“When a remission or intermission is necessary, the parent must decide what part of education shall be remitted or omitted, the walk, the ball, the school, or all of these.”—“No one can doubt which will interfere most with Nature's laws, four hours' dancing or four hours' studying.”—“In these pages the relation of sex to mature life is not discussed.”
It is necessary to state at the outset, that this preface does not in the least represent the book as it naturally strikes the reader. Women may read carelessly, as they have been accused of doing in this instance, but when hundreds of women, writing from all parts of the country, in private and in public, and without concert with each other, all testify to the same impression received, it is impossible that the carelessness of numbers should always feel the same bias.
It is quite certain that four hours of dancing is far more injurious to a delicate girl than four hours of steady study: why, then, in considering the education of girls, does the author steadily avoid all cases where dancing, late hours, and bad food, have been known to interfere with health?
What satisfaction can any girl find in the fact, that the period of mature life is not covered by the statements in this volume? The period of a working life is included in the years between fourteen and nineteen, and as matters now are, society life is nearly ended at twenty. If the beginning of brain-work were deferred till a girl were jaded with dissipation, how much could be accomplished in season for self-support? Schools vary in varying localities, and since women are hereafter to be elected on every school committee, it is reasonable to suppose that unwise pressure from that source will soon cease.
All figures of speech are misleading, but it is quite fair to meet the statement that we must not train oaks and anemones in the same way, by retorting that that is precisely what God does.
He gives to different plants different powers of appropriation, sets them in precisely the same circumstances, and leaves them.
The sturdy oak, that centuries of storm have beaten into firmness, which fits it to encounter the fiercest blows of the wave; the stately pine, which is to tower as main-mast when the gale is at its height, stand serried or single on the mountain's peak. At their feet nestles the wind-flower, quite as confident of its destiny, although no sun is moderated, no shower abated for its tender sake. It is protected by the very way in which it is made, by its very loneliness, pregnant as that is with the charm of sweetness and color. So might it be with woman!
Private schools in our large cities cannot be said to overwork their pupils. Fifty years ago, when my mother was educated, far more was required of girls at school than was ever possible in my day. Thirty years ago, when my school education ended, far more was possible to me than has ever been required of my daughter. It is the uniform testimony of teachers, that girls now study less, that the hours of recitation are fewer, and that dilatoriness and absences are far more frequently excused than was once the case.
At the most fashionable, and also the best conducted school in Boston fifty years ago, my mother was allowed no study time in school, and committed thirty pages of history as a daily lesson. For myself, at a time when we were pursuing languages and the higher mathematics, we took a whole canto of Dante three times a week, and were required to give an explanation of every historical allusion. I had no study time in school; but neither my mother, nor myself, nor any girls in my class, were in the least injured by anything required of us. During the whole of our school life, we “thought and understood” as children, and very reluctant we were to “put away childish things.” We rose for a bath and walk before a seven o'clock breakfast, nine o'clock found us at school, and we returned to a two o'clock dinner. In the afternoon we walked, or rode on horseback, or studied together for an hour. We took tea at six or half past six o'clock, and the curfew ringing at nine found us preparing for bed. We had no time for unsuitable reading, and none of the cares or dissipations of maidenhood perplexed our straight forward way.
If we could secure this simplicity for our children, we should have small reason to be anxious about their health.