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
training are now doing this, whether for racial weal or woe, can not
yet be determined, for many whom nature designed for model mothers.
The bachelor woman is an interesting illustration of Spencer's law of
the inverse relation of individuation and genesis. The completely
developed individual is always a terminal representative in her line
of descent. She has taken up and utilized in her own life all that was
meant for her descendants, and has so overdrawn her account with
heredity that, like every perfectly and completely developed
individual, she is also completely sterile. This is the very
apotheosis of selfishness from the standpoint of every biological
ethics. While the complete man can do and sometimes does this, woman
has a far greater and very peculiar power of overdrawing her reserves.
First she loses mammary functions, so that should she undertake
maternity its functions are incompletely performed because she can not
nurse, and this implies defective motherhood and leaves love of the
child itself defective and maimed, for the mother who has never nursed
can not love or be loved aright by her child. It crops out again in
the abnormal or especially incomplete development of her offspring, in
the critical years of adolescence, although they may have been
healthful before, and a less degree of it perhaps is seen in the
diminishing families of cultivated mothers in the one-child system.
These women are the intellectual equals and often the superiors of the
men they meet; they are very attractive as companions, like Miss Mehr,
the university student, in Hauptmann's "Lonely Lives," who alienated
the young husband from his noble wife; they enjoy all the keen
pleasures of intellectual activity; their very look, step, and bearing
is free; their mentality makes them good fellows and companionable in
all the broad intellectual spheres; to converse with them is as
charming and attractive for the best men as was Socrates's discourse
with the accomplished hetaerae; they are at home with the racquet and
on the golf links; they are splendid friends; their minds, in all
their widening areas of contact, are as attractive as their bodies;
and the world owes much and is likely to owe far more to high Platonic
friendships of this kind. These women are often in every way
magnificent, only they are not mothers, and sometimes have very little
wifehood in them, and to attempt to marry them to develop these
functions is one of the unique and too frequent tragedies of modern
life and literature. Some, though by no means all, of them are
functionally castrated; some actively deplore the necessity of
child-bearing, and perhaps are parturition phobiacs, and abhor the
limitations of married life; they are incensed whenever attention is
called to the functions peculiar to their sex, and the careful
consideration of problems of the monthly rest are thought "not fit for
cultivated women."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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