The Education of the Girl

I DO not know why an utterance on that subject in yesterday morning’s paper stirred me up more than similar ones which I am constantly seeing in print. Perhaps it was because the utterer was advertised as an ‘authority’ on ‘vocational education,’ for his words did not differ essentially from the current platitude. ‘The problem of girls’ education is simple,’ he said in effect, ‘since what you have to do is merely to train them to be home-keepers; to teach them the details of the management of the house and the care of children, and not to despise domestic duties.’

I regret that I inadvertently gave away the paper this morning, for I should be glad to quote the ‘authority’s’ own statement as to the complexity of the problem of the boy’s education as contrasted with the perfect simplicity of that of the girl’s. He does recognize that it may be difficult to determine just what vocation may satisfy the physical and spiritual needs (I put the physical first, of course, because that is the up-to-date order of consideration) of a boy between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one, and admits that a good deal of anxious thought should be given to the question by the truly conscientious educator. But he evidently considers that it is a peculiar token of the dispensations and compensations of an all-wise Providence that time for this is given to the thoughtful pedagogue through the fact that he has to spend practically none in guessing at the possible destiny of the girl.

Considering that even in the remote days of Carthaginian Dido ‘varium et mutabile femina’ seems to have been a proverb, and that ever since, in various tongues and under various skies, woman has been described always as ‘uncertain, coy and hard to please,’ there is a note of originality in this serene assumption that in one respect, and that the supreme one, she is invariable, and perfectly easy to please, and I almost feel constrained to apologize for calling it a ‘platitude.' On the whole, however, I think I shall let my descriptive term stand, for the definition of a platitude does not demand that it should also be inconsistent with some other platitude.

But why, I beg to ask, does every one know that the vocation which is sure to delight every girl and in which she is sure to succeed (always provided, of course, that she is given the proper ‘practical’ training in her school-days) is housekeeping and the rearing of children, when even the cocksure vocationalist has to admit that he cannot always foretell with absolute certainty whether a boy of fourteen was made to be a carpenter or an engineer, a farmer or a Methodist preacher? In our outward configuration of form and feature we women confessedly differ as greatly from one another as do men. Why this assumption that in the inward configuration of character, taste, and talent we are all made upon one pattern? I must say that the perpetual declaration on the ‘woman’s page’ of modern periodicals that ‘every woman should know how to cook a meal, and make her own clothes, and feed a baby’ fills me with scorn unutterable. But then for that matter the mere fact of a ‘woman’s page’ fills me with scorn. Why not a ‘ man’s page,’ with a miscellany of twaddle, labeled as exclusively, adapted to the masculine intellect? The idea that literature is properly created male and female is no less absurd than the idea that there is one education of the man and another of the woman. And it is no more essential to the progress of the universe that every woman should be taught to cook than that every man should be taught to milk a cow.

I do not propose to enter into any discussion of the possible mental superiority of either sex over the other (although I cannot resist quoting in an ‘aside’ the recent remark to me of a teacher of distinguished judgment and long experience: ‘The fact is, girls are much better students than boys ’), but only to maintain this: that girls show as much diversity of taste in intellectual work as boys, that their aptitude for work purely intellectual is as great, and that, therefore, whatever variation is made in the present plan of their education, it should not be based upon the narrow foundation of preconceived ideas of differences inherent in sex. I do not believe that anything necessarily ‘becomes a woman’ more than a man, except as our superstition has made it seem to do so.

Yet, as a matter of fact, superstition begins to hamper a girl’s education almost at the very beginning, and one of the first forms which it takes is ‘consideration for her health.’ Consideration for the health of a child of either sex is more than laudable, if it be intelligently exercised; but I really cannot see why our daughters deserve more of such consideration than our sons. And the typical consideration for the health of the little girl and the young maiden is not infused with a striking degree of intelligence, as is evidenced by the very small amount of intelligence with which we invariably credit the girl herself. For absolutely the only kind of activity which we ever conceive to be inj urious to her is mental activity.

