W. K. Brooks,3 approaching the subject from the stand- point of biology, characterized the female body, instincts, and habits as conservative, devoted to keeping what has been ac- quired by successive generations as new layers of snow are added to glaciers. Thus woman is best in acting and judging in ordinary matters; man in those that are extraordinary. The male is the agent of variation and progress, and transmits variations best, so that perhaps the male cell and sex itself originated in order to produce variation. Influence is more potent than argument with women. An ideal or typical male is hard to define, but there is a standard ideal woman. Be- cause her mind is, more than that of man, essentially an organ of heredity, we find that, although she may sometimes seem volatile and desultory, the fact that her processes seem to be unconscious emancipates her from nature less than is the case with man. Her thought is a mode of thinking. Brooks pre- sents the following suggestive scheme: 1 The Chances of Death.
•Variation in Man and Woman. Pop. Sci. Mo., January, 1903. 1 The Condition of Woman from a Zoological Point of View. Two articles, Pop. Sci. Mo., June, 1879.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE The power of to foresee the conduct of or to influence is greater than the power of to foresee the conduct of or to influence Women Women Men Men «< M « Women II Men « Men 41 « « Women Hyatt l says that " men and women, like the males and females of most animals, show by their organization that they have been evolved from a type in which both sexes have been combined in the same individual. The separation of the sexes did not destroy this dual nature, as is demonstrated by the development of secondary male characters in the old age of many species of animals, and of women in extreme age, and of feminine characters in aged men. This opinion can also be supported by the structure of the tissue cells in the body, the nuclei of which are made up of paternal and maternal parts. This dual structure enables us to understand the fact that secondary sexual characters are latent in both males and females/' He also urges that " in the early history of man- kind the women and men led lives more nearly alike and were consequently more alike physically and mentally than they have become subsequently in the lives of highly civilized peo- ples. This divergence of the sexes is a marked characteristic of progression among highly civilized races. Coeducation of the sexes, occupations of a certain kind, and woman's suffrage may have a tendency to approximate the ideals, the lives, and the habits of women to those of men in these same highly civilized races. Such approximation in the future, while per- fectly natural and not in the common sense degenerate, would not belong to the progressive evolution of mankind." They would be convergences, and although they might bring intel- lectual advance would tend to virify women and feminize men, and would be retrogressive. We find gerontic changes even in the younger stages of adults, when the phylum is declining, or in its epacme. Perhaps, he thinks, a type like an individual has only a limited store of vitality and a cycle, so that we can 1 The Influences of Woman in the Evolution of the Human Race. Natural Science, August, 1897, p. 89.
ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 569 speak of phylogerontic stages. If man is approaching this stage, it is especially important that every degenerative influ- ence be avoided, because our organisms may be such that we can not rely upon continuous or certain progress, one neces- sity of which is that the sexes be not approximated, for this would inaugurate retrogressive evolution.
II. The Medical Standpoint. — Even the demands of the new-school hygiene now represented by so many experts, new journals, conferences, etc., have revealed no point of such wide divergence between doctors and current methods and ideals as in the education of adolescent girls. We have no space for even the outline of or history of this holy war, one of the most important of many that physiology and biology have had to wage with ignorance and well-entrenched custom, but must be content with sampling a few of the most repre- sentative medical opinions in chronological order since this issue was so fairfy and opportunely raised. What follows in this section is immediately connected with Chapter VII.
Dr. Storer,1 one of the first and most sagacious American writers in this field, urged that girls should be educated far more in body and less in mind, and thought delicate girls fre- quently ruined in both body and mind by school. He was not only one of the first to urge that surgery should be per- formed at the uterine ebb which affected the system even dur- ing pregnancy, but to hold that education should be regulated throughout with reference to monthly changes. An epoch, however, was marked by Dr. Clarke's2 book in 1873, and the reply to it by Miss Brackett 3 and twelve other ladies eminent in the movement for the higher education of girls. The for- mer was a not very scholarly, but a simple and sensible, plea by a practitioner of experience that woman's periods must be more respected. It appeared at the height of the movement to secure collegiate opportunities for girls, was suspected of being unofficially inspired by the unwillingness of Harvard College to receive them, and reached a seventeenth edition 1 Female Hygiene, by H. R. Storer, M.D. California State Board of Health, 1871, and in many other publications.
