The Education of American Girls Part 13

Domestic service is expensive, and of poor quality, for no one is willing to occupy the position of a menial who can find anything else to do.

The intelligence of our women, combined with the necessity in our society of producing a good personal impression, together with the habit of applying their intelligence to the construction and arrangement of articles of dress, have developed among us a very high order of taste in these matters, and the skilled labor that can satisfy it, is necessarily very costly.

Our women spend all they can afford in buying these materials, and save, in using their own intelligence and hands in making them up.

Very few, in considering the work of our women, take into account the real brain-power expended in this triple combination of economy, taste, and execution. Emerson somewhere in his _English Traits_ says, referring to the English aristocracy:--"It is surprising how much brain can go into fine manners."

It would be very pertinent to say of American women, "It is surprising how much brain-work can go into fine dressing," and our girls join their mothers in this worry and work at a very early age. Pa.s.sing from work to society, the strain upon our women is no less. Social gatherings occur irregularly, have irregular hours, and an irregular regimen of food, and every one feels a keen stimulus to be both agreeable and brilliant.

English faces at a party look as they do at church, and as they do at Madame Tussaud's. Contrast with them the smiles, luminous eyes, and pretty cant or toss of the head of the carefully-dressed American woman, and think of the work to be done the next day.

In place of a health-seeking instinct in America, we have a feeling which says, "I do not mind how hard a strain I have, provided I can hold out till I get through it." We are too much employed to think much of the discomfort of moderate fatigue and ill-health. Neither have we sufficient feeling respecting the permanence of the family to lead us to plan for a succession of descendants. An American says, "I had rather have forty-five or fifty years of active, satisfactory life, than sixty or seventy years of a comfortable, dawdling existence;" and, if we look at the case only as it affects himself, we cannot especially condemn the reasoning, but when we consider the const.i.tution that this overstrained life bequeathes to the children, it a.s.sumes a different aspect.

Being accustomed to see an attenuated, sickly physique in our leading and best-bred families, the eye is mis-educated; we establish a false ideal for women, and become comparatively indifferent to a fine physique in men. Men do not marry with a view of founding or continuing a family name, and their sentiment of gallantry inclines them to be fond of protecting a weak woman.

Irregular habits are to some degree a necessity with us, and the greatest misfortune is, that we get used to the irregularity, and take little pains to avoid it. We have some rules in regard to diet and digestion, but they are for the most part practised only by those who have acquired ills, and are not very frequently applied in the rearing of children.

The extremes of climate, and our uninviting roads, discourage open air exercise, and comparatively few have much time to go out.

Our children do some more work at school than English children, and they have a good deal more of their time wasted in our system of text-books and "recitations," a word not known in England in the sense in which we use it, which requires that the able and conscientious pupils of the cla.s.s shall look on while the weak and indolent ones are being drilled; which plan, judging from my own experience at school and college, I feel justified in saying, involves for them not only a waste of from one to three hours a day, but a fatigue fully or nearly equal to the same amount of time spent in study. We put great pressure upon cla.s.s rank, the value of which is determined by the daily marks. This forces pupils into a very high degree of regularity in their work; at the same time it has most effect upon the most conscientious pupils; if it does not lead them to overdo in work, it is liable to make them overworry about the work, and girls suffer far more from this overworry than boys.

In considering the relation between the health of the country and the education, the few women who have had a university course of study need not be taken into account. Most of them have reached an age when people are allowed to decide upon their own habits, and, as a matter of fact, these habits have been determined by stern necessities, by the hard, money-getting circ.u.mstances that surround women, rather than by choice.

At Antioch College, with few exceptions, they were women who were looking forward to self-support, and who were borrowing the whole, or a part of the money required for their current expenses, on the promise of repaying it with the wages of their subsequent work.

Many of them were absent a part of the year, teaching, were giving private lessons, or were teaching cla.s.ses in the preparatory school connected with the college; and, if a few hours of leisure were left after all this employment, they were likely to be spent upon extra studies; aside from this, they did their own sewing, and many of them boarded themselves. They often overworked, but it was the necessities of their lives that were driving them, and not the curriculum of Antioch College. However, if the English feeling respecting health, and the means of preserving it, prevailed in our country, these mistakes would less frequently occur.