One might perhaps agree to the reiterated parental excuse for half-educated daughters that ‘nothing can compensate a girl for the loss of her health,’ if parents would explain how they think that anything can compensate a boy for the loss of his. But they take that risk quite blithely, and send him to college. Personally I have never seen any evidence that the risk for either sex is more than a phantom, and I believe that it is yet to be proved that the study of books has ever in itself been responsible for the breaking down in health of any human being. Many foolish things done in connection with the study of books have contributed to the occasional failure in healt h of students, but there is, I firmly believe, no reason but prejudiced superstition for the unanimity with which the fond mamma and the family physician fix the cause of the break-down in the books, and never in the numerous and usually obvious other activities. And in the spasms of commiseration for the unfortunates whose ’health has been ruined by hard study’ nobody has taken the trouble to notice the by-no-means infrequent cases of young persons, and girls especially, of really delicate health, who have stuck to their studies, but with a reasonable determination not to try to stick to ten or a dozen other side issues at the same time, and have come out of college, not physical wrecks, but stronger than when they went in. And who shall say with what greater capacity for enjoying life than those who have devoted the principal energy of their adolescence to the conservation of their health — frequently with no marked success?

So far as the normal child is concerned, his — and her— brain is naturally as active as his body, and it is not ‘crowding,’nor yet ’over-stimulation, to give that activeand acquisitive brain material worth while to work with. Therefore, the pathetic picture which has been painted recently in certain periodicals of the lean and nervous little overworked school-girl may be classed, I think, among the works of creative art rather than among photographs taken from life. Such pictures, as Art, may rank very high, but do not deserve great commendation as a contribution to the science of education. I am not saying that there are not many abominations practiced in our schools, especially of primary and secondary grade; but they are not in the direction of over-education.

The thing against which I pray to see a mighty popular protest is the wasting of children’s time, and the dissipation of all their innate powers of concentration, through the great number of studies of minor (not to use a less complimentary adjective) educational value, which is now one of the serious evils in our schools. And I think that this evil is bearing rather more heavily upon the girls than upon the boys, for more than one reason.

First, if there is actually a difference, innate or developed by years of artificial sex-distinction, in the attitude of boys and girls toward their studies, it is that girls generally do seem inclined to take their school work somewhat more seriously than boys, whether this be due to greater interest in the work itself, or greater sensitiveness to failure. Consequently the mere effort to give conscientious attention to so many different subjects may produce a nervous condition; but not because a girl is learning too much, or even, in a certain sense, working too hard.

Secondly, because this multiplication of the trivialities of education in the lower grades means the neglect or postponement of subjects which even the ‘progressives’ still allow to approximate, at least, the fundamentals, there is a congestion of all these more important, subjects, besides a fresh array of time-devouring frills, in the high-school years, — the one period in a girl’s life when, if ever, she does run some risk of physical break-down from over-strain. As a result, if she be concientious and ambitious, she does sometimes give way under the dread of failing to carry the suddenly increased load for which she has not been properly trained. But this, remember, is not the result of hard study; it is the natural consequence of never having been taught how to study hard.

But thirdly, the multiplicity of facts now being pursued in the schools is particularly deadly to the girl because it gives a fresh impulse to the thing which has long been the peculiar foe of woman’s development: the tendency to dissipate her abilities in the pursuit of an infinity of trivial activities. Trained in school to think that there are ‘so many things that it is nice for a girl to know how to do,’ she goes on into womanhood, and through it, still thinking that there are so many things that it is nice for a woman to do, and she ambles along, doing them, so far as time and strength permit, until she comes up to that final function, which, it is truly refreshing to think, demands even of a woman her undi vided at tention. How pleasant to remember that not even the most domestic will ever have to turn back from the gate of Death to embroider a centrepiece or heat the milk for the baby.

Would men ever get anywhere, do you think, if they fussed around with as many disconnected things as most women do? And the worst of our case is that we are rather inclined to point with pride to what is really one of the most vicious habits of our sex. We have all seen the swelling satisfaction with which the comely young schoolma’am, complimented upon a pretty gown, announces, ‘I made it myself.’ And we have all heard the chorus of admiring approbation following the announcement — joined in it, perhaps, and asked to borrow the pattern. But really, viewed in the light of reason, what is there about t he feat upon which she should so plume herself? Suppose that a man should point proudly to his nether garments, and say, ‘Lo! I made these trousers.’ I have not a mental picture of even the most economical of his fellow clerks, or mail-carriers, or clergymen, or school-teachers, crowding around to admire and cry, ‘What a splendid way to spend your time out of business hours! And it looks just like a tailor-made.’ (Which last is just as truly a lie when we tell it to our fellow women as it would be if men told it to men.)

