SCIENCE 



NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 37, 1891. 



HIGHER EDUCATION OF WOMEN.' 



I HAVE often expressed surprise, and sometinnes indigna- 

 tioD, that citizens of a State which possesses two great uni- 

 versities — Columbia and Cornell — should so often decide 

 to send their children to the universities of other States — to 

 Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton. Apart from special prefer- 

 ences or personal associations with one or the other univer- 

 sity, the parent often claims that absence from home is es- 

 sential to the complete education of a boy. This proposition 

 is, I think, open to much dispute. But it becomes still more 

 assailable when applied to the education of girls. 



It seems to me that the origin of this idea, as of so many 

 others that claim a logical basis, is really an historical 

 tradition, derived froin conditions of life in England, where 

 the youth to be educated were chiefly recruited from families 

 scattered through the country, and who must therefore nec- 

 essarily leave home in order to acquire a university train- 

 ing. In England also originated the idea that to " make a 

 man of a boy," he must be thrown young into the often bru- 

 tal public life of the great public schools, and in tender years 

 be consigned to a rough-and tumble existence, because in 

 mature life this was what he would be expected to lead. 



The feminine counterpart to the boys' public school was 

 the young ladies' boarding-school. Here the girl was ex- 

 pected to acquire manners and finish, as there the boy was 

 expected to learn manliness. Intellectual considerations had 

 little to do with the choice in either ease. 



If we throw aside the subtle influence of tradition, and 

 state clearly the reasons which should incline parents to send 

 their daughters away from home to be educated, it is easier 

 to note where these reasons may still hold in modern times 

 and where they have become invalid. 



Evidently, to share the privileges of a university, it is 

 necessary to be a resident of a university town, so that non- 

 residence in such a town becomes an imperative reason in 

 favor of sending girls away from home, if it be once decided 

 that they are to have this training. Again, if a family is 

 consciously and avowedly on a lower plane of intelligence, 

 education, or refinement than that to which it is desired that 

 the daughters shall attain, it may again be necessary to re- 

 move the latter entirely into a different sphere of life and 

 thought, while their minds and characters are being 

 moulded. 



Or, again, it may be desired to educate girls rather against 

 their will, as is so often the case with boys, and therefore 

 considered best to remove them into a special atmosphere, 

 where they shall be uninfluenced by family or social dis- 

 tinctions, where, as the phrase is, " they shall have more 

 systematic training." This might happen for younger girls, 

 :whose older sisters were going out into society. 



Admitting that these considerations may all become im- 

 perative in certain cases, it remains true, however, that they 

 must always be enforced against counter considerations of 

 such strength as often justly lead parents to forego a college 



' Dr. Mary Putnara-Jacobi, in the Eveniug Post. 



education for their girls altogether, rather than incur the 

 risks of sending them away from home. 



Whatever may be the use or abase of a gregarious life for 

 boys and young men, there can be no doubt that it involves 

 great risks for adolescent girls. All the voluminous litera- 

 ture that has been written on the dangers of "coeducation" 

 for girls really applies to gregarious education with members 

 of their own sex. A girl thrown into a mass of several 

 hundred other students, is subjected to a constant nervous 

 strain, which, indeed, may be borne by the robust and 

 healthy, but to which the nervous and delicate too often 

 succumb. The physical evil of such massive association is 

 beginning to be recognized, and combated by the device of 

 substituting smaller groups of students in isolated homes or 

 cottages, for the 'vast dormitories of the earlier colleges, 

 which resembled magnified models of the old-fashioned 

 boarding-schools. Still it remains true that a girl placed in 

 an army of her fellows is in a position peculiarly foreign to 

 her nature, which demands — possibly merely from the in- 

 fluence of immemorial inheritance and tradition — an indi- 

 vidual setting, a family life. " It is natural," Goethe says 

 somewhere, " for boys to wear uniforms: it is equally un- 

 natural for girls to do so, for they are not destined to liveor 

 act in masses, but each is to be the centre of a home." 



Thus a girl who is living at home, or who, in default of 

 that, is living in a private family while attending lectures 

 at a university, is running counter to no traditii.,nal organic 

 habits of sex, whether her fellow-students be all girls, or 

 whether the classes be mixed. But if she be removed to an 

 institution, she is placed to that extent in the unfavorable 

 conditions common to the monastery, the nunnery, and the 

 orphan asylum. These unfavorable influences may, of 

 course, be resisted, and are so in many cases, but they are 

 always theoretically unfavorable, and not favorable, as is 

 often claimed; and on that account certainly should not be 

 encountered except under pressure of absolute necessity. 



"The systematic training," which consists in shutting up 

 a girl exclusively in one set of ideas, horizons, and pursuits 

 for three or four years, is again a disadvantage and not an 

 advantage. The gi'eat thing that youth requires, and that fe- 

 male youth requires especially, is change, change of thought, 

 scene, interest, frequent and absolute relaxation of tension. 

 It is perfectly understood that in boys' colleges this impera- 

 tive need of complete change is apt to be met, not only by 

 innocent though boisterous recreation, but often also by far 

 from innocent dissipation. A young man has been expected 

 to "sow his wild oats" at college coincidently with the seed 

 from which he hopes to reap a satisfactory harvest. But 

 girls are too docile, too unenterprising, for these violent 

 reactions. They have less innate force of reaction, and thus 

 a greater tendency to adjust themselves to the exact tem- 

 perature of their surroundings. It is desirable, therefore, 

 that their surroundings should not be of a uniform character, 

 bvit rather varied, accidents, such indeed as are offered bv 

 the daily incidents of family life. 



The intellectual life of the university should, wherever 

 practicable, be blended with this family life. When it is 

 shut off from the latter, the four college years are dropped 



