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
It has just been said that the educational methods of our schools and
colleges for girls are, to a large extent, the cause of "the thousand
ills" that beset American women. Let it be remembered that this is not
asserting that such methods of education are the sole cause of female
weaknesses, but only that they are one cause, and one of the most
important causes of it. An immense loss of female power may be fairly
charged to irrational cooking and indigestible diet. We live in the
zone of perpetual pie and dough-nut; and our girls revel in those
unassimilable abominations. Much also may be credited to artificial
deformities strapped to the spine, or piled on the head, much to
corsets and skirts, and as much to the omission of clothing where it
is needed as to excess where the body does not require it; but, after
the amplest allowance for these as causes of weakness, there remains a
large margin of disease unaccounted for. Those grievous maladies which
torture a woman's earthly existence, called leucorrhoea, amenorrhoea,
dysmenorrhoea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsus uteri, hysteria,
neuralgia, and the like, are indirectly affected by food, clothing,
and exercise; they are directly and largely affected by the causes
that will be presently pointed out, and which arise from a neglect of
the peculiarities of a woman's organization. The regimen of our
schools fosters this neglect. The regimen of a college arranged for
boys, if imposed on girls, would foster it still more.
The scope of this paper does not permit the discussion of these other
causes of female weaknesses. Its object is to call attention to the
errors of physical training that have crept into, and twined
themselves about, our ways of educating girls, both in public and
private schools, and which now threaten to attain a larger
development, and inflict a consequently greater injury, by their
introduction into colleges and large seminaries of learning, that have
adopted, or are preparing to adopt, the co-education of the sexes.
Even if there were space to do so, it would not be necessary to
discuss here the other causes alluded to. They are receiving the
amplest attention elsewhere. The gifted authoress of "The Gates Ajar"
has blown her trumpet with no uncertain sound, in explanation and
advocacy of a new-clothes philosophy, which her sisters will do well
to heed rather than to ridicule. It would be a blessing to the race,
if some inspired prophet of clothes would appear, who should teach
the coming woman how, in pharmaceutical phrase, to fit, put on, wear,
and take off her dress,--
"Cito, Tuto, et Jucunde."
Corsets that embrace the waist with a grip that tightens respiration
into pain, and skirts that weight the hips with heavier than maternal
burdens, have often caused grievous maladies, and imposed a needless
invalidism. Yet, recognizing all this, it must not be forgotten that
breeches do not make a man, nor the want of them unmake a woman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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