The truth is, most school-teachers who make their own clothes ought to be ashamed of it, for they are stealing time which belongs to their profession and their patrons. And if they defend themselves, as many of them have pitifully good reason to, with the plea of salaries so near the starvation point that they might go unclad (which would disturb the minds of the Ohio Legislature) unless they fashioned their own covering, I would reply that perhaps the general average of the salaries of women teachers might be appreciably raised, if any considerable number of them spent their time out of school hours in efforts to make themselves worthy of even the salary they now receive. It is a somewhat advertised fact that I can iron shirt-waists, not to mention other garments. I have no objection to doing it (I have never ‘despised domestic duties’) whenever it seems expedient. But I should consider it very close to a sin for me habitually to do my own laundry work, not because I should be taking the work from a poorer woman who needs it, — I wonder why a certain type of social theorist accuses women like me of doing that by entrance into professional life, and then is so calm when we ‘save money’ by keeping her regular work from the dressmaker or laundress, — but because I should be taking my time and my energy from the pupils to whom I am pledged to fit myself to teach Latin as well as I possibly can.

But my objection to the whole movement to ‘redirect’ the education of girls is not that many very good things are not put into the redirected curriculum, but that its whole direction is wrong. I cannot say that it is not a good thing for some women to know how to cook and sew well, for it is indeed both good and necessary to civilized life. I cannot say that some of the subjects introduced into a good domestic-science course are not educative and truly scientific, because I should be saying what is not true. But I do believe that the idea at the basis of it all is fundamentally false. For the idea is this: that one half of the human race should be ‘educated’ for one single occupation, while the multitudinous other occupations of civilized life should all be loaded upon the other half. The absurd inequality of the division should alone be enough to condemn it. The wonder is that the men do not complain of being overloaded with so disproportionate a share of the burden. I dare say it is their chivalry which makes them bear it so bravely.

This statement of the division is not inconsistent with my complaint that women try to do too many things. They do, but they are all things which are supposed to be included in some way or other within their ‘proper sphere,’ the maintenance of the home. Sometimes I grow so weary of The Home that if I did not love my own I could really wish that there were no such thing upon this terrestrial ball. I do love my own home, but I protest that the primary reason is not because my mother is a good cook, although she is, notably. Even as I write these words I thrill with the thought of my near return to her strawberry shortcakes. But I know other homes where there is also strawberry shortcake of a high order, in which I yet think that even filial devotion would have a hard task to make me feel much contentment. I might say the same of t he various things that make my home attractive to look upon. Yet the course of study which would graduate ‘homemakers’ is based upon the principle that ‘home’ consists primarily of these things. I am aware that its makers would include certain studies supposed to contribute to ‘culture,’ but even where these are well taught, they are still, in my opinion, rendered largely ineffectual by the false motive for study inculcated from the beginning, which makes them all, for women, only sideissues.

I cannot see that girls were created essentially to be ‘home-keepers’ any more than boys. Men and women, so far as they choose to marry, are to make a home together, and any system of education which so plans the division of labor between them that the woman shall ‘ make’ and stay in a place for which the man pays and to which he returns once in twenty-four hours, is wrong for at least two good reasons. It trains to two such different conceptions of responsibility that true companionship and community of interest is diminished, and often almost destroyed; and it so magnifies a specialized manual training for the woman that, it places her at the end in the artisan class, and not in the educated. If a woman so trained knows how to care for the minds of her children as well as she knows how to feed and dress and physic and spank them, she owes it to the grace of Heaven and not to her ‘vocational’ education ‘for motherhood.’ But I do not believe that girls should be ‘educated to be mothers’ at all, in the absurdly narrow sense in which such education is now conceived.

Every form of special instruction as a preparation for parenthood that can be necessary for a girl is necessary for a boy also. For what does it profit a woman or her offspring to have kept herself strong and clean, to have learned the laws of sex-hygiene and reproduction, or of care of the child, if the father of that child has failed to do the same?

