Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls

by Edward H. Clarke

The experiment of the identical co-education of the sexes has been set on foot by some of our Western colleges. It has not yet been tried long enough to show much more than its first fruits, viz., its results while the students are in college; and of these the only obvious ones are increased emulation, and intellectual development and attainments. The defects of the reproductive mechanism, and the friction of its action, are not exhibited there; nor is there time or opportunity in college for the evils which these defects entail to be exhibited. President Magoun of Iowa College tells us, that, in the institution over which he presides, "Forty-two young men and fifty-three young ladies have pursued college courses;" and adds, "Nothing needs to be said as to the control of the two sexes in the college. The young ladies are placed under the supervision of a lady principal and assistant as to deportment, and every thing besides recitations (in which they are under the supervision of the same professors and other teachers with the young men, reciting with them); and one simple rule as to social intercourse governs every thing. The moral and religious influences attending the arrangement have been most happy."[30] From this it is evident that Iowa College is trying the identical co-education of the sexes; and the president reports the happy moral and religious results of the experiment, but leaves us ignorant of its physiological results. It may never have occurred to him, that a class of a hundred young ladies might graduate from Iowa College or Antioch College or Michigan University, whose average health during their college course had appeared to the president and faculty as good as that of their male classmates who had made equal intellectual progress with them, upon whom no scandal had dropped its venom, who might be presented to the public on Commencement Day as specimens of as good health as their uneducated sisters, with roses in their cheeks as natural as those in their hands, the major part of whom might, notwithstanding all this, have physical defects that a physiologist could easily discover, and that would produce, sooner or later, more or less of the sad results we have previously described. A philanthropist and an intelligent observer, who has for a long time taken an active part in promoting the best education of the sexes, and who still holds some sort of official connection with a college occupied with identical co-education, told the writer a few months ago, that he had endeavored to trace the post-college history of the female graduates of the institution he was interested in. His object was to ascertain how their physique behaved under the stress,—the wear and tear of woman's work in life. The conclusion that resulted from his inquiry he formulated in the statement, that "the co-education of the sexes is intellectually a success, physically a failure." Another gentleman, more closely connected with a similar institution of education than the person just referred to, has arrived at a similar conclusion. Only a few female graduates of colleges have consulted the writer professionally. All sought his advice two, three, or more years after graduation; and, in all, the difficulties under which they labored could be distinctly traced to their college order of life and study, that is, to identical co-education. If physicians who are living in the neighborhood of the present residences of these graduates have been consulted by them in the same proportion with him, the inference is inevitable, that the ratio of invalidism among female college graduates is greater than even among the graduates of our common, high, and normal schools. All such observations as these, however, are only of value, at present, as indications of the drift of identical co-education, not as proofs of its physical fruits, or of their influence on mental force. Two or three generations, at least, of the female college graduates of this sort of co-education must come and go before any sufficient idea can be formed of the harvest it will yield. The physiologist dreads to see the costly experiment tried. The urgent reformer, who cares less for human suffering and human life than for the trial of his theories, will regard the experiment with equanimity if not with complacency.

If, then, the identical co-education of the sexes is condemned both by physiology and experience, may it not be that their special and appropriate co-education would yield a better result than their special and appropriate separate education? This is a most important question, and one difficult to resolve. The discussion of it must be referred to those who are engaged in the practical work of instruction, and the decision will rest with experience. Physiology advocates, as we have seen, the special and appropriate education of the sexes, and has only a single word to utter with regard to simple co-education, or juxtaposition in education.

That word is with regard to the common belief in the danger of improprieties and scandal as a part of co-education. There is some danger in this respect; but not a serious or unavoidable one. Doubtless there would be occasional lapses in a double-sexed college; and so there are outside of schoolhouses and seminaries of learning. Even the church and the clergy are not exempt from reproach in such things. There are sects, professing to commingle religion and love, who illustrate the dangers of juxtaposition even in things holy. "No physiologist can well doubt that the holy kiss of love in such cases owes all its warmth to the sexual feeling which consciously or unconsciously inspires it, or that the mystical union of the sexes lies very close to a union that is nowise mystical, when it does not lead to madness."[31] There is less, or certainly no more danger in having the sexes unite at the repasts of knowledge, than, as Plautus bluntly puts it, having he wits and she wits recline at the repasts of fashion. Isolation is more likely to breed pruriency than commingling to provoke indulgence. The virtue of the cloister and the cell scarcely deserves the name. A girl has her honor in her own keeping. If she can be trusted with boys and men at the lecture-room and in church, she can be trusted with them at school and in college. Jean Paul says, "To insure modesty, I would advise the education of the sexes together; for two boys will preserve twelve girls, or two girls twelve boys, innocent amidst winks, jokes, and improprieties, merely by that instinctive sense which is the forerunner of matured modesty. But I will guarantee nothing in a school where girls are alone together, and still less when boys are." A certain amount of juxta-position is an advantage to each sex. More than a certain amount is an evil to both. Instinct and common sense can be safely left to draw the line of demarcation. At the same time it is well to remember that juxtaposition may be carried too far. Temptations enough beset the young, without adding to them. Let learning and purity go hand in hand.

There are two considerations appertaining to this subject, which, although they do not belong to the physiology of the matter, deserve to be mentioned in this connection. One amounts to a practical prohibition, for the present at least, of the experiment of the special and appropriate co-education of the sexes; and the other is an inherent difficulty in the experiment itself. The former can be removed whenever those who heartily believe in the success of the experiment choose to get rid of it; and the latter by patient and intelligent effort.

