“And that,” twinkled the Professor, “requires some dexterity.”
“The American child,” I pursued, “is accused by many of threatening our destruction, and if the American view of rearing children is wrong or requires modification, this radical suggestion of Mr. Spencer, looking to greater rather than less liberty in making terms with the instincts of children, becomes a matter for serious concern. If the American idea has stood for anything it is more sugar—that is to say, yielding something to the instinct, the personality of the child. I think we have gone a long way with it. Our children are becoming very self-possessed. Sometimes I have qualms. Take the American girl child—”
“A vast subject,” commented the Professor.
“The American girl child is getting a good deal of sugar—figuratively. The question comes, Is it good for her? Is her freedom, her undomestic training, her intellectual development, to the advantage of the race? I believe with Mr. Ruskin that you can’t make a girl lovely unless you make her happy. But how can we expect her to know what will make her happy? Aren’t you afraid, Professor, that she is becoming a trifle frivolous? Of course you yourself are a living contradiction—”
“Don’t try to deceive me,” warned the Professor. “I perceive in what you say, not the doubts of an incipient cynic, but the remorse of a doting and indulgent man. Most really typical American men are in the same situation. They are wondering if they haven’t overdone it, and, being too busy to find out for themselves, are eager for outside judgment, upon which they may act, de jure. The vice of the American man is his indulgence of the American girl. The foreigner commiseratingly thinks that the American girl demands this indulgence. The American man in his secret soul knows that he has pampered her for his own pleasure, and because, to a busy man, pampering is easier than regulating.”
“Yes,” I complained, “in the new paradise Adam is always to blame.”
“No,” protested the Professor, “not always; just humanly often. And don’t think that you have invented this modern anxiety for the welfare of girl children. Before and since ‘L’Éducation des Filles,’ they all have been ‘harping on my daughter.’ Women have been even more despairing than men. Hannah More thought that ‘the education of the present race of females’ was ‘not very favorable to domestic happiness.’ Mrs. Stowe thought ‘the race of strong, hearty, graceful girls’ was daily decreasing, and that in its stead was coming ‘the fragile, easily fatigued, languid girls of the modern age, drilled in book learning and ignorant in common things.’ Now that sort of thing has been going on since our race stopped speaking with the arboreal branch of the family. There is perpetual opportunity for a treatise on ‘The Antiquity of New Traits.’ We are apt to think that we of this era have invented the idea of educating girls, but civilized children always have been educated early in something. Nowadays it is in science. In our colonial days it was in piety. Miss Repplier, who has a most relishable antipathy for prigs, in fiction and in life, reminds us of Cotton Mather’s son, who ‘made a most edifying end in praise and prayer at the age of two years and seven months,’ and of Phoebe Bartlett, who was ‘ostentatiously converted at four.’ You are not sorry to be rid of all that, are you?”
