Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene

by G. Stanley Hall

In our civilization, I believe that bright girls of good environment of eighteen or nineteen, or even seventeen, have already reached the above-mentioned peculiar stage of first maturity, when they see the world at first hand, when the senses are at their very best, their susceptibilities and their insights the keenest, tension at its highest, plasticity and all-sided interests most developed, and their whole psychic soil richest and rankest and sprouting everywhere with the tender shoots of everything both good and bad. Some such—Stella Klive, Mary MacLane, Hilma Strandberg, Marie Bashkirtseff—have been veritable epics upon woman's nature; have revealed the characterlessness normal to the prenubile period in which everything is kept tentative and plastic, and where life seems to have least unity, aim, or purpose. By and by perhaps they will see in all their scrappy past, if not order and coherence, a justification, and then alone will they realize that life is governed by motives deeper than those which are conscious or even personal. This is the age when, if ever, no girl should be compelled. It is the experiences of this age, never entirely obliterated in women, that enable them to take adolescent boys seriously, as men can rarely do, in whom these experiences are more limited in range though no less intense. It is this stage in woman which is most unintelligible to man and even unrealized to herself. It is the echoes from it that make vast numbers of mothers pursue the various branches of culture, often half secretly, to maintain their position with their college sons and daughters, with their husbands, or with society.

But in a very few years, I believe even in the early twenties with American girls, along with rapidly in creasing development of capacity there is also observable the beginnings of loss and deterioration. Unless marriage comes there is lassitude, subtle symptoms of invalidism, the germs of a rather aimless dissatisfaction with life, a little less interest, curiosity, and courage, certain forms of self-pampering, the resolution to be happy, though at too great cost; and thus the clear air of morning begins to haze over and unconsciously she begins to grope. By thirty, she is perhaps goaded into more or less sourness; has developed more petty self-indulgences; has come to feel a right to happiness almost as passionately as the men of the French Revolution and as the women in their late movement for enfranchisement felt for liberty. Very likely she has turned to other women and entered into innocent Platonic pairing-off relations with some one. There is a little more affectation, playing a rôle, and interest in dress and appearance is either less or more specialized and definite. Perhaps she has already begun to be a seeker who will perhaps find, lose, and seek again. Her temper is modified; there is a slight stagnation of soul; a craving for work or travel; a love of children with flitting thoughts of adopting one, or else aversion to them; an analysis of psychic processes until they are weakened and insight becomes too clear; sense of responsibility without an object; a slight general malaise and a sense that society is a false "margarine" affair; revolt against those that insist that in her child the real value of a woman is revealed. There are alternations between excessive self-respect which demands something almost like adoration of the other sex and self-distrust, with, it may be, many dreameries about forbidden subjects and about the relations of the sexes generally.

A new danger, the greatest in the history of her sex, now impends, viz., arrest, complacency, and a sense of finality in the most perilous first stage of higher education for girls, when, after all, little has actually yet been won save only the right and opportunity to begin reconstructions, so that now, for the first time in history, methods and matter could be radically transformed to fit the nature and needs of girls. Now most female faculties, trustees, and students are content to ape the newest departures in some one or more male institutions as far as their means or obvious limitations make possible with a servility which is often abject and with rarely ever a thought of any adjustment, save the most superficial, to sex. It is the easiest, and therefore the most common, view typically expressed by the female head of a very successful institution,[5] who was "early convinced in my teaching experience that the methods for mental development for boys and girls applied equally without regard to sex, and I have carried the same thought when I began to develop the physical, and filled my gymnasium with the ordinary appliances used in men's gymnasia." There is no sex in mind or in science, it is said, but it might as well be urged that there is no age, and hence that all methods adapted to teaching at different stages of development may be ignored. That woman can do many things as well as man does not prove that she ought to do the same things, or that man-made ways are the best for her. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer[6] was right in saying that woman's education has all the perplexities of that of man, and many more, still more difficult and intricate, of its own.

