At eighteen or twenty the girl normally reaches a stage of first maturity when her ideas of life are amazingly keen and true; when, if her body is developed, she can endure a great deal; when she is nearest, perhaps, the ideal of feminine beauty and perfection. Of this we saw illustrations in Chapter VIII. In our environment, however, there is a little danger that this age once well past there will slowly arise a slight sense of aimlessness or lassitude, unrest, uneasiness, as if one were almost unconsciously feeling along the wall for a door to which the key was not at hand. Thus some lose their bloom and, yielding to the great danger of young womanhood, slowly lapse to a anxious state of expectancy, or desire something not within their reach, and so the diathesis of restlessness slowly supervenes. The best thing about college life for girls is, perhaps, that it postpones this incipient disappointment; but it is a little pathetic to me to read, as I have lately done, the class letters of hundreds of girl graduates, out of college one, two, or three years, turning a little to art, music, travel, teaching, charity work, one after the other, or trying to find something to which they can devote themselves, some cause, movement, occupation, where their capacity for altruism and self-sacrifice can find a field. The tension is almost imperceptible, perhaps quite unconscious. It is everywhere overborne by a keen interest in life, by a desire to know the world at first hand, while susceptibilities are at their height. The apple of intelligence has been plucked at perhaps a little too great cost of health. The purely mental has not been quite sufficiently kept back. The girl wishes to know a good deal more of the world and perfect her own personality, and would not marry, although every cell of her body and every unconscious impulse points to just that end. Soon, it may be in five or ten years or more, the complexion of ill health is in these notes, or else life has been adjusted to independence and self-support. Many of these bachelor women are magnificent in mind and body, but they lack wifehood and yet more—motherhood.
In fine, we should use these facts as a stimulus to ask more searchingly the question whether the present system of higher education for both sexes is not lacking in some very essential elements, and if so what these are. Indeed, considering the facts that in our social system man makes the advances and that woman is by nature more prone than man to domesticity and parenthood, it is not impossible that men's colleges do more to unfit for these than do those for women. One cause may be moral. Ethics used to be taught as a practical power for life and reënforced by religious motives. Now it is theoretical and speculative and too often led captive by metaphysical and epistemological speculations. Sometimes girls work or worry more over studies and ideals than is good for their constitution, and boys grow idle and indifferent, and this proverbially tends to bad habits. Perhaps fitting for college has been too hard at the critical age of about eighteen, and requirements of honest, persevering work during college years too little enforced, or grown irksome by physiological reaction of lassitude from the strain of fitting and entering. Again, girls mature earlier than boys; and the latter who have been educated with them tend to certain elements of maturity and completeness too early in life, and their growth period is shortened or its momentum lessened by an atmosphere of femininity. Something is clearly wrong, and more so here than we have at present any reason to think is the case among the academic male or female youth of other lands. To see and admit that there is an evil very real, deep, exceedingly difficult and complex in its causes, but grave and demanding a careful reconsideration of current educational ideas and practises, is the first step; and this every thoughtful and well-informed mind, I believe, must now take.
It is utterly impossible without injury to hold girls to the same standards of conduct, regularity, severe moral accountability, and strenuous mental work that boys need. The privileges and immunities of her sex are inveterate, and with these the American girl in the middle teens fairly tingles with a new-born consciousness. Already she occasionally asserts herself in the public high school against a male teacher or principal who seeks to enforce discipline by methods boys respect, in a way that suggests that the time is at hand when popularity with her sex will be as necessary in a successful teacher as it is in the pulpit. In these interesting oases where girl sentiment has made itself felt in school it has generally carried parents, committeemen, the press, and public sentiment before it, and has already made a precious little list of martyrs whom, were I an educational pope, I would promptly canonize. The progressive feminization of secondary education works its subtle demoralization on the male teachers who remain. Public sentiment would sustain them in many parental exactions with boys which it disallows in mixed classes. It is hard, too, for male principals of schools with only female teachers not to suffer some deterioration in the moral tone of their virility and to lose in the power to cope successfully with men. Not only is this often confessed and deplored, but the incessant compromises the best male teachers of mixed classes must make with their pedagogic convictions in both teaching and discipline make the profession less attractive to manly men of large caliber and of sound fiber. Again, the recent rapid increase of girls, the percentage of which to population in high schools has in many communities doubled in but little more than a decade, almost necessarily involves a decline in the average quality of girls, perhaps as much greater for them as compared with boys as their increase has been greater. When but few were found in these institutions they were usually picked girls with superior tastes and ability, but now the average girl of the rank and file is, despite advanced standard, of admission, of an order natively lower. From this deterioration both boys and teachers suffer, even though the greatest good for the greatest number may be enhanced. Once more, it is generally admitted that girls in good boarding-schools, where evenings, food, and regimen are controlled, are in better health than day pupils with social, church, and domestic duties and perhaps worries to which boys are less subject. This is the nascent stage of periodicity to the slow normalization of which, during these few critical years, everything that interferes should yield. Some kind of tacit recognition of this is indispensable, but in mixed classes every form of such concession is baffling and demoralizing to boys.
