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Sex And Education: A Reply To Dr. E.H. Clarke's "Sex In Education"
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255 | If there are any spheres of labor or of action that have with earnest solicitude more carefully and faithfully looked after the health of the girls and women who every day repair within their walls than have many of our seminaries of learning, we have yet to learn the fact. | |
256 | So long as men are willing that women should do all or any of the things herein specified, beside the thousand and one things to which we have no space to allude; so long as men are willing she should enter marriage, a regimen which imposes more duties, responsibilities, trials, burdens, cares, and sorrows than any other can, which taxes health, strength, blood, and nerve infinitely more than any thing else she can ever do; so long as they are willing that she should endure the wear and tear of wifehood and motherhood, the severest and most trying ordeals through which human beings are ever called to pass, and, in comparison to the burdens which it inflicts Upon her physical organization, all others are of a straw's weight; so long as men are willing that woman should act, work, labor, earn her living in these various capacities, not one of which gives. her more opportunity to favor herself than it gives man, is it not insulting for a physician to single out one individual phase of action, and declare that it is a sin for woman to share equally with man in the advantages it affords, because it don't pay so much attention to the subject of catamenia as he thinks it ought? | |
257 | Will Dr. Clarke please tell us why colleges, or places of learning of any kind, should be denied to woman on the ground that an insufficient amount of deference is given to her physiological nature, any more than other institutions which overlook it entirely? | |
258 | XIII. | |
259 | BY A. C. GARLAND. | |
260 | A VERY flattering notice of the volume bearing the title "Sex in Education" having appeared in the "Journal," one "ambitious woman," who is not "fretting under the restraints which nature imposes," but those arbitrary and unjust social laws which have grown out of a false, partial, and superficial view of nature's laws, and who is not "meditating the dangerous experiment of making herself a man," but has long claimed for herself and other women the right of deciding what constitutes womanhood, feels moved to reply. | |
261 | Not having read the book in question, we shall simply attack the position of its admirer. We find, first, a complaint that the "subject" of woman's co-education with man "has been treated as a matter purely of moral claim, not of natural capacity," by many. Those who have claimed equal educational advantages for women as a right have in nearly if not all cases done so because of the following unanswerable reasons: While women are taxed for the support of higher schools of instruction, they have a moral claim on such institutions for the equal education of both sexes. The statement of any author, that "experience and careful observation have proved that the higher education of women has been detrimental to their health, is simply an assumption of his own, which can be met by as determined and well-proven statements on the other side. The fact is, that we cannot absolutely settle the limits of woman's strength and endurance by any experiments made and recorded so imperfectly as they must be at a time like the present, when the majority of women who are educating themselves thoroughly in public colleges are doing so at the cost of home comforts, and under a severe pressure resulting from poverty. There was a time in the history of New England when the great majority of young men who were studying for the Christian ministry were in such poor health that sanctity and an earnest purpose came to .be associated in almost every person's mind with a body just ready to fall a victim to any disease, a cadaverous or "spiritual "face, and a thin and wasted hand. Why was this? Not because the simple preparation of study injured them, but because they could not afford the generous living and comfortable homes which the body requires for its development, and their necessities compelled them to work outside their studies, while their student enthusiasm led them to disregard many laws of health. For these same reasons many a woman to-day fails in her course, when so near the end that a few more years would land her in competence and congenial employment. The health of the young ladies in Vassar College -- where the curriculum is quite as exhaustive and exhausting as the various special courses at Harvard, to say the least -- is excellent, as statistics, not theories, show. In the early history of Oberlin, the pioneer in higher education of the sexes, we read the names of many women who, so far from being "wrecks," physically at least, have lived to bear healthy children, have borne their full share of woman's special duties, and, in addition, have made themselves famous in various departments of literary and reformatory labor. | |
262 | The recent census reports show that of all classes of women most subject to insanity and other diseases, the "farmers' wives" are most afflicted. Does higher education do this work? Our observation, neither "professional" nor very "extensive," but careful and fair, has shown more healthful and strong women among the better educated, even the intellectual, than in those whose lives have been devoted exclusively to the duties which their sex imposes on them. It seems reasonable that the profession which calls for most varied talent, demands most strength of brain and body, is the most potent power for good or evil which the world knows, that of motherhood, should be freely accorded every advantage of physical, intellectual, and moral training which the State has it in its power to bestow. |