Hence, we must conclude that, while women's colleges have to a great extent solved the problem of special technical training, they have done as yet very little to solve the larger one of the proper education of woman. To assume that the latter question is settled, as is so often done, is disastrous. I have forced myself to go through many elaborate reports of meetings where female education was discussed by those supposed to be competent; but as a rule, not without rare, striking exceptions, these proceedings are smitten with the same sterile and complacent artificiality that was so long the curse of woman's life. I deem it almost reprehensible that, save a few general statistics, the women's colleges have not only made no study themselves of the larger problems that impend, but have often maintained a repellent attitude toward others who wished to do so. No one that I know of connected with any of these institutions, where the richest material is going to waste, is making any serious and competent research on lines calculated to bring out the psycho-physiological differences between the sexes and those in authority are either conservative by constitution or else intimidated because public opinion is still liable to panics if discussion here becomes scientific and fundamental, and so tend to keep prudery and the old habit of ignoring everything that pertains to sex in countenance.

Again, while I sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every opportunity which she can fill, and yield to none in appreciation of her ability, I insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college is that it is based upon the assumption, implied and often expressed, if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be trained to independence and self-support, and that matrimony and motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even urge, is thus best provided for. If these colleges are, as the above statistics indicate, chiefly devoted to the training of those who do not marry, or if they are to educate for celibacy, this is right. These institutions may perhaps come to be training stations of a new-old type, the agamic or even agenic woman, be she nut, maid—old or young—nun, school-teacher, or bachelor woman. I recognize the very great debt the world owes to members of this very diverse class in the past. Some of them have illustrated the very highest ideals of self-sacrifice, service, and devotion in giving to mankind what was meant for husband and children. Some of them belong to the class of superfluous women, and others illustrate the noblest type of altruism and have impoverished the heredity of the world to its loss, as did the monks, who Leslie Stephens thinks contributed to bring about the Dark Ages, because they were the best and most highly selected men of their age and, by withdrawing from the function of heredity and leaving no posterity, caused Europe to degenerate. Modern ideas and training are now doing this, whether for racial weal or woe, can not yet be determined, for many whom nature designed for model mothers.

The bachelor woman is an interesting illustration of Spencer's law of the inverse relation of individuation and genesis. The completely developed individual is always a terminal representative in her line of descent. She has taken up and utilized in her own life all that was meant for her descendants, and has so overdrawn her account with heredity that, like every perfectly and completely developed individual, she is also completely sterile. This is the very apotheosis of selfishness from the standpoint of every biological ethics. While the complete man can do and sometimes does this, woman has a far greater and very peculiar power of overdrawing her reserves. First she loses mammary functions, so that should she undertake maternity its functions are incompletely performed because she can not nurse, and this implies defective motherhood and leaves love of the child itself defective and maimed, for the mother who has never nursed can not love or be loved aright by her child. It crops out again in the abnormal or especially incomplete development of her offspring, in the critical years of adolescence, although they may have been healthful before, and a less degree of it perhaps is seen in the diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one-child system. These women are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of the men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr, the university student, in Hauptmann's "Lonely Lives," who alienated the young husband from his noble wife; they enjoy all the keen pleasures of intellectual activity; their very look, step, and bearing is free; their mentality makes them good fellows and companionable in all the broad intellectual spheres; to converse with them is as charming and attractive for the best men as was Socrates's discourse with the accomplished hetaerae; they are at home with the racquet and on the golf links; they are splendid friends; their minds, in all their widening areas of contact, are as attractive as their bodies; and the world owes much and is likely to owe far more to high Platonic friendships of this kind. These women are often in every way magnificent, only they are not mothers, and sometimes have very little wifehood in them, and to attempt to marry them to develop these functions is one of the unique and too frequent tragedies of modern life and literature. Some, though by no means all, of them are functionally castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of child-bearing, and perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor the limitations of married life; they are incensed whenever attention is called to the functions peculiar to their sex, and the careful consideration of problems of the monthly rest are thought "not fit for cultivated women."

