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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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It is a valuable discovery that, the more you transform a college into a University, the better it is adapted for both sexes. The same advantage may be noted on another point, the consideration of which may throw light on Dr. Clarke's demand for two million dollars. I mean the question of dormitories. If the admission of girls to our colleges does nothing else but to break down the present system of brick barracks, and to substitute the simpler boarding-house system of Michigan University, it will be a work well done. Of course, if there must be duplicated for girls the vast array of dormitories now encumbering the scanty college-yard at Cambridge, it will cost a great deal of money. But just now, when all the boarding-house keepers of Cambridge are deploring their occupation gone by reason of these structures, it is the very time to introduce young women into the humbler quarters left vacant; and why, in this case, will these students cost the college more than so many additional young men? Once adopt the plan, which I believe to be the true one, that it is simply the office of the college to provide facilities of instruction, and that of the pupils and their parents (under the general supervision of the college) to look out for food and lodging, medical attendance and spiritual guidance, -- and the increased expense of joint collegiate education turns out a mere chimera. Were it ever so great, I should still regard it as the best way of spending money, since, in any case, the expense of providing for girls equal advantages in a separate college would be still greater but I do not see it to be great, or indeed to amount to any thing worth mentioning at all. Nor do I see why, even if we admit all Dr. Clarke's facts, he has given a single valid reason why our colleges should not admit girls to-morrow, -- making, as many of them have already made on other grounds, the necessary changes to secure sufficient flexibility of system.

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It therefore seems to me that, as his facts are not worked out with sufficient thoroughness to justify any general conclusion whatever, so his conclusion that our present colleges, and particularly Harvard College, cannot, except at a vast expense, admit women, is utterly unsustained by his facts.

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III.

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BY MRS. HORACE MANN.

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DR. CLARKE'S "Sex in Education" would have been an invaluable addition to popular works on hygiene, if it had been written in a different spirit, -- without insult to woman, whom the author professes to respect, and whom he pronounces to be capable of as extended education as men are. This admission on his part is actually overlooked by many of his reviewers, because their feelings are so hurt by his ungentlemanly jeers, and his vulgar attack upon the noble army of unmarried women, who are often in the respectable ranks of "spinsterism," as he calls it, out of self-respect, and because their ideal of the marriage state is far beyond that of the average woman.

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The average woman has unfortunately been educated to consider matrimony more respectable than the state of single blessedness, which has thus been well named when compared with the heartless or heart-breaking condition of incompatible or unworthy marriage. Probably not one of these women would have refused marriage if the conditions she required had been fulfilled, but without these her self-respect would have been compromised. Probably the sentiment of love has been awakened in the breasts of all. It would be unnatural, I concede, if it were not so.

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"God gives us love,
Something to love he lends us;"

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but it is far better for the soul to live in an ideal union with a possible twin-soul than to enter marriage upon a low plane of thought or feeling. When this most vital institution of society is demoralized by worldliness, cupidity, or other of the manifold forms of selfishness, the greatest unhappiness is sure to follow; on the principle that the corruption of the best is the worst. It is in this fatal disappointment of life that we see the undeveloped women; and many a young woman, who has an opportunity to make the observation, is made cautious of trusting her happiness to what appears to be, and has justly been called, "the lottery of life." It seems incredible that a man who has had Dr. Clarke's opportunity of seeing domestic life has not realized that unfortunate marriages are the circumstances under which the harmonious development of nature is arrested and perverted. Such circumstances stunt growth and spoil family life, and the children who are its unhappy result. Indeed, the idea with which many women enter into the married state, even when their affections, are engaged in it, pervert and maim the development of the human being, and often end in a loss of faith in human nature. This idea is that the oneness of the union is the oneness of the man, and not a new oneness born of the union. The assumption of the authority of the average husband extends even to the opinion of the wife, so that there is often a concession to a paramount will where the wife is the superior by nature. It is the freedom from this bondage which constitutes the happiness of single blessedness, and is at the root of the unhappy tendency to divorce which is characteristic of our times. Far higher is the unmarried state, as a condition for the development of the human being, than this low state of marriage, which latter in its ideal form is a condition of mutual growth. A new code of morals is needed in this regard. It is not a mere matter of speculation, for in true marriage the ideal is realized. The one will is only truly one when based upon perfect freedom and mutual sacrifice, -- which indeed is not conscious sacrifice, but only a loving contention for self-renunciation.

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