Unquestionably our whole nation needs some escape from its exhausting activities. We need either less work, or some more skilful combination of the different varieties of work, that will secure us more rest, and, except in a small circle of wealth, our women, as a rule, need this rest more than the men. We need repose, freedom from anxiety perhaps, more even than freedom from work. How are we to get it?

We cannot have back the caste condition of society, nor would we desire it. We cannot stop the progress of our system of free education, nor would we be willing to do it. We cannot set aside the practice and belief in equality of education for men and women; men would not like it, and women would not permit it. There are many things that can be done that will conduce to the desired result, and the best among them for women is, to organize women's work.

The education is not a mistake; the fault lies in this, that the industries of women have not kept pace with their advancing education.

They have been exempt from bread-winning to a degree unknown in the old countries, and the average education is far higher than exists elsewhere among women. They have startled the world a little by attempting a few of the intellectual industries. .h.i.therto monopolized by men, and, though the opening of the professions, or, indeed, all lines of human industry, to women, is not to be undervalued, of almost infinitely greater importance is the application of scientific economical principles to the large sphere of work already in their hands, and which is remaining in a disastrously undeveloped condition, just because it is in their hands.

The low rate of female wages leaves them the monopoly of it, and they dawdle along in the ways of their grandmothers, out of sight behind the advancing masculine industries.

It is surprising to foreigners that in the application of the division of labor principle to domestic work, we are actually behind them, that we still permit such excess of work and excess of waste in our domestic arrangements. Cooking and sewing, the two leading branches of domestic industry, are with them to a very large degree trades, while nursing and laundry-work are trades in a far greater degree than with us.

Upon this point of the organization of domestic industry, though one that I have long been considering, I can do no better than to refer to the suggestive article of Mrs. E. M. King in the _Contemporary Review_ for December, 1873. The substance of this article was presented at the last meeting of the British a.s.sociation. The Right Honorable Mr. Forster occupied the chair, and at the close of the discussion remarked that he should not like to give up his private home. Now, it is not to be supposed that Royalty would at once give up its palaces to rush into the society of a set of co-operative homes, nor that Right Honorables with "large fortunes" would make close bargains in domestic service. The scheme at the outset would recommend itself only to those whose incomes did not provide an adequate supply for their wants on the present wasteful plan of domestic life, and who saw in this system a means to secure larger returns for their outlay of money, and it could advance in favor only as it fulfilled this promise.

Seeing a trustworthy principle of economy in the plan, the _Spectator_ turned pale, and declaimed against the destruction of the time-honored English homes; and London builders began to consult Mrs. King in regard to the house arrangements for carrying out her plan.

There will be no difficulty in preserving the desired privacy for the family, though the wearying privacy of many English homes leads not a few to think it is not worth preserving in the English degree.

Adopt and apply the plan of which Mrs. King suggests an outline, press the division of labor principle in woman's work as far as it will go, and the wives and daughters who make our homes will not break down from overwork.

The readiest and surest corrective for the excessive greed of our girls for society is to carry on the system of co-education. This supplies a temperate gratification to the social appet.i.tes, induces girls to remain longer in school, and to do more thorough work, thus securing to them other sources of pleasure than social amus.e.m.e.nts and the companions.h.i.+p of friends. The process of co-education tends to develop a well-balanced character, and to put into it a trustworthy ballast, which American girls cannot afford to do without. For confirmation of this, one need only read the reports of any school judiciously managed on this plan, or he need only use his eyes in comparing the past school days with those of girls educated in the high schools and private schools of our Western cities. Of course girls of the present average habits and inherited tendencies must not be pressed up to quite the same degree of work that may be safely required of their brothers, who have fewer domestic demands upon their time, more out-of-door exercise, a freer style of dress, and, in general, healthier habits of life. Many a girl who takes especial care of herself--and, as a rule, the able girls do this--or who has especial care from her mother, may safely do what the best boys do without especial care.

But so long as girls require from one hour and a half to three hours a day, to be, or to develop themselves into, the conventional girl, and boys require only about one-third of that time to get themselves up into the conventional pattern for a boy, girls must either be superior to boys to begin with, or they must economize their power better, if they are able to do as much school-work in a year as boys; that is, if girls must consume power in all the ways that const.i.tute the approved specialties of girls, they cannot do the whole work of boys without doing much more than boys do.

