She is not fairly up to what Nature
asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain herself under
the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which now-a-days she is
eager to share with the man?"[20]
In our schools it is the ambitious and conscientious girls, those who
have in them the stuff of which the noblest women are made, that
suffer, not the romping or lazy sort; and thus our modern ways of
education provide for the "non-survival of the fittest." A speaker
told an audience of women at Wesleyan Hall not long ago, that he once
attended the examination of a Western college, where a girl beat the
boys in unravelling the intracacies of Juvenal. He did not report the
consumption of blood and wear of brain tissue that in her college way
of study correlated her Latin, or hint at the possibility of arrested
development. Girls of bloodless skins and intellectual faces may be
seen any day, by those who desire the spectacle, among the scholars of
our high and normal schools,--faces that crown, and skins that cover,
curving spines, which should be straight, and neuralgic nerves that
should know no pain. Later on, when marriage and maternity overtake
these girls, and they "live laborious days" in a sense not intended by
Milton's line, they bend and break beneath the labor, like loaded
grain before a storm, and bear little fruit again.
Pages:
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100