SEX IN MIND AND IN EDUCATION. 209 



they are undergoing such organic development as renders them remarkably sen. 

 sitive. . . . To-day the American woman is, to speak plainly, physically unfit 

 for her duties as woman, and is, perhaps, of all civilized females, the least quali- 

 fied to undertake those weightier tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system 

 of man. She is not fairly up to what IsTature asks from her as wife and mother. 

 How will she sustain herself under the pressure of" those yet more exacting 

 duties which nowadays she is eager to share with man ? " 



Here, then, is no uncertain testimony as to the effects of the Amer- 

 ican system of female education : some women who are without the 

 instinct or desire to nurse their offspring, some who have the desire 

 but not the capacity, and others who have neither the instinct nor 

 the capacity. The facts will hardly be disputed, whatever may finally 

 be the accepted interpretation of them. It will not j)robably be 

 argued that an absence of the capacity and the instinct to nurse is a 

 result of higher development, and that it should be the aim of woman, 

 as she advances to a higher level, to allow the organs which minister 

 to this function to waste and finally to become by disuse as rudimen- 

 tary in her sex as they are in the male sex. Their development is 

 notably in close sympathy with that of the organs of reproduction, 

 an arrest thereof being often associated with some defect of the lat- 

 ter ; so that it might perhaps fairly be questioned whether it was 

 right and proper, for the race's sake, that a woman who has not the 

 wish or power to nurse should indulge in the functions of maternity. 

 We may take note, by-the-way, that those in whom the organs are 

 wasted invoke the dress-maker's aid in order to gain the appearance 

 of them; they are not satisfied unless they wear the show of perfect 

 womanhood. However, it may be in the plan of evolution to produce 

 at some future period a race of sexless beings who, undistracted and 

 unharassed by the ignoble troubles of reproduction, shall carry on the 

 intellectual work of the world, not otherwise than as the sexless ants 

 do the work and the fighting of the community. 



Meanwhile, the consequences of an imperfectly developed reproduc- 

 tive system are not sexual only ; they are also mental. Intellectually 

 and morally there is a deficiency, or at any rate a modification an- 

 swering to the physical deficiency ; in mind, as in body, the indi- 

 vidual fails to reach the ideal of a complete and perfect womanhood. 

 If the aim of a true education be to make her reach that^ it cannot 

 certainly be a true education which operates in any degree to unsex 

 her ; for sex is fundamental, lies deeper than culture, cannot be ig- 

 nored or defied with impunity. You may hide Nature, but you can- 

 not extinguish it. Consequently, it does not seem impossible that, if 

 the attempt to do so be seriously and persistently made, the result 

 may be a monstrosity — something which having ceased to be woman 

 is yet not man — " ce quelque chose de monstrueux," which t])e Comte 

 A. de Gasparin forebodes, " cet etre repugnant, qui deja parait a notre 

 horizon." 



TOL. V. — 14 