Whether the future has possibilities for girls that will give no occasion for this deficit of available power for school-work, it is impossible to say. Oberlin College and Michigan University report that the young women are no more frequently absent from their cla.s.ses on account of ill-health than the young men. But it must be remembered that the women are few in number, and in some important respects more above the average of women than the young men are above the average of young men. Especially in the respect of a prudent care for their health their necessities have made them wise--and this will be the character of most of the women who go to college for some time to come. Our schools, too, show as high an average of work for girls as for boys, but this must not be wholly put down to equal resources. Girls, on the average, are more anxious for approval than boys are, and if work is a.s.signed them, in spite of disadvantages they are quite as likely to do it as boys are.

Nor are we to suppose that the best average education for the present girls would show just the same average in direction as the best average education for boys.

Oberlin, the oldest experiment in co-education at college, arranges its plans with especial reference to the average differences between the quant.i.ty and direction of the school-work at present demanded for men and women. It has its "Ladies' Course," as well as its University Course. The young women are allowed to pursue the University Course, though out of the four or five hundred young women who are in attendance, those who have taken degrees give only an average of about two in a year. At Antioch there was a large range of optional subjects, and among them was Greek, which the Western young men were about as much disposed to omit as the young women. The curriculums of the Western high schools have also a wide optional margin.

The growing educational sentiment is setting aside the old idea that it is well for all boys to pursue the same line of study, independent of tastes, and past and prospective circ.u.mstances in life; and another still more pernicious notion is sure soon to give way, that boys and young men, of whatever physical and brain power, are to be put through a definite course of study in just the same time. No one thinks it much of a guarantee for a man's scholars.h.i.+p that he holds an A.B. or an A.M.

degree. This only a.s.sures us that he has spent four years at some inst.i.tution that has a right to confer these degrees. When our system of schools and colleges is sufficiently flexible to meet the varying needs of boys and young men, we shall not find that it lacks anything to adapt it to the varying needs of boys and girls, or men and women. Men furnish us with examples through the whole scale of physical power and mental apt.i.tude, and so do women.

The best girls will at least have no difficulty in carrying on three subjects of study, while the best boys carry on four; and girls not only can, but as a rule do, remain longer at school than the boys. It would be well, too, to give more credit to the specialties of girls in the schools. I can think of nothing else that would conduce so much to the thorough and satisfactory study of music as to give it an optional place in our school curriculums.

Doubtless the best plan would be to give girls a moderate amount of home work along with their school-work--that is, to develop a united domestic and intellectual taste. With the habit once formed of making this combination of pursuits, we should be much surer of their continuing their intellectual cultivation through life. If this could be done, they ought, as a rule, to be able to do more than men do in the last fifteen or twenty years of their lives.

The results of our experiments in co-education have so far indicated that there is no difference between the intellectual tastes of men and women. This I do not accept as final. The prevailing sentiment in society, that girls cannot do all that boys do, and that they are a little in discredit because they cannot, has given them an undue stimulus to prove their power by experiment; and it is well that they have done it, to silence the doubts. Moreover, the women who were looking forward to the higher places of intellectual industry occupied by men, had to test themselves by the standards established for their rivals. And the same may be said of all the money-getting pursuits for women, outside of the lines of domestic service and sewing; in order to get any ground, they have had to fall into men's ways, so that their work could be tested by men's standards. To prove that they were the equals of men, they have had to prove that they were the equals of both women and men; they have had to learn and to be all that other women know and are, and, in addition, to equal men in the points where men surpa.s.s women; while their masculine rivals are exempt from all the demands for time and thought bestowed upon the specialties of women.

When women can gain authority for their own standards--the right to work in a woman's way, tested only by the quant.i.ty and quality of their results, that is, by the value of their work to society--money-earning women will not break down in health any more than money-earning men do, nor will the total of their work appear smaller than the total of men's work. There is no intrinsic reason why women's work, done in women's way, should have less commercial value and creditable recognition than men's work, done in men's way. Poems are in as good repute and sell as well as books of philosophy, and house decorators are as much in demand, and are paid as well as architects. The present industries of women are undeveloped; there is among them, as yet, no sphere for skilled, high-cla.s.s work, and many of the industries that naturally belong to women have been developed by men, and are possessed by men. The wages of women are low, because there are too many workers for the range of work they are attempting to do.