The slow evolution of this type is probably inevitable as civilization advances, and their training is a noble function. Already it has produced minds of the greatest acumen who have made very valuable contributions to science, and far more is to be expected of them in the future. Indeed, it may be their noble function to lead their sex out into the higher, larger life, and the deeper sense of its true position and function, for which I plead. Hitherto woman has not been able to solve her own problems. While she has been more religious than man, there have been few great women preachers; while she has excelled in teaching young children, there have been few Pestalozzis, or even Froebels; while her invalidism is a complex problem, she has turned to man in her diseases. This is due to the very intuitiveness and naïveté of her nature. But now that her world is so rapidly widening, she is in danger of losing her cue. She must be studied objectively and laboriously as we study children, and partly by men, because their sex must of necessity always remain objective and incommensurate with regard to woman, and therefore more or less theoretical. Again, in these days of intense new interest in feelings, emotions, and sentiments, when many a psychologist now envies and, like Schleiermacher, devoutly wishes he could become a woman, he can never really understand das Ewig-Weibliche, [The eternal womanly] one of the two supreme oracles of guidance in life, because he is a man; and here the cultivated woman must explore the nature of her sex as man can not, and become its mouthpiece. In many of the new fields opening in biology since Darwin, in embryology, botany, the study of children, animals, savages (witness Miss Fletcher), sociological investigation, to say nothing of all the vast body of work that requires painstaking detail, perseverance, and conscience, woman has superior ability, or her very sex gives her peculiar advantages where she is to lead and achieve great things in enlarging the kingdom of man. Perhaps, too, the present training of women may in the end develop those who shall one day attain a true self-knowledge and lead n the next step of devising a scheme that shall fit woman's nature and needs.

For the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first of all distinctly and ostensively invert the present maxim, and educate primarily and chiefly for motherhood, assuming that, if that does not come, single life can best take care of itself, because it is less intricate and lower and its needs far more easily met. While girls may be trained with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of adolescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy between the sexes in high school, if not in college, tends to rub of the bloom and delicacy which can develop in each, and girls suffer in this respect, let us repeat, far more than boys. The familiar comradeship that ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Staël, the Misses Cobb, Martineau, Fuller, Bronté, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs. Browning; and while accepting and profiting by what they have done, and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and achievements, prospective mothers must not be allowed to forget a still larger class of ideal women, both in history and literature, from the Holy Mother to Beatrice Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who have inspired men to great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of noble mothers.

We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she can, from surreptitious or worthy sources, what she most of all needs to know; must recognize that our present civilization is hard on woman and that she is not yet adjusted to her social environment; that as she was of old accused of having given man the apple of knowledge of good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less serious indictment of having given her the apple of intellectualism and encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense of health. We must recognize that riches are probably harder on her, on the whole, than poverty, and that poor parents should not labor too hard to exempt her from its wholesome discipline. The expectancy of change so stamped upon her sex by heredity as she advances into maturity must not be perverted into uneasiness or her soul sown with the tares of ambition or fired by intersexual competition and driven on, to quote Dr. R.T. Edes, "by a tireless sort of energy which is a compound of conscience, ambition, and desire to please, plus a peculiar female obstinacy." If she is bright, she must not be overworked in the school factory, studying in a way which parodies Hood's "Song of the Shirt"; and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by preceptresses like a eminent lady principal,[7] who thought girls' weakness is usually imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for suggesting illness and for intimating that men will have to choose between a healthy animal and an educated invalid for a wife.

Without specifying here details or curricula, the ideals that should be striven toward in the intermediate and collegiate education of adolescent girls with the proper presupposition of motherhood, and which are already just as practicable as Abbotsholme[8] or L'Ecole des Roches,[9] may be rudely indicated somewhat as follows.