Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for GirlsClarke, Edward H. (Edward Hammond)
Science
Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls
Clarke, Edward H. (Edward Hammond)
Women -- Education; Women -- Health and hygiene
Words fail to convey the lesson of this case to others with any thing
like the force that the observation of it conveyed its moral to those
about Miss F----, and especially to the physician who watched her
career through her educational life, and saw it lead to its logical
conclusion of invalidism and thence towards recovery, till life ended.
When she finished school, as the phrase goes, she was considered to be
well. The principal of any seminary or head of any college, judging
by her looks alone, would not have hesitated to call her rosy and
strong. At that time the symptoms of failure which began to appear
were called signs of previous overwork. This was true, but not so much
in the sense of overwork as of erroneously-arranged work. While a
student, she wrought continuously,--just as much during each
catamenial week as at other times. As a consequence, in her
metamorphosis of tissue, repair did little more than make up waste.
There were constant demands of force for constant growth of the system
generally, equally constant demands of force for the labor of
education, and periodical demands of force for a periodical function.
The regimen she followed did not permit all these demands to be
satisfied, and the failure fell on the nervous system. She
accomplished intellectually a good deal, but not more than she might
have done, and retained her health, had the order of her education
been a physiological one. It was not Latin, French, German,
mathematics, or philosophy that undermined her nerves; nor was it
because of any natural inferiority to boys that she failed; nor
because she undertook to master what women have no right to learn: she
lost her health simply because she undertook to do her work in a boy's
way and not in a girl's way.
Let us learn the lesson of one more case. These details may be
tedious; but the justification of their presence here are the
importance of the subject they illustrate and elucidate, and the
necessity of acquiring a belief of the truth of the facts of female
education.
Miss G---- worked her way through New-England primary, grammar, and
high schools to a Western college, which she entered with credit to
herself, and from which she graduated, confessedly its first scholar,
leading the male and female youth alike. All that need be told of her
career is that she worked as a student, continuously and
perseveringly, through the years of her first critical epoch, and for
a few years after it, without any sort of regard to the periodical
type of her organization. It never appeared that she studied
excessively in other respects, or that her system was weakened while
in college by fevers or other sickness. Not a great while after
graduation, she began to show signs of failure, and some years later
died under the writer's care. A post-mortem examination was made,
which disclosed no disease in any part of the body, except in the
brain, where the microscope revealed commencing degeneration.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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