waves of sexual life. "Many a young life is battered and forever crippled in the breakers of puberty; if it cross these unharmed and is not dashed to pieces on the rock of childbirth, it may still ground on the ever-recurring shallows of menstruation, and, lastly, upon the final bar of the menopause ere protection is found in the unruffled waters of the harbor beyond the reach of sexual storms." He holds mental stimulus to be the chief cause of sexual precocity in girls. He finds from the census of 1890 there were 32,751 young women in American colleges and 341,736 in secondary educational institutions, and it is these, he thinks, who preeminently need attention, although there are about 1,000,000 more between fifteen and twenty who are working for wages. The effects of mental strain in schoolgirls are most seen in increased frequency of menstruation. In college the freshman year is marked by most irregularity, and change of surroundings almost always delays the courses, often amounting to amenorrhea for two or three months. Schrader found this in 57 per cent of his 114 cases. Dr. Wood writes that it is surprising how quickly college life affects this function. Debility, on the other hand, shortens the intervals and increases the pain and amount of the flow. Examinations, Engelmann thinks, are "more deleterious to functional health than any other one cause in college life."

On the basis of a long study, Celia D. Mosher, M.D.,[40] prints some interesting preliminary conclusions concerning menstruation, that a rhythmic fall of blood pressure at definite intervals occurs in both men and women. Along with this, subjective observation of the sense of well-being shows concomitant variations, the sense of maximum efficiency of the individual, corresponding to the time when the pressure is high, and lessened efficiency to the periods of low pressure, the latter in both sexes being a period of increased susceptibility. If symptoms of any kind appear, they should come at the point of least resistance, or low pressure. This is true of digestive disturbances, catarrh, etc. The author believes [p. 589] that the tradition that women must suffer and be incapacitated at these times tends to increase the sense of lessened efficiency, especially in women without education and without absorbing occupations. Much, usually ascribed to dysmenorrhea, is really a coincident functional disturbance of other organs, induced perhaps by the favoring condition of lowered general blood pressure occurring near the periods.

A college girl or graduate confronted with a questionnaire knows well that if she confesses pain or ill health, it may contribute to increase the prejudice against the cause of education which she has dearly at heart, and normally is as reluctant to confess illness as a boy is to confess muscular weakness. The latter, however, can be tested, while there is no good criterion of health, which more perhaps than anything else in the world is especially dependent on subjective and uncontrollable factors. Every psychologist knows that pain is hard to gauge and harder yet to remember, and that general euphoria and disphoria are more matters of disposition, environment, habit of control, time of the month, etc., than of true symptomatic value. Again, confession of real illness is the last thing a normal girl will make. It means the abandonment of hope and life prospects, and is usually concealed even to herself as long as possible. Hence I attach very slight value to questionnaire returns in this field, and therefore think it more probable that the doctor's objective and personal tests and opinions are nearer the truth. If so, we must reluctantly conclude that it is, to say the very least, not yet proven that the higher education of women is not injurious to their health.