2 Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls, by Edward H. Clarke, M.D Boston, 1873.
'The Education of American Girls. New York, 1874. 75 57° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE in a few years. The women who replied took very diverse views. To one it was an intrusion into the sacred domain of womanly privacy. To another it seemed insolent and coarse, an affront to the sex. To another it was only a sneer, not doing as men would be done by, for the vices of men were worse, twitting them of their sex, throwing sex in their teeth; " these things must not be thought of in this wise." One writer deplored that women had not said this for and of them- selves, and advised that they study physiology, etc. On the whole, Dr. Clarke raised the most important issue in the his- tory of female education, and his book is still a shibboleth of a woman's attitude on most questions pertaining to her sex and its so-called sphere. The misery of being a girl, said Byford,1 consists in feeling at this age that she is prone to pain, depression of spirits, bears a badge of inferiority which must be endured, must wear corsets, pads, and long clothes that impede her movements and that must never be soiled or rumpled by free activity to which she was accustomed as a girl. Her studies are laid on her sensitive consciousness and her pride and self-respect prompt her to overwork. Girls' schools are governed too much, for girls need now not less but far more freedom than boys. Some parts of the body are clothed too thickly, and some too little for health. No- where in the world do men work so hard or girls and women do so little useful work or render so little real service to the community as in this country. Young men are often fastid- ious and unpractical, and are attracted by accomplishments that fall off and are lost soon after marriage, while they do not know how to seek or recognize what is useful, and thus defer matrimony as a too expensive luxury. In this self-imposed celibacy they become dangerous to the virtue of the debili- tated if not degenerate girls in the community.
Dr. Beard 2 says, after sending many circulars and study- ing the returns they brought: " Nearly everything about the conduct of the schools was wrong, unphysiological and un- psychological, and they were conducted so as to make very sad and sorrowing the lives of those who were forced to attend 1 The Second Decade of Life. Cincinnati Lancet and Observer, 1877, p. 342. 'American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences. New York, 1881.
ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 57 l them. It was clear that the teachers and managers of these schools knew nothing of and cared nothing for those matters relating to education that are of the highest importance, and that the routine of the schools was such as would have been devised by some evil deity who wished to take vengeance on the race and the nation...Everything pushed in an unsci- entific and distressing manner, nature violated at every step, endless reciting and lecturing and striving to be first — such are the female schools of America at this hour. The first signs of ascension or of declension in nations are seen in women. As the foliage of delicate plants first shows the early warmth of spring, and the earliest frosts of autumn, so the impressible, susceptive organization of woman appre- ciates and exhibits far sooner than that of man the manifesta- tion of national progress or decay." Nathan Allen 1 urged that while in men.everything depended upon bodily vigor, this was even more important for girls, for in them we were edu- cating the race. The best balance for weak nerves or other organs was well-developed muscles, and in this at proper periods he saw the way of safety for the well and of salvation for the sickly. Stated and out-of-door and not excessive physical culture he thought had a normative influence upon the monthly function, and he, too, held to periodic remission of work for mind, heart, and muscles.
The current prejudices that menstruation is a disagree- able function or a badge of inferiority, Dr. Galippe 2 thinks arose from educational establishments for girls. The senti- ment, which prevails in these schools, is that it is somewhat shameful and at least not worthy of serious and respectful consideration by well-bred minds. Instead of indicating her state to some person selected for that purpose and receiving from her the delicate, hygienic instruction and consideration needed, the pubescent girl conceals it and is left to herself, and metrorrhagia or anemia and often local states result which are simply pathetic. Girls do not complain of easily remov- able suffering, thinking often that pain is inseparable from 1 The Education of Girls as Connected with their Growth and Physical Develop- ment. Sanitarian, 1879.
2 De la Menstruation dans les Etablissements Consacres a 1' Education des Jeunes Filles. Rev. de Hygiene et de Police Sanitarie, 1880, ii, p. 605 ft seq.