But I cannot see how the world can have gone so mad as it has over the idea that the birth of the child, and its few subsequent months of existence, constitute the epochal point, the climax, as it were, in the life of any married pair. Surely, it is a very narrow view of life which fails to see how much is to be done in the world besides rearing children. It is true that society does perhaps in a way recognize this, but it seems to wish all active doing relegated to the men, while the woman’s contribution is confined to ‘influence’ exerted while nursing a numerous progeny through the diseases of infancy in a happy and perfectly sanitary home. It is time for a more general recognition that such ‘feminine influence,’ like honesty, laudatur et alget. The average woman only influences her husband or children to anything good through her brains and character, and the degree of power to express either brains or character depends mainly upon education. It sounds well to proclaim the mothering of the world as woman’s greatest profession, her truest glory; but it would be well also to consider that such ‘ mothering ’ as is mostly done

— and will be, so long as women are taught to prepare only for its physical demands, its purely material services

— is never going to be either great or glorious. An education which can give the greatest intellectual strength, the completest mental sanity, and so the broadest outlook upon life, is the need and the right of girls and boys alike.

But surely it cannot be said that their need is met alike unless the likeness in their education extends also to the ideal of the use that is to be made of it after school-days are past. If the colleges in which women are taught have failed at all in accomplishing their full possibility, it has been in the comparatively small degree to which they have succeeded in removing even from the minds of the young women themselves the hoary idea that, after all, the principal thing to be expected of the higher education of women is still the diffusion of an exceptionally exalted type of the afore-mentioned ‘ influence.’ It does seem rather a small return for years of collegiate effort that the best that can be said of them is that a woman’s mental attainments have proved a great assistance to her husband’s career as a Cabinet officer. I cannot think that we shall have what wholly deserves to be called an educated womanhood until we have dissipated the idea, still so prevalent even among women themselves, that a woman needs to have a definite occupation only until she marries, or if she fails to marry. That ‘a woman must choose between marriage and a career ' is the most detestable of all the woman platitudes in the entire collection, because, while most of these platitudes are merely stupid, this one is wholly vicious. It has been so incessantly reiterated, to the accompaniment of much shallow sentimentalizing on the sacred ness of home and mother, that the public has never been allowed a quiet moment to reflect on its injustice, and to realize how possible, and therefore imperative, is its removal along with other ancient injustices.

As I have urged in a previous article, the recently born and phenomenally growing department of education which styles itself variously Domestic Science, Household Economy, and I believe one or two other impressive things, might be the pioneer in this great work of justice, if it would. So far as that educational movement adds to woman’s ability to become a good citizen by leading her to an intelligent interest in the civic problems of housing, feeding, teaching, and amusing not alone her immediate family group, but a whole community, it does more in the right direction. But the very women who are themselves making a successful profession of teaching this group of subjects (thanks mainly to their having received the sort of education they now deprecate for women in general) apparently claim for them no greater mission for the average young woman than ability to guard her husband from ptomaine poison in his ice-cream, or to make gowns and shirt-waists well enough so that she can earn a living, ‘if she ever has to work.'

Shall we never cease to hear that contemptible reason for a girl’s education? An age in which women have proved themselves possessors of intellects might naturally be expected to recognize as a province of their education the ability to discover some particular intellectual bent whose training and development for life-long use are not contingent upon matrimony and the financial condition of two men — their fathers and their husbands respectively. It is held rather reprehensible to say it, but I do not see why every girl has not as good a right as every boy to dream of fame, and to be put in the way of reaching fame. If ninetynine per cent of the girls fail of even the smallest title to fame, just as ninetynine per cent of the boys do, yet the level of their lives must inevitably be raised by the education and the educational ideals which we should provide for them all for the sake of the hundredth girl. The supreme ideal which I hope that our schools may some day inspire is that every girl should discover something, whether of fame-bringing probabilities or not, which will seem to her worthy of being a life-work.

In nearly every present plan for the education of girls there lurks the same fatal weakness; girls are not made to realize as boys are that they are being educated for a business which must last as long as life lasts; that they are to feel an interest in it and grow in it, — to develop it, if possible; they are not taught that a definite purposeful share in the outside world’s work is a privilege not a misfortune. My own theory is that the only way in which such a state of feminine mind can be made general is by broadening woman’s education on the purely intellectual side; but of course I am open to conviction that the result can be better attained by ‘scientific’ bread-making, — even to the exclusion of Latin and Greek.