The women who really achieve the higher culture should make it their "cause" or "mission" to work out the new humanistic or liberal education which the old college claimed to stand for and which now needs radical reconstruction to meet the demands of modern life. In science they should aim to restore the humanistic elements of its history, biography, its popular features at their best, and its applications in all the more non-technical fields, as described in Chapter XII, and feel responsibility not to let the moral, religious, and poetic aspects of nature be lost in utilities. Woman should be true to her generic nature and take her stand against all premature specialization, and when the Zeitgeist [Spirit of the Times] insists on specialized training for occupative pursuits without waiting for broad foundations to be laid, she should resist all these influences that make for psychological precocity. Das Ewig-Weibliche [The eternal womanly] is no iridescent fiction but a very definable reality, and means perennial youth. It means that woman at her best never outgrows adolescence as man does, but lingers in, magnifies and glorifies this culminating stage of life with its all-sided interests, its convertibility of emotions, its enthusiasm, and zest for all that is good, beautiful, true, and heroic. This constitutes her freshness and charm, even in age, and makes her by nature more humanistic than man, more sympathetic and appreciative. It is not chiefly the 70,000 superfluous Massachusetts women of the last census, but representatives of every class and age in the 4,000 women's clubs of this country that now find some leisure for general culture in all fields, and in which most of them no doubt surpass their husbands. Those who still say that men do not like women to be their mental superiors and that no man was ever won by the attraction of intellect, on the one hand, and those who urge that women really want husbands to be their intellectual superiors, both misapprehend. The male in all the orders of life is the agent of variation and tends by nature to expertness and specialisation, without which his individuality is incomplete. In his chosen line he would lead and be authoritative, and he rarely seeks partnership in it in marriage. This is no subjection, but woman instinctively respects and even reveres, and perhaps educated woman coming to demand, it in the man of her whole-hearted choice. This granted, man was never more plastic to woman's great work of creating in him all the wide range of secondary sex qualities which constitute his essential manhood. In all this, the pedagogic fathers we teach in the history of education are most of them about as luminous and obsolete as is patristics for the religious teacher, or as methods of other countries are coming to be in solving our own peculiar pedagogic problems. The relation of the academically trained sexes is faintly typified by that of the ideal college to the ideal university, professional or technical school. This is the harmony of counterparts and constitutes the best basis of psychic amphimixis. For the reinstallation of the humanistic college, the time has come when cultivated woman ought to come forward and render vital aid. If she does so and helps to evolve a high school and an A.B. course that is truly liberal, it will not only fit her nature and needs far better than anything now existing, but young men at the humanistic stage of their own education will seek to profit by it, and she will thus repay her debt to man in the past by aiding him to de-universitize the college and to rescue secondary education from its gravest dangers.
But even should all this be done, coeducation would by means be thus justified. If adolescent boys normally pass through a generalized or even feminized stage of psychic development in which they are peculiarly plastic to the guidance of older women who have such rare insight into their nature, such infinite sympathy and patience with all the symptoms of their storm and stress metamorphosis, when they seek everything by turns and nothing long, and if young men will forever afterward understand woman's nature better for living out more fully this stage of their lives and will fail to do so if it is abridged or dwarfed, it by no means follows that intimate daily and class-room association with girls of their own age is necessary or best. The danger of this is that the boy's instinct to assert his own manhood will thus be made premature and excessive, that he will react against general culture, in the capacity for which girls, who are older than boys at the same age, naturally excel them. Companionship and comparisons incline him to take premature refuge in some one talent that emphasizes his psycho-sexual difference too soon. Again, he is farther from nubile maturity than the girl classmate of his own age, and coeducation and marriage between them are prone to violate the important physiological law of disparity that requires the husband to be some years the wife's senior, both in their own interests, as maturity begins to decline to age, and in those of their offspring. Thus the young man with his years of restraint and probation ahead, and his inflammable desires, is best removed from the half-conscious cerebrations about wedlock, inevitably more insistent with constant girl companionship. If he resists this during all the years of his apprenticeship, he grows more immune and inhibitive of it when its proper hour arrives, and perhaps becomes in soul a bachelor before his time. In this side of his nature he is forever incommensurate with and unintelligible to woman, be she even teacher, sister, or mother. Better some risk of gross thoughts and even acts, to which phylogeny and recapitulation so strongly incline him, than this subtle eviration. But if the boy is unduly repelled from the sphere of girls' interests, the girl is in some danger of being unduly drawn to his, and, as we saw above, of forgetting some of the ideals of her own sex. Riper in mind and body than her male classmate, and often excelling him in the capacity of acquisition, nearer the age of her full maturity than he to his, he seems a little too crude and callow to fulfil the ideals of manhood normal to her age which point to older and riper men. In all that makes sexual attraction best, a classmate of her own age is too undeveloped, and so she often suffers mute disenchantment, and even if engagement be dreamed of, it would be, on her part, with unconscious reservations if not with some conscious renunciation of ideals. Thus the boy is correct in feeling himself understood and seen through by his girl classmates to a degree that is sometimes quite distasteful to him, while the girl finds herself misunderstood by and disappointed in men. Boys arrive at the humanistic stage of culture later than girls and pass it sooner; and to find them already there and with their greater aptitude excelling him, is not an inviting situation, and so he is tempted to abridge or cut it out and to hasten on and be mature and professional before his time, for thus he gravitates toward his normal relation to her sex of expert mastership on some bread- or fame-winning line. Of course, these influences are not patent, demonstrable by experiment, or measurable by statistics; but I have come to believe that, like many other facts and laws, they have a reality and a dominance that is all-pervasive and inescapable, and that they will ultimately prevail over economic motives and traditions.
