Library Collections: Document: Full Text

A physician of such standing and authority in the community that we are compelled to listen to him has made assertions which he has not yet supported by statistics. It behooves the earnest women, especially the faithful teachers, to satisfy themselves at least whether these assertions can be supported, -- in order, if they can be, to correct what is wrong in their present methods, and, if they cannot be, to do their part towards removing a false impression.

VII.

BY ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS.

THE only really serious thing about Dr. Clarke's book is the confusion of the author's ideas as to the precise defining line between a work adapted to popular instruction and a medical treatise. An author who forgets in the drawing-room and at the fireside that he is not in the lecture-room of the medical school, has put himself beyond the reach of knowing the real effect produced by him upon either the drawing-room or the fireside. He may have done so with the deliberate intention of a theorist who does not desire to be answered, he may have done so with the clear conscience of a zealot who desires only to do what presents itself to him as his duty. He has undoubtedly done so, at least, with motives which it were indelicate to call indelicate, whatever else might be said of them, but, all the same, he has put himself beyond this reach. From the medical lecture-room alone can he be answered. Only a physician can reply to "Sex in Education."

It is to be hoped that, among the physicians whose professional rank may entitle them to a hearing as broad as Dr. Clarke's, some one who joins issue with him upon his principal physiological theory, may find the leisure to remind us what a blessed fact it is that doctors always disagree. Without the least desire to undervalue either the culture or the skill of the man from whom we differ, a little inquiry into the effect produced upon brother and sister physicians by his essay will reveal the fact that its author is not without sufficiently important opponents. "Sex in Education" having once been written, another essay, equally to the point, if a little more regardful of the old-fashioned prejudices of non-medical society, should be written to mate it.

Meanwhile it remains possible for any of us to say, in deprecation of the notion of womanhood advanced by Dr. Clarke, two things.

1. The physician is not the person whose judgment upon a matter involving the welfare of women can possibly be final. His testimony, worth what it may be worth, should seek and fall into its proper place in the physical aspects of such a question; but it shall stay in its place. It is but a link in a chain. It is only a tint in a kaleidoscope. A question so intricate and shifting as that which involves the exact position of woman in the economy of a cursed world is not to be settled by the most intimate acquaintance with the proximate principles of the human frame, with the proportions of the gray and white matter in the brain, or with the transitional character of the tissues and the exquisite machinery of the viscera. The psychologist has yet his word to say. The theologian has a reason to be heard. The political economist might also add to experience knowledge. The woman who is physically and intellectually a living denial of every premise and of every conclusion which Dr. Clarke has advanced, has yet a right to an audience. Nor is he even the man whose judgment as to the health of women can be symmetrical. No clinical opinion, it will be remembered, bearing against the physical vigor of any class of people, is or can be a complete one. The physician knows sick women almost only. Well women keep away from him, and thank Heaven. If there be any well women he is always in doubt. Thousands of women will read that they are prevented by, Nature's eternal and irresistible laws from all sustained activity of brain or body, but principally of brain, with much the same emotion with which we might read a fiat gone forth from the Royal College of Surgeons in London, that Americans could not eat roast beef, since their researches into morbid American anatomy had developed the fact that Americans had died of eating roast beef, as well as a peculiar structure of the American stomach, to which roast beef was poisonously adapted. Thousands of women will not believe what the author of "Sex in Education" tells them, simply because they know better. Their own unlearned experience stands to them in refutation of his learned statements. They will give him theory for theory. They can pile up for him illustration on illustration. Statistics they have none; but no statistics has he. They and the Doctor are met on fair fight.

Many a woman who stands at the factory loom eleven hours and a half a day, from year's end to year's end, from the age of eight to the age of forty-eight, knows better than he tells her. Every lady lecturer in the land, who unites the most exhausting kind of brain and body labor in her own experience, day and night after day and night, for the half of every year, and unites it in defiance of Dr. Clarke's prognostications, knows better. Every healthy woman physician knows better; and it is only the woman physician, after all, whose judgment can ever approach the ultimate uses of the physicist's testimony to these questions.