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Sex And Education: A Reply To Dr. E.H. Clarke's "Sex In Education"

Creator: Julia Ward Howe (author)
Date: 1874
Publisher: Roberts Brothers, Boston
Source: Available at selected libraries

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Andrew Combe in his book on Infancy speaks of the great number of infants who in Germany are brought up by hand. He gives most careful rules for rearing infants on artificial food, and does not treat this as at all an uncommon necessity. English women confined in Italy and other foreign countries proverbially lose their milk, and the profession of wet-nurse to an English family has long been one of the most common in Rome and Naples. Many German women in America are obliged to feed their infants wholly or in part, and many American women are good nurses and prolific mothers.

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Again we see in Paris papers advertisements of the new remedies, "which the patient herself can apply, and which will spare her the unpleasant necessity of examinations," &c. Physicians of large practice and experience are able, in all parts of the world, to chronicle many cases of uterine disease, of functional derangement, and of arrested development among women, in which cases no plea of excessive cerebral action induced by over-study is at all admissible. But Dr. Clarke sees disease chiefly in American women. In them reside leucorrhcea,, dysmenorrhoea, amenorrhoea, &c. In them are ateknia, agalactia, amazia. And the reason why they have all these evils is simply this, some of them wish to enter Harvard College, and some of them have already passed through other colleges.

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Now that the topics of sex and education need careful study and remodelling of ideas and methods, nobody is less disposed to deny than the writer of these lines. She is perfectly sure that the philosophy of sex is thus far little understood in America, or anywhere else. She has the same impression concerning the philosophy of education. The physical evils attendant upon the female constitution are as old as that constitution itself. They deserve and require the most careful investigation. But the feminine hygiene will be higher and more complete when it is administered by women. Personal experience adds an important element even to the closest and most scientific observation.

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Before this pet theory of the incompatibility of health with intellectual activity, for women only, was discovered, men of science speculated concerning the deficient busts of American women. The dry, stimulating climate was supposed, in a great measure, to account for it. The fact itself reaches back to the grandmothers of the grandmothers of to-day. It was and is chiefly observable in the northern and eastern States. As you go south, you find fuller forms, but not always combined with emptier heads. The effect of the climate of this portion of the country upon the masculine physique is equally noticeable, and has long been a subject of remark. Men here are for the Most part wiry, sinewy, nervous, and brainy. If any of us, carrying out Dr. Clarke's views, prefer to mate with men in whom flesh and muscle counterpoise the tyrannous nerve system, we too must go over the borders, and bring the progenitors of the future race from lands where the east wind blows not. But this reminds us of the well-known overplus of sixty thousand single women in Massachusetts alone. Dr. Clarke arraigns the mothers, actual and possible, for being no better than they are. But what is he going to do about the impossible fathers, in view of the coming generation to which he is so devoted?

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If one thing could be more astonishing than another in Dr. Clarke's treatment of his subject, we should give the palm to his consideration of the influence of climate on the human organism. He is unwilling to consider it at all as a factor in the alleged ill-health of American women. According to him one hundred years are not enough to mould the European organism in accordance with the American type. If this is really his opinion, his experience must have differed widely from that of others. I have observed important effects of modification produced by climate, in shorter periods of time than this. Two brothers of one family, resident in Boston, separated at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. One remained in this city, one migrated to Nova Scotia. Those who at a later day were able to compare the children of these two gentlemen found the Boston family marked with every characteristic of the New England race, thin, nervous, wiry, alert, intense.

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The Nova Scotian family were stout, full-blooded, and plethoric, altogether of the English colonial type.

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English families resident in India soon lose the freshness of their coloring and the fulness of their outline. In fact, the adaptation of one nationality to another is sometimes astonishingly rapid. Mr. Burlingame looked almost like a Chinaman before he died. The writer has seen an American official long resident in Turkey whose physiognomy had become entirely that of his adopted country. The potent American climate works quickly in assimilating the foreign material offered to it. Two generations suffice to efface the salient marks of Celtic, Saxon, French, or Italian descent. The Negro alone is able to offer a respectable resistance.

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