The present practical prohibition of the experiment is the poverty of our colleges. Identical co-education can be easily tried with the existing organization of collegiate instruction. This has been tried, and is still going on in separate and double-sexed schools of all sorts, and has failed. Special and appropriate co-education requires in many ways, not in all, re-arrangement of the organization of instruction; and this will cost money and a good deal of it. Harvard College, for example, rich as it is supposed to be, whose banner, to use Mr. Higginson's illustration, is the red flag that the bulls of female reform are just now pitching into,—Harvard College could not undertake the task of special and appropriate co-education, in such a way as to give the two sexes a fair chance, which means the best chance, and the only chance it ought to give or will ever give, without an endowment, additional to its present resources, of from one to two millions of dollars; and it probably would require the larger rather than the smaller sum. And this I say advisedly. By which I mean, not with the advice and consent of the president and fellows of the college, but as an opinion founded on nearly twenty years' personal acquaintance, as an instructor in one of the departments of the university, with the organization of instruction in it, and upon the demands which physiology teaches the special and appropriate education of girls would make upon it. To make boys half-girls, and girls half-boys, can never be the legitimate function of any college. But such a result, the natural child of identical co-education, is sure to follow the training of a college that has not the pecuniary means to prevent it. This obstacle is of course a removable one. It is only necessary for those who wish to get it out of the way to put their hands in their pockets, and produce a couple of millions. The offer of such a sum, conditioned upon the liberal education of women, might influence even a body as soulless as the corporation of Harvard College is sometimes represented to be.

The inherent difficulty in the experiment of special and appropriate co-education is the difficulty of adjusting, in the same institution, the methods of instruction to the physiological needs of each sex; to the persistent type of one, and the periodical type of the other; to the demand for a margin in metamorphosis of tissue, beyond what study causes, for general growth in one sex, and to a larger margin in the other sex, that shall permit not only general growth, but also the construction of the reproductive apparatus. This difficulty can only be removed by patient and intelligent effort. The first step in the direction of removing it is to see plainly what errors or dangers lie in the way. These, or some of them, we have endeavored to point out. "Nothing is so conducive to a right appreciation of the truth as a right appreciation of the error by which it is surrounded."[32] When we have acquired a belief of the facts concerning the identical education, the identical co-education, the appropriate education, and the appropriate co-education of the sexes, we shall be in a condition to draw just conclusions from them.

The intimate connection of mind and brain, the correlation of mental power and cerebral metamorphosis, explains and justifies the physiologist's demand, that in the education of girls, as well as of boys, the machinery and methods of instruction shall be carefully adjusted to their organization. If it were possible, they should be adjusted to the organization of each individual. None doubt the importance of age, acquirement, idiosyncrasy, and probable career in life, as factors in classification. Sex goes deeper than any or all of these. To neglect this is to neglect the chief factor of the problem. Rightly interpreted and followed, it will yield the grandest results. Disregarded, it will balk the best methods of teaching and the genius of the best teachers. Sex is not concerned with studies as such. These, for any thing that appears to the contrary physiologically, may be the same for the intellectual development of females as of males; but, as we have seen, it is largely concerned about an appropriate way of pursuing them. Girls will have a fair chance, and women the largest freedom and greatest power, now that legal hinderances are removed, and all bars let down, when they are taught to develop and are willing to respect their own organization. How to bring about this development and insure this respect, in a double-sexed college, is one of the problems of co-education.

It does not come within the scope of this essay to speculate upon the ways—the regimen, methods of instruction, and other details of college life,—by which the inherent difficulties of co-education may be obviated. Here tentative and judicious experiment is better than speculation. It would seem to be the part of wisdom, however, to make the simplest and least costly experiment first; that is, to discard the identical separate education of girls as boys, and to ascertain what their appropriate separate education is, and what it will accomplish. Aided by the light of such an experiment, it would be comparatively easy to solve the more difficult problem of the appropriate co-education of the sexes.

It may be well to mention two or three details, which are so important that no system of appropriate female education, separate or mixed, can neglect them. They have been implied throughout the whole of the present discussion, but not distinctly enunciated. One is, that during the period of rapid development, that is, from fourteen to eighteen,[33] a girl should not study as many hours a day as a boy. "In most of our schools," says a distinguished physiological authority previously quoted, "the hours are too many for both boys and girls. From a quarter of nine or nine, until half-past two, is with us (Philadelphia schools for girls) the common schooltime in private seminaries. The usual recess is twenty minutes or half an hour, and it is not filled by enforced exercise. In certain schools,—would it were the rule,—ten minutes' recess is given after every hour. To these hours, we must add the time spent in study out of school. This, for some reason, nearly always exceeds the time stated by teachers to be necessary; and most girls between the age of thirteen and seventeen thus expend two or three hours. Does any physician believe that it is good for a growing girl to be so occupied seven or eight hours a day? or that it is right for her to use her brains as long a time as the mechanic employs his muscles? But this is only a part of the evil. The multiplicity of studies, the number of teachers,—each eager to get the most he can out of his pupil,—the severer drill of our day, and the greater intensity of application demanded, produce effects on the growing brain, which, in a vast number of cases, can be only disastrous. Even in girls of from fourteen to eighteen, such as crowd the normal school in Philadelphia, this sort of tension and this variety of study occasion an amount of ill-health which is sadly familiar to many physicians."[34]

Experience teaches that a healthy and growing boy may spend six hours of force daily upon his studies, and leave sufficient margin for physical growth. A girl cannot spend more than four, or, in occasional instances, five hours of force daily upon her studies, and leave sufficient margin for the general physical growth that she must make in common with a boy, and also for constructing a reproductive apparatus. If she puts as much force into her brain education as a boy, the brain or the special apparatus will suffer. Appropriate education and appropriate co-education must adjust their methods and regimen to this law.