ATHLETICS FOR WOMEN^ IN COLLEGES. 519 



class contests are held. An athletic association has been organ- 

 ized by the students, and an annual field day has been observed, 

 when there have been contests in field and track athletics. 



If there be those who assume that physical excellence is the 

 attribute of the so-called " new woman," and therefore unwoman- 

 ly, we can only reply that the idea that women should have the 

 same physical training as men is no newer than Plato's Republic, 

 wherein the Greek sage insists that the women should have the 

 same physical training as the men, that the race might be con- 

 tinued in the highest perfection of mental and physical vigor. 

 Little is told us of the education of girls in Greece ; but this we 

 know that Spartan girls were subjected to a course of training 

 differing from their brothers only in being less severe. They had 

 their own exercise grounds, in which they learned to leap, run, 

 cast the javelin, throw the discus, play ball, wrestle, dance, and 

 sing. The result of this fine physical training was not only 

 health and strength, but beauty; for it is a well-attested fact 

 that the daughters of Sparta were handsomer and more attractive 

 than the more delicately nurtured Athenians. In Aristophanes, 

 Lampito, a Spartan woman, excites the jealous admiration of the 

 Athenian women because of her beauty. When some one said to 

 Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas, "You Spartans are the only women 

 who rule men," she proudly replied, " Because we are the only 

 women who bring forth men." 



In behalf of the introduction of games as supplementary to 

 the work of the gymnasium, I will quote Miss Hill, of the 

 Wellesley Gymnasium : " Four years ago I began to give my 

 services to the college in organized ' sports and pastimes ' in 

 connection with the department, feeling that we were giving in 

 America too much attention to artificial exercises and too little to 

 the development of the play instinct, which is the natural means 

 of recreation. I believe in gymnastics for girls for their cor- 

 rective value and as an antidote to the faulty postures we take so 

 much, the efi:ects of wrong clothing, etc., lack of knowledge how 

 to breathe, run, walk, to climb and leap for practical purposes 

 and self-preservation in accident. But I think we use them too 

 much. We waste time and strength in not accomplishing the 

 direct results of gymnastics, and fail to obtain the nerve stimulus 

 that comes from natural play. If games and sports are organ- 

 ized and directed to a certain extent by the director of physical 

 training, often, of course, the gymnastic and corrective value 

 can be got out of a sport, and the fun, too." 



Matthew Arnold, in his work on Higher Schools and Universi- 

 ties in Germany, says, in describing the exercise ground of a Ger- 

 man school finely equipped for gymnastics, " Nothing, however, 

 will make an ex-schoolboy of one of the great English schools 



