Mrs. Craigie Declares It Makes Girls
Overbearing and Converts Boys
Into Dandies or Weaklings.
Mrs. Craigie, better known to the literary world as John Oliver Hobbes, is an American woman who has spent many years in England. On her recent visit to her native land she gave her impressions of English life. Her keen observation, deepened and intensified by her life on two continents, and her wide and close association with great thinkers, lend weight to any subject upon which she expresses her opinions. She finds but two objections to coeducation: one is its effect on the boys, and the other on the girls.
Coeducation, she says, is not so dangerous to the working classes as to those of higher rank. The English working classes are a very sane lot, and, besides, the sexes seem better balanced among them than in the higher classes. In the board schools it may serve well enough, but in the higher classes coeducation is impossible. It is not only the girls that are to be considered. Coeducation not only makes English girls tomboys, overbearing and feverish in the pursuit of their masculine schoolmates, but it also has a very bad effect upon the boys. The boys, being inevitably outnumbered, five to one, either become silly little dandies, ruling a feminine court, or are tyrannized over by the girls until their spirits are broken and their ambition destroyed. All they care for is comfort.
It is dreadful that young boys should be cowed in this way and become submissive to their girl schoolmates, and yet even sturdy boys must bow to superior numbers, and twenty weak and sickly girls may tyrannize over four or five boys.
Mrs. Craigie's view seems to harmonize with that of Dr. G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University, and one of America's greatest educators. In discussing higher education in this country, he says it reduces the rate of both marriage and offspring, so that barely three-fourths of our male graduates and only about half of our female graduates marry, and those who do so, marry late and have few children. In an article contributed to Munsey's Magazine, he says:
Recent studies show that a large per cent of girls actually wish they were boys. Their ideals grow masculine, and we seem slowly to be developing a female sex without a female character. So far have the actions against the old restraint gone that feminists still regard every effort to differentiate as endangering a relapse to old conditions.
Again, the rapid feminization of our schools encourages women teachers to give their own masculine traits and ideals free rein.
Once more, girls' manners are roughened, and they do not develop pride in distinctively feminine qualities, or the grace and charm of their young womanhood, or lack a little respect for their sex. Girls have much responsibility in bestowing the stimulus of their approval aright. It is said that association with boys makes high-school girls less poetic, impulsive, romantic, their conduct more thoughtful, but I maintain, women teachers to the contrary notwithstanding, that this is unfortunate; that something is wrong with the girl in the middle teens who is not gushy or sentimental, at least at times.
So it is said that the presence of girls is humanizing for boys, but there is something wrong with the boy at this age who can truly be called a perfect gentleman. I do not like to urge that he should be a little rowdy or barbaric, but vigor must not be sacrificed to primness, and masculinity at this age does not normally take a high polish. Nature impels boys to get away, in certain respects, from girls and women, whoever they are. Some suffer subtle eviration, while others react, with coarseness toward femininity, if held in too close quarters with girls.