Library Collections: Document: Full Text

IV.

BY ADA SHEPARD BADGER.

No thoughtful reader can fail to appreciate the nobleness of the purpose that actuated Dr. Clarke in writing "Sex in Education." No loving and thinking mother can lay aside the book, after reading the first pages, until the whole is perused. But no candid woman teacher, with the interests of education for girls deeply at heart, can quietly allow Dr. Clarke's statement to pass without wishing to suggest essential modifications of its main idea.

In her double capacity of teacher and mother, the writer of the present article begs leave to call the attention of other mothers and teachers to a few facts bearing upon the other side of this quaestio vexata.

And, to begin with that branch of the subject which is least essential, since education stands before co-education in all minds, -- and, so that we obtain the former, we will not insist too strongly upon the latter, -- Dr. Clarke quotes the opinion of "a philanthropist and an intelligent observer," holding an official connection with a college for men and women, that "the co-education of the sexes is intellectually a success, physiologically a failure." He does not state the facts from which this inference is drawn. Doubtless this observer has known instances where women who studied in classes with men finally succumbed to disease, as did some of their male classmates, in all probability.

But what gives him the power to decide that the proportion of the sufferers among the female graduates is greater than that among their male classmates, or that the seeds of the particular form of malady which has prostrated any woman student were not sown, before the birth of the latter, in the organism of a mother to whose youth the opportunity for a liberal education was denied? And how can he know that their very origin was not attributable to the lack of that knowledge of physiology requisite to instruct a woman as to the commonest facts with regard to the care of herself required by the approach of the sacred office of maternity? And what probability is there that, had the sufferer in question pursued one of the alternatives to a student's course, a life of fashionable folly, or even one of common Wiling, uninspired by the light of a newly awakened intellectual life, these germs of disease would have been less likely to come to fruition? What are the grounds of belief that regular study is a prominent cause of physical degeneracy?

Facts of the nature of those stated by Dr. Clarke (in Part III., chiefly clinical) would doubtless be adduced by the observer above cited, were he called upon to substantiate his opinion. But, could we look at any one of these cases with the power to judge the hidden as well as the revealed causes in operation, considering also what would have been the probable alternative adopted by the individual in question, had study not been her chief pursuit, is it not quite possible that the conclusion at which we should arrive would contradict that of the work before us?

One of the most striking cases mentioned in Part III. chances to have been known to the writer from the earliest infancy of the subject. And, although the details of such a case are forbidden by many considerations, the circumstance of studying in and being graduated with honor at a college planned for both sexes, and in which, indeed, she remained through the senior year only, was but a slight cause among the many that converged to menace, and finally to overcome, that rarely endowed but perilously poised organization. The congenial pursuit of the studies that were so large a part of her life probably delayed for years a result that discerning observers saw imminent for her from the dawning of her conscious life. Neither "death from over-work," nor "death from unphysiological work," was a verdict to pass unchallenged in her case.

Who that looked upon Story's bust of Elizabeth Browning could come away without a sympathetic tingling, as it were, of the whole being, from the possibilities of suffering -- beyond the conception of most mortals -- revealed in that exquisitely sensitive face?

But Mrs. Browning did not go to a man's college, or to any college. She studied with her father at home, and could take all the rests required by the needs of her physical life. No college routine, but, possibly, the very absence of its regularity, was responsible for her sufferings throughout her life. God wrote on her organism the lines that could not be effaced by time or circumstance.

Yet she could write, in that patient sweetness which was more wonderful than her version of "Prometheus Bound," or her "Drama of Exile," and which made her a glorious woman more essentially than a gifted poet: --

"Oh! we live, -- Oh! we live, --
And this life that we conceive
Is a strong thing and a grave,
Which for others' use we have,
Duty-laden to remain.

We are helpers, fellow-creatures,
Of the right against the wrong: --
We are earnest-hearted teachers
Of the truth that maketh strong, --
Yet do we teach in vain?"