The Education of American Girls

by Anna C. Brackett

Of the fourteen “fair,” five left in essentially the same condition; nine improved.

Of the twelve “delicate,” five left in the same condition; seven improved.

It is scarcely necessary to say that every year the same old battles with bad habits in dress, diet, exercise, sleep, and work, have to be fought; but the enemies are not so numerous, and the allies of health and common sense are always gaining in numbers and strength; so the prospect for ultimate and complete victory improves. Perhaps the greatest obstacle that we find to the consummation of our scheme for intellectual training, is the pressure made by students, and even more strongly by their parents, to take the work while they are too young.

Fifteen is the minimum age at which any are admitted, even for the preparatory classes; but no girl of fifteen has the poise, the settledness of nerve and muscle and brain to enable her to bear uninjured the immense strain that the mere living in such a great family necessitates. It is almost impossible for any one who has not tried it to understand this; and parents listen with a polite, incredulous smile, when I explain why I think it unwise for their bright young daughters to attempt here the not difficult Latin, mathematics, etc., of the preparatory years. We—the parents and I—agree perfectly that the girls can do the work easily enough, but they, the parents, can not see the difference which is so clear to my mind—as, after these eight years, it could hardly help being—the difference that it will make to the girls whether they do the work in the small classes of the home school, and surrounded in their leisure hours with the freedom and repose of the accustomed family, or in the large classes that are here necessary, and amid the inevitable excitements, outside the recitation room, of a constant residence in a household of five hundred.

Again and again I have seen these young students, for, of course, they enter despite my protestations—everybody wants to see the folly of everything for himself—I have seen them succumb to the unwonted nervous tax within a few weeks; others bear up for months, many get through the year and go home to spend their summer vacation in bed—“Vassar victims” all, whose ghosts haunt the clinical records of doctors from Texas to Canada, from Maine to California, and whose influence makes, so far as it is felt, against woman's chances for liberal education; for these failures are counted as natural effects of study, of mental labor which the female organization cannot endure!

I have no doubt that, for a respectable minority of these fifteen-year-old girls, life here, with its absolute regularity of hygienic regimen, is less disadvantageous than the mixture of school and “society,” in which they would be permitted to dissipate their energies at home; but that does not alter the fact that the vital needs of immaturity, physical, mental, and moral; cannot be most wholesomely met amid conditions so artificial as must obtain in a great educational establishment.

With those who enter more advanced classes at an immature age—fortunately, they are very few—the case is still worse, for, in addition to the nervous tax to which I have alluded above, they attempt woman's work with a child's strength. The result is inevitable—a stunted, unsatisfactory womanhood, the penalty for the violating of Nature's law of slow, symmetrical development, is not to be escaped.

Dr. Clarke's Sex in Education puts this point well, and perhaps the little book may be forgiven its coarseness and bad logic, if it succeeds in awakening the consciences of parents and teachers with regard to this phase of the school question, a phase which bears with equal pertinency upon a fair chance for boys and for girls.

When women begin at eighteen or twenty the earnest business of a collegiate course, for which they have slowly and thoroughly prepared while their physical organization was maturing in happy freedom, and when they give to this higher intellectual labor the strength and enthusiasm that are at that age of all the life preëminent and most perfectly balanced, then we shall know what educated woman is, and learn her possible capacities in all that makes for the noblest humanity.

I do not undervalue what Oberlin, Antioch, Mt. Holyoke, and other schools have accomplished for woman's higher education. I would not willingly be ranked second to any in according to them the esteem and honor which their work richly merits; and among Vassar's own Alumnæ are already many who give gracious promise of what may be hoped for, nay, fulfilled, when the good seed now sowing all over this broad land shall come to glad fruition.