Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
and, as we saw above, of forgetting some of the ideals of her own sex.
Riper in mind and body than her male classmate, and often excelling
him in the capacity of acquisition, nearer the age of her full
maturity than he to his, he seems a little too crude and callow to
fulfil the ideals of manhood normal to her age which point to older
and riper men. In all that makes sexual attraction best, a classmate
of her own age is too undeveloped, and so she often suffers mute
disenchantment, and even if engagement be dreamed of, it would be, on
her part, with unconscious reservations if not with some conscious
renunciation of ideals. Thus the boy is correct in feeling himself
understood and seen through by his girl classmates to a degree that is
sometimes quite distasteful to him, while the girl finds herself
misunderstood by and disappointed in men. Boys arrive at the
humanistic stage of culture later than girls and pass it sooner; and
to find them already there and with their greater aptitude excelling
him, is not an inviting situation, and so he is tempted to abridge or
cut it out and to hasten on and be mature and professional before his
time, for thus he gravitates toward his normal relation to her sex of
expert mastership on some bread- or fame-winning line. Of course,
these influences are not patent, demonstrable by experiment, or
measurable by statistics; but I have come to believe that, like many
other facts and laws, they have a reality and a dominance that is
all-pervasive and inescapable, and that they will ultimately prevail
over economic motives and traditions.
To be a true woman means to be yet more mother than wife. The madonna
conception expresses man's highest comprehension of woman's real
nature. Sexual relations are brief, but love and care of offspring are
long. The elimination of maternity is one of the great calamities, if
not diseases, of our age. Marholm[4] points out at length how art
again to-day gives woman a waspish waist with no abdomen, as if to
carefully score away every trace of her mission; usually with no child
in her arms or even in sight; a mere figurine, calculated perhaps to
entice, but not to bear; incidentally degrading the artist who depicts
her to a fashion-plate painter, perhaps with suggestions of the arts
of toilet, cosmetics, and coquetry, as if to promote decadent reaction
to decadent stimuli. As in the Munchausen tale, the wolf slowly ate
the running nag from behind until he found himself in the harness, so
in the disoriented woman the mistress, virtuous and otherwise, is
slowly supplanting the mother. Please she must, even though she can
not admire, and can so easily despise men who can not lead her,
although she become thereby lax and vapid.
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