Education should aim at keeping young persons fresh and unstrained; charged with vital energies for growth of mind and body, filled with zest and enthusiasm for the career before them.
Everywhere, mothers deplore bitterly that they can obtain neither duty, obedience, nor affection from their girls. Many will not mend their clothes even; refuse so slight a domestic concession as to arrange flowers for the home. Lacking the morbid excitement of competitive rough games, an abnormal craving for which has been artificially created, and home-tastes extinguished, at school, modern girls are bored and disaffected save when indulging in sports or in other excitements. The more delicate, sympathetic, and humanising amenities have no appeal for them.
All the subtler, vital and inspiring impulses of natural womanhood have been rudely smothered in tussles of big muscles, in sensational crazes for making hockey-goals, and similar crude aims, quite alien to natural girlhood. The recurring stimulus of such, in addition to over-developing male muscles and proclivities in them, creates both the habit and the craving for excitement; effects pernicious and demoralising as are those of all habitual strong nerve-excitants.
It is impossible to exaggerate the cumulative effect of habit upon disposition—and this particularly upon the plastic, shaping dispositions of young girls.
Youth is at the mercy of its pastors and its masters, to spoil or to foster its best growth. We feed the bodies and cram the brains of our young people, while, in sending them away from the home which is their natural environment, we starve and dwarf their emotions and affections; giving these nothing to evoke, nothing to nurture them. The abnormal cold-heartedness and self-absorption latter-day mothers bewail in their girls are the inevitable outcome of their unnatural upbringing.
The spectacle of young women, with set jaws, eyes strained tensely on a ball, a fierce battle-look gripping their features, their hands clutching some or other implement, their arms engaged in striking and beating, their legs disposed in coarse ungainly attitudes, is an object-lesson in all that is ugly in action and unwomanly in mode. The so-called "tennis-grin," which on many women's faces does duty for smile, shows how the muscular tension of forceful effort permanently mars higher attribute. So too, the proverbial quarrelsomeness of tennis-playing women results from the combative habit of mind. Light and exhilarating, in place of strenuous competitive exercises, enable girls to develop their womanhood in healthy structure, efficient function, and beauty of body and mind. Dancing—the poetry of motion—particularly conduces to health and to grace. True dancing, that is, not the acrobatics of the professional dancer, which result in coarsened ugly limbs and stilted action.
There is a well-known Girls college which makes pre-eminently for the cult of Mannishness.
And here are seen, absorbed in fierce contest during the exhausting heat of summer afternoons, grim-visaged maidens of sinewy build, hard and tough and set as working-women in the forties; some with brawny throats, square shoulders and stern loins that would do credit to a prize-ring. All of which masculine developments are stigmata of abnormal Sex-transformation precisely similar in origin to male antlers in female-deer; namely, deterioration of important sex-glands, with consequent obliteration of the secondary Sex-characteristics arising normally out of the functional efficiency of these.
It has been said that the "hardening" process for children succeeds in rearing sturdy families, by killing off those of more delicate (and higher) organisation. And this and other such latter-day schools earn a reputation for rearing amazons, by so breaking the health and constitution of their more delicately-constituted members that these are compelled to withdraw. Following the rule that healthy bodies rebel in terms of illness against deteriorative conditions, it is the normal and healthfully-constituted girls who fail beneath such injurious strain. While organisations less sound of constitutional morale, in place of sustaining their typal ideals, conform to these deteriorative methods, and degenerate from higher to lower-grade standards of structure and function. Precisely as happens to minds when exposed to demoralising influences.
And to what end is it all? The training of modern young persons should fit them for Twentieth-Century existence in all its varied, complex and psychical developments. Yet now-a-days we train our girls as though their destiny were carpet-beating or the forge, rather than the higher human amenities. It is not surprising, therefore, that they frequently play hockey with the higher amenities. So impressionable and mimetic the sex is, and such its bent toward extremes, that women trained to Sports comport themselves in after-life as though playing a competitive game. A mental warp which has been one of the sources of latter-day strenuousness, as too of that fierce social rivalry which is wrecking older and fairer ideals and methods of friendship and hospitality.