572 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE this function, and take part in all the exercises of the school, both physical and mental, when they have crying need of all the highest functions of true motherhood to teach them the effects of fatigue and excitement, the need of rest, and proper regimen and toilet. It is vain to assume that because savages or peasants can live in a state of nature, that well-born girls at school can be thus abandoned. Civilization in some respects is an artificial state and needs new habits and functions be- cause it involves greater susceptibility.
Dr. F. C. Taylor1 presents some pertinent considerations as follows: Civilization is hard on woman, and constantly stimulates her beyond her strength, fires her with ambitions she can not realize, and robs her of the tranquillity she needs. Imperfect sexual hygiene is a prolific source of evil to the individual woman and to the race. If the latter deteriorates it will be through the degeneration of woman. In her, sex and its wider irradiations overshadow all else during her ripening period, is an ever-present influence controlling mind and body, and in old age is the glory of the declining day of life. If the sexual life is lowered or suppressed, a tonic needed for vigor in all directions is lost. Owing in part to the fact that her organs are internal and therefore less or later known, they are less often consciously connected with impressions that are indirectly if not directly sexual, and there is greater convertibility of emotions. Women can remain in what is really a suppressed semi-erotic state with never-cul- minating feeling, so scattered in their interests and enthu- siasms that they can not fix their affections permanently. Particularly repressed molimina may become vicarious and issue in estheticism and all kinds of noble or ignoble interests.
Women are sometimes led astray when their feelings are made especially delicate by bereavement, and on the other hand, ex- cessive erotic sensations sometimes cause loss of power in the limbs. Unmarried women are, and ought to be, great walk- ers, but wives and mothers expend the same energy normally in other ways. Where the normal exercise of functions is unduly restrained, it finds, therefore, many other outlets. Dr.
1 Effects in Woman of Imperfect Hygiene of Sex Functions. Am. Jour, of ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 573 Taylor thinks, however, that the difference between boys and girls in learning self-abuse on account of the more obvious anatomy of the former is overestimated, and that the latter, more commonly than is thought, not only find their organs and use them improperly, but are more difficult to cure of this vice.
Clouston, in various articles and books, has expressed him- self in very trenchant terms. Each generation, he premises, can use up more than its share of energy, and women have a peculiar power of taking out of themselves more than they can bear. All should carry a reserve to meet emergencies and not use up all their power, and thus rob future generations.1 His conception is also that human life is divided into stages, each of which must be lived out in such a way as not to draw upon the later stages. We should ask what nature aims at in each period ar\d surround each by its own ideal conditions, and see to it that in no stage we strive for what belongs to another later one. Again, any organ like the brain or repro- ductive parts, if overworked, may draw upon the vigor of others. Each individual stage and organ has just so much energy. We should strive sedulously to keep the mental back in all and especially in females, and not " spoil a good mother to make a grammarian." In the United States, Clouston thinks that most families have more or less nervous taint or disease; that heredity is weak because woman has lost her cue, -although nature is benign and always tends to a cure if we have not gone too far astray. Adolescence is more important for girls than for boys. Science and learning are happily less likely to take a dominating hold of woman's nature, because they are not along the lines on which it was built. Clouston is fond of reminding us that none of Shake- speare's women were learned, that even Portia describes her- self as " an unlettered girl, unschooled, unpractised." Most great men's mothers were women of strong mind, but not highly educated. Would their sons have been better, he asks, had the mothers been schooled? Would they have been really better companions for men, and is learning bought at the 1 Female Education from a Medical Point of View, by T. S. Clouston, M.D. Pop. Sci. Mo., 1884, two articles, pp. 214, 319.
574 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE expense of any degree of cheerfulness, which is the best sign of health, not too costly? "There is no time or place of organic repentance provided by nature for sins of the school- master." A man can work if he is one-sided or defective, but not so a woman. " If she is not more or less finished and happy at twenty-five, she will never be." Parents want chil- dren to work in order to tone down their animal spirits, and it almost seems to Clouston as if the devil invented the school for spite. He quotes approvingly Oliver Wendell Holmes, who refers to the " American female constitution which col- lapses just in the middle third of life and comes out vulcanized India-rubber, if it happens to live through the period when health and strength are most wranted," and thinks girls' brains should be put to grass for a few generations. Fun is to the mind what fat is to the body. A large part of study should be what to omit and skip and not to know. Possibly we may be developing an unique kind of girl, a different species. A true fully developed woman is very hard to mature, but when ripe can stand very much.
