Woman and Womanhood: A Search for Principles

by C. W. Saleeby

It is the nervous system by which we human beings live. Our voluntary muscles are agents of the will, agents of purpose; and while strength is a trifle, skill is always everything. We know now that it is impossible to carry out any human purpose by the contraction of one muscle or even one group of muscles. Even when we merely bend the arm we are doing things with the muscles which extend it, and when we raise it sideways we are modifying the whole trunk in order to preserve the balance. We have only to watch the clumsiness of an infant or a small child to realize how much skill the nervous system has to acquire. This skill may be mainly expressed as co-ordination, the balanced use of many muscles for a purpose and, as a rule, their co-ordinated use with one of the senses, more especially vision, but also touch and hearing.

This is the first of the physiological reasons why games and play of all sorts are so incomparably superior to the use of dumb-bells and developers, where movement and increase of muscular strength are made ends in themselves; whereas in play we are making relations with the outside world, responding to stimuli, educating our nerve muscular apparatus as an instrument of human purpose.

It is in part true to suppose that the play of children expresses an overflow of superfluous energy, but a still deeper and much more important conception of play is that which recognizes in it Nature's method of nervous development, the attainment of control and co-ordination, the capacity of quick and accurate response to circumstances and obedience to the will. Compare, for instance, the girl who has played games, avoiding danger as she crosses the road, with another whose youth has been made dreary by dumb-bells. It may freely be laid down, then, that systems of physical training are good in proportion as they approximate to play, and bad in proportion as they depart from it; and, further, that the very best of them ever devised is worthless in comparison with a good game. This evidently does not refer to, say, special exercises for a curved back.

However, systems of physical training we shall still have with us for a long time to come, and perhaps the mere difficulty of finding room for games makes them necessary, though it may be noted in passing that the last touch of absurdity is accorded to our frequent preference for exercises over games when we conduct the exercises in foul air and prefer them to games in the open air. If exercises we are to have, then they must at least be modelled so as to come as near as possible to play in the two essentials. The first of these has already been mentioned—the preference of skill to strength as an object.

The second, though less obvious, is no less important. What is the most palpable fact of the child's play? It is enjoyment. We have done for ever with the elegant morality which grown-up people, very particular about their own meals, used to impose upon children, and which was based upon the idea that everything which a child enjoys is therefore bad for it. We are learning the elements of the physiology of joy. We find that pleasure and boredom have distinct effects upon the body and the mind, notably in the matter of fatigue. Careful study of fatigue in school children has shown that the hour devoted to physical exercise of the dreary kind under a strict disciplinarian may, instead of being a recreation, actually induce more fatigue than an hour of mathematics. If, then, we cannot allow the girl to play, but must give her some kind of formal exercise, we must at least make it as enjoyable as possible. There are Continental systems of gymnastics which do not believe in the use of music because, forsooth, they find that the music diminishes the disciplinary effect! Such an argument dismisses those who adduce it from the category of those entitled to have anything to do with young people. They should devote themselves to training the rhinoceros, these martinets; the human spirit is not for their mauling. In point of fact one of the redeeming features of physical training is the use of music, which goes far to supply the pleasure that accrues from the natural exercise of games, and greatly reduces the fatigue of which the risk is otherwise by no means inconsiderable. We leave this subject, then, for the nonce, having arrived at the conclusion that the objects of physical training are skill and pleasure rather than strength and discipline; that the system is best which is nearest to play; and that the use of music is specially to be commended.

But, as we have said, artificial physical training at its best is not to be compared with the real thing; more especially if, as is usually the case, the real thing has the advantage of being practised in pure air. We must ask ourselves, then, what sort of games are suitable for girls, and to what extent, if at all, mixed games are desirable. We must first remind ourselves of the proviso that any game may be played to excess, whether physical excess or mental excess, the risk of both of these being involved when the competitive element is made too conspicuous. If this risk be avoided there is no objection, perhaps, to even such a vigorous game as hockey in moderation for girls. The present writer has observed mixed hockey for many years, and finds it impossible to believe that the game should be condemned for girls, but he has always seen it under conditions where the game was simply played for the fun of the thing, and that makes a great difference.