The industries that are exclusively in their hands are almost wholly at a stage where intelligent labor is not required, and so few of the industries that have been developed by men are open to them, that, owing to the great compet.i.tion, even the skilled work of women, as yet, commands but a low price. They want more work, and especially a larger amount of intelligent or skilled work. They must both organize and develop, by the application of the division of labor principle, the work they already have, and they must win from men a part of their work.

But they can make their way into the industries occupied by men, only by doing the work in men's way, and underbidding men in wages. When they once get undisputed possession, they can and do apply their own methods.

Mr. Mundella's Bill, to which I have already referred, will, as is believed, if it become a law, put a great obstacle in the way of their progress. It is to the interest of the mill-owners to keep their machinery at work as many hours as they can, and if men will work ten hours a day, while women are prohibited from working more than nine and a half, men will be employed in preference to women, even with the disadvantage of larger wages. But, fortunately, it is said, the women cannot be wholly driven out. In some branches of the work they do so much better than the men, that even if this reduction of hours should be enforced, the mill-owners will still find it to their advantage to employ women.

The women in these special lines have already proved the value of women's work done in women's way. I believe women have also got a similar recognition in some branches of the watchmaking trade; and in teaching, they have already proved the superiority of their methods.

They get forward slowly, because of the great strain required in using men's methods to get the gates opened to them, and Mr. Mundella's Bill would put an extra bar across the gates. The wages are kept low along the line of their advance, because an army of laborers follow along so fast in the rear. I have no fear but that women will stand a fair chance with men in the industries of the world, when they once get a free and open way into them, and learn to apply scientific principles as men do.

Fine manipulation in a hand is fast coming to be as valuable a quality as strength.

To secure the changes that all wise or good feeling must desire for women, many things are needed; and as I have said, first of all, we need organization in domestic work, in order to reduce the quant.i.ty, to save waste in materials, and to develop a better quality of work, by making the different departments into trades or skilled industries--thus we must put our cooking under the care of chemists and physiologists, and in a variety of ways provide work for wives and daughters suited to their intelligence, and relieved of coa.r.s.e drudgery. We need women physicians, employed by the year, whose duty and interest it will be to keep the family in health, and thus avoid the occasions for curing them when they are ill; and here is the safeguard for our girls--a person familiar with both the home life and school life of the children, and whose interest would forbid her to yield either to the weak affection of the mother, or the thoughtless ambition of the teacher. The familiar conversations that would naturally spring up between competent women physicians on the one side, and mothers, children, and cooks on the other, would contribute vastly to the improved diet and general sanitary habits of the family; and open a way to more rapid progress in determining the relation between different varieties of food and peculiarities in the mental and physical powers and appet.i.tes. We need creditable wages, given in employments for women other than teaching, in order to save our schools from being the receptacle of all women who have occasion to earn money. We need some half-time system in our schools, to provide for the pupils who have less health or less time; and also to secure for them teachers from a higher cla.s.s of families, who find all-day work uncomfortably exhausting or confining. We need to raise the scale of feminine wages, in order to invite the application of time-saving inventions in women's work, as they are now employed in men's work. We need a wider range of work for women.

As a means to all this we need, and as the result of all of it we shall get, a recognition of feminine methods and standards, as well as of masculine methods and standards. If the specialties in the culture of women are worth preserving, it is because they have value; many of them, I am certain, have real value, and others have a current value, so that we cannot at present dispense with them--if they have value, when we have a free and well-adjusted labor market, they will command their price. For bringing about these changes, we must have well-educated, wise women.

Our women, in matters of dress, are more completely the slaves of fas.h.i.+on than the women in any other civilized country. This is due to the necessity they feel for making a good personal impression. Their family position does comparatively little, either for or against them.

They marry, or get forward in life, chiefly by making themselves personally agreeable. When we give them other means of influence than this, when we secure to them industrial and political power, these personal considerations will diminish in importance, and their minds will naturally turn away from them.

There are many things awry, many things that need to be improved, but we must be wise in our methods.

We cannot exactly imitate the English, nor do I believe it is worth doing. The Malthusian chorus of political economists suggests the notion that a nation may be over-physical. We want health for ourselves, and healthy tendencies for our descendants. Beyond this, we want to send our surplus force to the brain.

MARY E. BEEDY.

83 Ladbroke Road, Notting Hill, London W.

MENTAL ACTION

AND

PHYSICAL HEALTH.