Again, they had seldom more than one flight of stairs to climb; nor were they, in climbing these, burdened with skirts that weigh five, six, and even seven pounds, such as I know from actual weight, carefully reported, young girls of the present time sometimes wear in climbing three immense flights of stairs! Let any woman undertake this with her arms full of books, her hands tied in holding them, so that she cannot clear her feet from her long, heavy skirt, with its manifold flounces switching about them, while she is laboring to lift them with a movement of her hips and pinioned arms, and yet feels herself liable every instant to be thrown from her balance by all this encumbrance—let her undertake this, and she will learn that there is something besides study that is endangering the health of our school girls. Again, let her take her stand at the top of one of these long flights of stairs—the last in the building, perhaps—reaching up to the floor where the High school rooms are almost always located; let her watch the flushed faces of a class of girls coming up to recitation, note the palpitating, almost breathless efforts with which some of them achieve the last few steps; and when they have accomplished this, see here and there one clinging to the post of the balustrade, or leaning speechless against the wall until she can recover breath to proceed another step; let her do this, and she will get another insight into the causes of invalidism among the girl graduates of our schools. “How can a mother rest when she doesn't know where her boys are?” we often hear asked. How can a mother rest when she doesn't know where her girls are, or by what dangerous steps they have gone where they are? How can she rest? Simply, in most instances, because she has not herself been educated to any comprehension of the danger her child is in.
Neither did school-girls, in that earlier time, perform their brain labor under an outside pressure scarcely less than that of one of those iron helmets which one sees in the Tower of London, and which, the guide assures us, with an emphasis implying that he does not expect us to believe it, were actually worn by some Knight at the battle of Cressy, Agincourt, or some other which resulted in victory to the English. And how those old warriors did bear up under a head-gear weighing ten or twelve pounds, to fight the battles of their age, I have been best able to comprehend when I have seen what girls of our age can bear up under and live at all, much more, study.
I have a friend, an old pupil, a truly intellectual woman, who has not broken down under much more brain-work, since she left school, than she ever performed in school. Her husband greatly enjoys her intellectual tastes, and, without stint or jealousy, encourages them; only he would not have her “odd,” nor so very different from “other ladies of our acquaintance.” He would have her study; he “doesn't believe a woman should fall back in her intellectual life any more than a man.” He would have her paint, and practise, and study; and since he provides abundant help, he thinks she may. He will buy any book, or set of books, to aid her; but he would have her wear her hair as “other ladies wear theirs, and not give occasion for all those flings about women who want to know so much,” and go with their hair about their faces and themselves at “sixes and sevens,” generally. “And why can't she wear her hair put up?” “Sit down, and I will tell you why,” she said, one day, rather out of sorts; he did not yield very ready compliance. But she persuaded him to permit her to illustrate her “why.” He sat down, and she began by twisting his abundant curls into a knot as tight as could well be held by a strong hair-pin. This was the “underpinning” on which to rear the structure. So, with “switch” upon “switch,” and “braid” surrounding “braid,” a “frizz” here and a “frizz” there, with a few bows for capitals, and a few curls for streamers, and twenty-four hair-pins for fastenings and bracing-rods, the tower was finished, in less than half the time, as she assured him, owing to the advantageous position she enjoyed in her work, that it would take her to rear the same structure on her own head, and it was precisely like what other ladies of their acquaintance wore.
“Good gracious!” he exclaimed, “you do not pretend that women wear all this false pile on their heads!” “Yes, I not only pretend, but solemnly assure you that I have not exceeded by a braid or a curl what most of the ladies of our acquaintance wear on their heads.” “Well, what do women want to be such fools for?” he asked impatiently. “What did you want me to be such a fool for?” she answered. “Well, take down the thing and let me go,” he said. “you may wear your hair as you please, I have learned why enough for one day.” “No, stay and let us read that chapter of Mill on 'Liberty' that we were going to read together sometime,” she said. “Liberty! I think so. I wouldn't wear that thing half a day for all the profits of my business for a year!” “Well, then, we'll let Mill go, for I think if I have taught you why, with all that toggery on my head, I can't do anything, I have done enough for one day,” she said.