It is certainly open to argument whether, in such a game as hockey, it is not better, on the whole, that girls shall play by themselves, but, as has been urged elsewhere, there is a good deal to be said for the meeting of the sexes elsewhere than in the artificial conditions of the ball-room, since these mixed games widen the field of choice for marriage and provide far more natural and desirable conditions under which the choice may be made. There can be no question that an epoch has been created by the freedom of the modern girl to play games, and to enjoy the movements of a ball, as her brother does. The very fact of her pleasure in games indicates, to those who do not believe that the body is constructed on essentially vicious principles, that they must be good for her. The mere exercise is the least of the good they do. The open air counts for more, as does the development of skill, and the girl's opportunity of sharing in that moral education which all good games involve and which there is no need to insist upon here. Amongst the many things alleged against woman as natural defects by those who have never for a moment troubled to distinguish between nature and nurture, are an incapacity to combine with her sisters, petty dishonour in small things, a blindness to the meaning of "playing the game." It is similarly alleged by such persons against the lower classes that they also do not know how to "play the game," and do not understand the spirit of true sportsmanship, preferring to win anyhow rather than not at all. But those who conduct the Children's Vacation Schools in London—that remarkable arrangement by which children are damaged in school time and educated in holidays—are aware that in a short time children of any class can be taught to "play the game," if only they can be made to see it from that point of view. So also women can learn to combine, to be unselfish, to avoid petty deceits even in games, to obey a captain and to accept the umpire's decision, when they are taught, as we all have to be taught, that that is playing the game.

These immense virtues of the new departure must by no means be forgotten in the course of the reaction which is bound to occur, and is indeed necessary, against the contemporary practice of trying to demonstrate that boys and girls are substantially identical. He who pleads for the golden mean is always abused by extremists of both parties, but is always justified in the long run, and this is a case where the golden mean is eminently desirable, being indeed vital, which is much more than golden. Safety is to be found in our recognition of elementary physiological principles, assuming from the first that though it is not difficult to turn a girl into something like a boy, it is not desirable; and especially in attending carefully, in the case of each individual, to the indications furnished by that characteristic physiological function, interference with which necessarily imperils womanhood.

The organism is a whole; it reacts not only to physical strain but to mental strain. There are parts of the world, including a country no less distinguished as a pioneer of education than Scotland, where serious mental strain is now being imposed upon girls at this very period of the dawn of womanhood, when strain of any kind is especially to be deplored. Utterly ignoring the facts of physiology, the laws and approximate dates of human development, official regulations demand that at just such ages as thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen large numbers of girls—and picked girls—shall devote themselves to the strain of preparing for various examinations, upon which much depends. Worry combines to work its effects with those of excessive mental application, excessive use of the eyes at short distances, and defective open-air amusement. The whole examination system is of course to be condemned, but most especially when its details are so devised as to press thus hardly upon girlhood at this critical and most to be protected period. Many years ago Herbert Spencer protested that we must acquaint ourselves with the laws of life, since these underlie all the activities of living beings. The time is now at hand when we shall discover that education is a problem in applied biology, and that the so-called educator, whether he works destruction from some Board of Education or elsewhere, who knows and cares nothing about the laws of the life of the being with whom he deals, is simply an ignorant and dangerous quack.

What has been said about the reaction against excess in the physical education of girls applies very forcibly to excess in their mental education. We are undoubtedly coming upon a period when more and more will be heard of the injurious consequences of such ill-timed preparation for stupid examinations as has been referred to; and there will be not a few to sigh for the return to the bad old days which a certain type of mind always calls good. Here, again, we must find the golden mean, recognizing that the danger lies in excess, and especially in ill-timed excess. We shall further discover that if we desire a girl to become a woman, and not an indescribable, we must provide for her a kind of higher education which shall take into account the object at which we aim. It will be found that there are womanly concerns, of profound importance to a girl and therefore to an empire, which demand no less of the highest mental and moral qualities than any of the subjects in a man's curriculum, and the pursuit of which in reason does not compromise womanhood, but only ratifies and empowers it.