greater trust in Nature, that she will be able to maintain the differences necessary to a continuance of the race.[1] Clothes and customs vary with time and place; sex is stable and not injured by anything but physical condition. The traditional idea that womanhood can be modified in some occult[2] way by occupation, training, or environment, is wholly unscientific and baneful; for it undoubtedly serves to nurse in many a woman that "slavishness of soul" which Mr. Allen, as a true well-wisher of woman, deplores. Physical condition, then, is the constant coefficient in the problem. Anything injurious to the health of either man or woman incapacitates each just so much for the fullest requirement of life.
Mr. Allen claims that the result of the higher education in England and America has been to convert woman into "a dulled and spiritless epicene automaton." Now, this peculiar product, which I take to mean the opposite of a healthy woman, must be wholly within the reach of statistics, else she, or it, is a fabulous affair. In England it is possible she may exist, but the best available statistics of Girton, Newnham, and Cheltenham prove that she is not typical. The following testimony in regard to women students is given:[3]
"I have known intimately Girton and Newnham Colleges and what is now the women's department of Owens College, Manchester. . . . Were an impression to get abroad that a thorough school and college education is injurious to tolerably healthy women, it would be as mistaken as it would be unfortunate" (Miss Bulley).
"My unqualified testimony is, that the intellectual quickening resulting from advanced education is of great benefit to their physical condition" (Miss Mackillip, Londonderry Collegiate School).
"I have been head of this college for more than twenty-eight years. . . . We have kept the minutest possible statistics[4]—these show that girls, working under proper conditions, are exceptionally healthy" (Miss Beale, Cheltenham College).
Mr. Fitch, inspector of training schools, testifies: "There are in England twenty-six training colleges for schoolmistresses, containing in all eighteen hundred resident students. It is my duty, on behalf of the Government, to make an annual visit to these institutions, and I have seen every one of them during the last twelve months. . . . It is the uniform opinion of the medical
- ↑ The average notion of manliness or womanliness is very fluctuating. A young man showing great interest in laces and hosiery would be considered to-day an effeminate fellow; yet in the time of Charles I such attention to fripperies was deemed manly enough.
- ↑ "Principles of Biology," Herbert Spencer; "Sex in Mind and in Education," Henry Maudsley, M. D.
- ↑ "Woman and Work," Emily Pfeiffer, pp. 115, 111, 128.
- ↑ Six hundred and twenty-seven pupils passed senior and higher university examinations.
