Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
The United States have been and are all the while deriving fresh influx
of vigour and vitality in stock, from the continuous immigration of
simpler and more vitalised peoples. But American women proper have never
recovered from the strain and hardships of adaptation to a new
environment, which settlers in alien and undeveloped countries
necessarily encounter; the deteriorative influences whereof are shown in
constitutional impoverishment of the parent-stock. This is true, as
well, of our Colonial kin. Not only the strain of acclimatisation, but
too the hard and rough life-conditions women have to cope with in
undeveloped lands are responsible for the constitutionally-debilitated,
or, on the other hand, for the rawer and less highly-organised racial
types found in new settlements.
In the United States, moreover, the standards of culture and of training
are pre-eminently artificial. Democratic sentiment and material
prosperity induce persons of working-class biological organisation to
over-tax their children's brains and constitutions by forcing these to
the educational standards and culture of stock that has evolved, by
generations of higher nurture, to higher evolutionary grades. The
"newly-rich," eager for their families to profit (as they regard it) by
opportunities denied themselves, invariably commit this radical error of
over-estimating academic education and social accomplishment. They fail
to realise that one can no more attain culture than one can acquire
breeding in a single generation. It takes _three_ generations of
culture--of comparative ease and freedom from the strain of industrial
labour and living--to evolve the crude muscular arm of a working woman
into the shapely, refined arm of a gentlewoman. And so it must be with
brains. In nineteen cases out of twenty, a 'Varsity education serves as
irreparable injury rather than as benefit to a working-class youth,
depleting health or warping character as it inevitably does.
The strain of living above the evolutionary level is exhaustive and
harmful, physically and mentally, both to individuals and to stock. The
prudence of apportioning education to the grade of evolutionary
development is strikingly shown in the cases of negroes, who, when
over-taxed by the education normal to white races, not seldom become
blind or consumptive. And always the morale deteriorates. The forcing
upon our own labouring-classes of an education above that suited to
their natural powers has contributed largely to the constitutional
deterioration and the neurasthenia common among them to-day.
One of the factors of modern Labour-unrest, indeed, is the physical
unfitness of debilitated and neurotic working-men to cope capably and
cheerfully with the tasks of earlier and sturdier generations.
The urgent need of all our over-civilised races is not more education
but more _native faculty_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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