Thorburn l fears disproportion between the development of muscle and of nerve in women. Girls should do hardly any steady work for one year before and two after puberty. They can not work without peril for about one-fourth of the time, and should adjust themselves to this law of their nature and plan to lie fallow about a quarter of the time. Teachers and others should not wait to be asked before excusing them from their task, but should command it without request. Girls should cultivate the festina lente of poise and develop the dig- nity and the efficiency of going slow, but this should be in no wise construed as inimical to their education. This problem we shall not have solved until there is no more clanger of college unfitting women to be wives than of its unfitting men to be husbands.
Most frequent among all the menstrual disorders of schoolgirls, Dr. Wilson 9 thinks, is dysmenorrhea. Next comes suppression, while 1 Female Education from a Medical Point of View, by John Thorburn, M. D. Manchester, 1884.
* Menstrual Disorders in Schoolgirls. The Texas Sanitarium, June, 1885. J. T. Wilson, M. D. See also subsequent discussion.
ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 575 menorrhagia is rare at this age. He urges more attention to physical development before puberty. Constipation, headache, sallowness, acne, leucorrhea, insomnia, perversity of appetite, dyspepsia, overtension of nerves, tea-ism, coffee-ism, cold feet, emotional strain, he finds amaz- ingly prevalent in the schools. American girls come to this crisis without having known much control or restraint, and with their habits and actions almost entirely unsystematized. They appear rosy and healthy because energies, that should go to perfecting other parts and functions, have been diverted to cerebration. Influences from those about her tend to make her give up free and girlish sports and romp- ing, and to feel herself a woman too suddenly. Her dress interferes with portal circulation, digestion, respiration, and favors displace- ment at a time when her entire system is most susceptible to disturb- ances, which it did not heed before. She is thrown on her own re- sponsibility, is often among strangers, her emotional nature is excited by music and art. From childhood, she is petted, pampered, and spoiled, thought cute and cunning, can not submit to restraint, and often has a small body of misinformation about herself, which is far worse than ignorance. She is made egotistic and superficial, is distracted by the beginnings of ftiany sorts of knowledge. She lays the foundation of invalidism at a time when she should become a mother, has a horror of maternity, partly instinctive and partly induced, hankers for pastry, sweets, and hot bread that insult and vex the stomach, and dreads the recurrence of periods which bring irritation and depression. She does not turn to her mother for care or advice, for unconscious in- stinct teaches her that there is no help from that source. Probably most American girls now have, Wilson thinks, more or less hereditary tendencies towards functional disorders, so that to inaugurate a proper hygiene that should lead to healthy and vigorous womanhood in most cases needs nothing less than medical supervision; while gynecologists agree in recognizing a steady increase of female troubles, as well as the increased use of drugs or patent nostrums, their own endeavors tend less to specific and more to general regimen.
The views of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell 1 are well known and have been often expressed. Woman, he holds, is physiolog- ically other than man and no education can change her. No one knows woman who does not know sick woman. She takes to being a patient naturally and comfortably, although if long ill she warps morally. Her doctor must often read the riot act to a mob of emotions; must look beyond drugs, for she is prone to think three pills a day easier than diet or regimen. He must listen and sympathize with her ills and with the joy 1 See e. g. his Doctor and Patient. Philadelphia, 1888, passim, and many other of his writings.
$76 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of convalescence in order to be of real use to her. He must recognize how prone nervous and feeble women are to crave pity and love power; how prone, like all who have not learned the great lesson of bearing pain, they are to some narcotic habit. Out-of-door life, the camp cure, sewing for its moral value, and all that pertains to regimen and psychic influence must be at her doctor's command.
