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The error which has led to the identical education of the two sexes, and which prophecies their identical co-education in colleges and universities, is not confined to technical education. It permeates society. It is found in the home, the workshop, the factory, and in all the ramifications of social life. The identity of boys and girls, of men and women, is practically asserted out of the school as much as in it, and it is theoretically proclaimed from the pulpit and the rostrum. Woman seems to be looking up to man and his development, as the goal and ideal of womanhood. The new gospel of female development glorifies what she possesses in common with him, and tramples under her feet, as a source of weakness and badge of inferiority, the mechanism and functions peculiar to herself. In consequence of this wide-spread error, largely the result of physiological ignorance, girls are almost universally trained in masculine methods of living and working as well as of studying. The notion is practically found everywhere, that boys and girls are one, and that the boys make the one. Girls, young ladies, to use the polite phrase, who are about leaving or have left school for society, dissipation, or self-culture, rarely permit any of Nature's periodical demands to interfere with their morning calls, or evening promenades, or midnight dancing, or sober study. Even the home draws the sacred mantle of modesty so closely over the reproductive function as not only to cover but to smother it. Sisters imitate brothers in persistent work at all times. Female clerks in stores strive to emulate the males by unremitting labor, seeking to develop feminine force by masculine methods. Female operatives of all sorts, in factories and elsewhere, labor in the same way; and, when the day is done, are as likely to dance half the night, regardless of any pressure upon them of a peculiar function, as their fashionable sisters in the polite world. All unite in pushing the hateful thing out of sight and out of mind; and all are punished by similar weakness, degeneration, and disease.

There are two reasons why female operatives of all sorts are likely to suffer less, and actually do suffer less, from such persistent work, than female students; why Jane in the factory can work more steadily with the loom, than Jane in college with the dictionary; why the girl who makes the bed can safely work more steadily the whole year through, than her little mistress of sixteen who goes to school. The first reason is, that the female operative, of whatever sort, has, as a rule, passed through the first critical epoch of woman's life: she has got fairly by it. In her case, as a rule, unfortunately there are too many exceptions to it, the catamenia have been established; the function is in good running order; the reproductive apparatus -- the engine within an engine -- has been constructed, and she will not be called upon to furnish force for building it again. The female student, on the contrary, has got these tasks before her, and must perform them while getting her education; for the period of female sexual development coincides with the educational period. The same five years of life must be given to both tasks. After the function is normally established, and the apparatus made, woman can labor mentally or physically, or both, with very much greater persistence and intensity, than during the age of development. She still retains the type of periodicity; and her best work, both as to quality and amount, is accomplished when the order of her labor partakes of the rhythmic order of her constitution. Still the fact remains, that she can do more than before; her fibre has acquired toughness; the system is consolidated; its fountains are less easily stirred. It should be mentioned in this connection, what has been previously adverted to, that the toughness and power of after life are largely in proportion to the normality of sexual development. If there is error then, the organization never fully recovers. This is an additional motive for a strict physiological regimen during a girl's student life, and, just so far, an argument against the identical co-education of the sexes. The second reason why female operatives are less likely to suffer, and actually do suffer less, than school-girls, from persistent work straight through the year, is because the former work their brains less. To use the language of Herbert Spencer, "That antagonism between body and brain which we see in those, who, pushing brain-activity to an extreme, enfeeble their bodies," (25) does not often exist in female operatives, any more than in male. On the contrary, they belong to the class of those who, in the words of the same author, by "pushing bodily activity to an extreme, make their brains inert." (26) Hence they have stronger bodies, a reproductive apparatus more normally constructed, and a catamenial function less readily disturbed by effort, than their student sisters, who are not only younger than they, but are trained to push "brain-activity to an extreme." Give girls a fair chance for physical development at school, and they will be able in after life, with reasonable care of themselves, to answer the demands that may be made upon them.

(26) The Study of Sociology, by Herbert Spencer, chap. 13.