Think of a girl thus burdened working through a problem in mathematics, or arranging, in her mind, an analysis of it, which will be called for in five minutes; or, of her thinking over, so as to give clearly, with its heads and deductions, an abstract of a chapter in some branch of science! She will say, perhaps, that “one gets used to it and thinks nothing about it,” and she thinks, no doubt, that what she says is quite true. But go to her room in the evening after the world is shut out, and you will, in all probability, find her with her wrapper on and her “braids” and “switches” off, and she will tell you, without thinking, what is nearer the truth—that you must excuse her, but she has a “hard lesson to get, and she can study so much better in this way, when she feels perfectly comfortable.” A straw will tell which way the wind blows, and straws of hair-pins, during months of pain and feebleness, may, in after life, tell which way the wind has blown.
Just in face of some of these hindrances, in the way of the higher education of our girls, I place some reports from schools and colleges which I have received. The following is from a teacher of high reputation, Superintendent of Public Schools in one of our large cities, a gentleman who has studied the science of teaching as few have done, and added to the usual attainments of a college graduate, studies which would have given him a right to practise as a physician. He has now been engaged in his profession, without a term's remission, for thirty years:
“It is not hard study that breaks down the health of our girls, but the circumstances under which they study, the demands of society and its thousand social follies, with all their excitements. It is the foolish ambition of parents to have their daughters accomplished before they are out of their teens, often allowing them to carry on five or six branches at a time instead of two or three. These, and some other like causes, as I think, do more towards breaking down the health of girls at school, than much study. The ability on the part of the girls to master the several branches, is fully equal to that of the boys, and when an amount of study is reached that is injurious to girls, we have gone as far as is profitable for boys. Boys also break down in study, from some of the evils of society. As to co-education of the sexes, my experience, observation, and reading, all convince me that it is the best way. If there are incidental evils in such a course, they are only incidental, and I can find those of equal, or, I think, of greater magnitude in separate schools.”
Michigan has tried the experiment of co-education perhaps as thoroughly and extensively as any State in the Union—as any territory of equal extent in the world. Her six colleges, her University, her Normal school, all her higher institutions of learning—with the exception of the Michigan Female Seminary, on the Mt. Holyoke plan, and some young ladies' private schools—are open to young men and to young women on the same terms. There are no separate roads for the sexes up the Hill of Science, from the lowest primary, to the highest professional school. Kalamazoo College, against the opinion of many educated and educational men, admitted women to a full curriculum, twenty years ago. And classes, about equally divided, have been graduating from the college ever since, confirming the authors of the movement and the whole Faculty, during these twenty years, in the practicability and the many advantages of the plan. The young women have always averaged as good scholarship and health as the young men. A smaller number of women than have abandoned their course on account of ill health. During the period of my own connection with this institution, many young women pursued there an extended elective course of study, who did not graduate. It was not their plan to do so when they entered the preparatory department. Many graduated from a course quite as extensive, requiring as persistent study, though not in all respects like that of the young men. They did not usually study Greek, though some did, and were leaders of their classes. They did not pursue Latin quite so far, but more than made up for this in a far more thorough study of French and German, History and Literature. There is scarcely a week in the year but I receive communications in some way from some of these old pupils. They are among my most enjoyable, intellectual, and literary correspondents. With few exceptions, they are growing women. Having learned how to learn—which they will all remember, was the most I ever professed to be able to teach them—they have instituted schools for themselves, compelled sometimes very hard circumstances to become their best teachers, and learned to draw lessons, as Mr. Emerson once said in a lecture to them, from “frost and fire.”
Some have learned to use the world as not abusing it, and are turning wealth and its advantages that have come to them, to useful, noble purposes. A few, but very few, of the large number, are invalids, but there is not one whose case does not furnish me with abundant evidence of many more probable causes of invalidism, than over-study. There is not one, of whom I have heard, whose case does not wear on the face of it decidedly other causes than “persistent study.”
Dr. Mahan, who was the first, and for fifteen years, President of Oberlin College, has since been for nearly as long a period the President of Adrian College, in this State. He says that, during his connection with Oberlin, the proportion of young men to young women who entered upon the course, and failed to complete it on account of failure of health, under the strain of thought and study, was at least two to one. The proportion was not quite so great in Adrian; but many more young men than young women—and, as far as he was acquainted with colleges, everywhere—succumbed under the change from their former life to one of study.