Grant Allen l insists that there ought to be a woman ques- tion and movement, but it must accept the fact that most adult women will be wives and mothers. In any ideal community the greatest possible number of women must be devoted to maternity and marriage, and support by men must be assumed and not female celibacy. The accidental and exceptional must not be the rule or the goal. This is only a pis alter. It is not so much the unmarried minority that need attention as the mothers. We must not abet woman as a sex in rebelling against maternity, quarreling with the moon, or sacrifice wifehood to maidenhood. The whole question of sex must be reconsid- ered. This woman will never do, nor will she go as far as men in emancipating herself. He even goes so far as to sug- gest that, waives or not, we must have mothers. Men must be made more virile, women more feminine, and sex dis- tinctions must be pushed to the uttermost. Woman must not be allowed to cramp her intellect or her waist. What seem to men feminine idiosyncrasies must be unfolded. She must be set free from her craven fear of the Grundian goddess. Her sexuality is in danger of enfeeblement. She eschews marriage often from the want of a normal physical impulse.
Instead of the ideal of becoming a self-supporting spinster, she ought to be married at twenty-five and plan to be. It is a shame to any normal woman not to long to be a wife and mother, and not to glory in her femininity, or to prate of those who insist on the laws of nature " as traitors to their sex," and " casting sex in their teeth." Allen estimates that about six children per marriage are necessary to keep up the popu- lation, as more than one-half die before maturity. If the best abstain from child-bearing, then the population is kept up by the lowest. Savages make but little provision for their 1 Plain Words about the Woman Question. Pop. Sci. Mo., December, 1889.
ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 577 women, so that analogy would lead us to suppose with Comte that in the highest state women will care only for children, and men do all the work.
Le Bon l pleaded that the education we now give to girls consists of instruction that fits brains otherwise constructed, perverts womanly instincts, falsifies the spirit and judgment, enfeebles the constitution, confuses their moods concern- ing their duties and their happiness, and generally disequili- brates them. It charges the brain with too much information that is useless, fails to give what can be applied, and fits them neither for domesticity nor for gaining their livelihood. It makes them misconceive their role in society and in the family, and often jealous of man and at heart inimical to the social order, and threatens future degeneration of the race.
In a suggestive series of ten articles, Dr. James Crichton Browne 2 defies Weismannism if it mitigates the woe that impends to a land if mothers decay. Girls, he says, suffer far more change and instability at the onset of puberty than boys, and he deprecates sowing the tares of ambition for careers in girls. He finds headaches far too common among young girls from ten to seventeen; advocates the abolition of evening study; finds danger that the ovum and sperm cell may have their activity so reduced before meeting that the infant comes to life old and without a fair chance. Despite the average increase of life for men, and still more for women, during the last forty years, he finds that beyond middle life there is little reduction of death-rate and that wear-and-tear diseases are increased; that even cancer is perhaps coming to have a nervous element; that neurasthenia and functional nerve troubles are augmenting; he thinks all " voluminous states " of nerves or souls are harbingers of epilepsy and especially de- plores the propensity to take short-sighted views seeking im- mediate causes (" the lobster salad did it ") for the outcrops of troubles of long and perhaps of ancestral incubation.
He 3 also holds that differences between sexes are involved in every organ and tissue, and deprecates the present relentless 3 Sex in Education, by Sir James Crichton Browne, M. D. Educational Re- 578 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE zeal of intersexual competition, concerning the results of which it is appalling to speculate from a medical point of view. When the University of St. Andrews opened its theo- logical department to woman, it was not a retrograde move- ment, because our ancestors did no such thing, but a down- hill step fraught with confusion and disaster. He quotes with approval Huxley's phrase that " what has been decided among prehistoric protozoa can not be annulled by an act of Parlia- ment." This is a condition that no senatus academicum can obliterate by pen strokes. In unicellular organisms the con- jugating cells are alike, but forms become more and more dimorphic. As we go higher sexes diverge not only in pri- mary and secondary sex characteristics, but in functions not associated with sex. Reciprocal dependence increases as does harmony, and each is in some respects higher and each lower. In union they are strong; in competition mutually destructive. Warner, he thinks, is right in saying that " mental stimulus applied to children lowers their general nutrition." Gastric troubles and anorexia scholastica increase, and all the abdomi- nal viscera become more or less exhausted until often apathy passes into mild coma, " the cyclone of mania, the anti-cyclone