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
The more exhausted men become, whether by overwork, unnatural city
life, alcohol, recrudescent polygamic inclinations, exclusive devotion
to greed and pelf; whether they become weak, stooping, blear-eyed,
bald-headed, bow-legged, thin-shanked, or gross, coarse, barbaric, and
bestial, the more they lose the power to lead woman or to arouse her
nature, which is essentially passive. Thus her perversions are his
fault. Man, before he lost the soil and piety, was not only her
protector and provider, but her priest. He not only supported and
defended, but inspired the souls of women, so admirably calculated to
receive and elaborate suggestions, but not to originate them. In their
inmost souls even young girls often experience disenchantment, find
men little and no heroes, and so cease to revere and begin to think
stupidly of them as they think coarsely of her. Sometimes the girlish
conceptions of men are too romantic and exalted; often the intimacy of
school and college wear off a charm, while man must not forget that
to-day he too often fails to realize the just and legitimate
expectations and ideals of women. If women confide themselves, body
and soul, less to him than he desires, it is not she, but he, who is
often chiefly to blame. Indeed, in some psychic respects, it seems as
if in human society the processes of subordinating the male to the
female, carried so far in some of the animal species, had already
begun. If he is not worshiped as formerly, it is because he is less
worshipful or more effeminate, less vigorous and less able to excite
and retain the great love of true, not to say great, women. Where
marriage and maternity are of less supreme interest to an increasing
number of women, there are various results, the chief of which are as
follows:
1. Women grow dollish; sink more or less consciously to man's level;
gratify his desires and even his selfish caprices, but exact in return
luxury and display, growing vain as he grows sordid; thus, while
submitting, conquering, and tyrannizing over him, content with present
worldly pleasure, unmindful of the past, the future, or the above.
This may react to intersexual antagonism until man comes to hate woman
as a witch, or, as in the days of celibacy, consider sex a wile of the
devil. Along these lines even the stage is beginning to represent the
tragedies of life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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