To be a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. The madonna conception expresses man's highest comprehension of woman's real nature. Sexual relations are brief, but love and care of offspring are long. The elimination of maternity is one of the great calamities, if not diseases, of our age. Marholm[4] points out at length how art again to-day gives woman a waspish waist with no abdomen, as if to carefully score away every trace of her mission; usually with no child in her arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated perhaps to entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading the artist who depicts her to a fashion-plate painter, perhaps with suggestions of the arts of toilet, cosmetics, and coquetry, as if to promote decadent reaction to decadent stimuli. As in the Munchausen tale, the wolf slowly ate the running nag from behind until he found himself in the harness, so in the disoriented woman the mistress, virtuous and otherwise, is slowly supplanting the mother. Please she must, even though she can not admire, and can so easily despise men who can not lead her, although she become thereby lax and vapid.
The more exhausted men become, whether by overwork, unnatural city life, alcohol, recrudescent polygamic inclinations, exclusive devotion to greed and pelf; whether they become weak, stooping, blear-eyed, bald-headed, bow-legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coarse, barbaric, and bestial, the more they lose the power to lead woman or to arouse her nature, which is essentially passive. Thus her perversions are his fault. Man, before he lost the soil and piety, was not only her protector and provider, but her priest. He not only supported and defended, but inspired the souls of women, so admirably calculated to receive and elaborate suggestions, but not to originate them. In their inmost souls even young girls often experience disenchantment, find men little and no heroes, and so cease to revere and begin to think stupidly of them as they think coarsely of her. Sometimes the girlish conceptions of men are too romantic and exalted; often the intimacy of school and college wear off a charm, while man must not forget that to-day he too often fails to realize the just and legitimate expectations and ideals of women. If women confide themselves, body and soul, less to him than he desires, it is not she, but he, who is often chiefly to blame. Indeed, in some psychic respects, it seems as if in human society the processes of subordinating the male to the female, carried so far in some of the animal species, had already begun. If he is not worshiped as formerly, it is because he is less worshipful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to excite and retain the great love of true, not to say great, women. Where marriage and maternity are of less supreme interest to an increasing number of women, there are various results, the chief of which are as follows:
1. Women grow dollish; sink more or less consciously to man's level; gratify his desires and even his selfish caprices, but exact in return luxury and display, growing vain as he grows sordid; thus, while submitting, conquering, and tyrannizing over him, content with present worldly pleasure, unmindful of the past, the future, or the above. This may react to intersexual antagonism until man comes to hate woman as a witch, or, as in the days of celibacy, consider sex a wile of the devil. Along these lines even the stage is beginning to represent the tragedies of life.
2. The disappointed woman in whom something is dying comes to assert her own ego and more or less consciously to make it an end, aiming to possess and realize herself fully rather than to transmit. Despairing of herself as a woman, she asserts her lower rights in the place of her one great right to be loved. The desire for love may be transmuted into the desire for knowledge, or outward achievement become a substitute for inner content. Failing to respect herself as a productive organism, she gives vent to personal solutions; seeks independence; comes to know very plainly what she wants; perhaps becomes intellectually emancipated, and substitutes science for religion, or the doctor for the priest, with the all-sided impressionability characteristic of her sex which, when cultivated, is so like an awakened child. She perhaps even affects mannish ways, unconsciously copying from those not most manly, or comes to feel that she has been robbed of something; competes with men, but sometimes where they are most sordid, brutish, and strongest; always expecting, but never finding, she turns successively to art, science, literature, and reforms; craves especially work that she can not do; and seeks stimuli for feelings which have never found their legitimate expression.
3. Another type, truer to woman's nature, subordinates self; goes beyond personal happiness; adopts the motto of self-immolation; enters a life of service, denial, and perhaps mortification, like the Countess Schimmelmann; and perhaps becomes a devotee, a saint, and, if need be, a martyr, but all with modesty, humility, and with a shrinking from publicity.