1873-06-01.14
“The American woman’s home” continues: “there has been a great deal of crude, disagreeable talk in these conventions, and too great tendency of the age to make the education of woman anti-domestic. It seems as if the world never could advance, except like ships under a headwind, tacking and going too far, now in this direction, and now in the opposite. Our common-school systems now reject sewing from the education of girls, which very properly used to occupy many hours daily in school a generation ago. The daughters of laborers and artisans are put through algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and the higher mathematics, to the entire neglect of that learning which belongs distinctively to women. A girl often cannot keep pace with her class if she gives any time to domestic matters; and accordingly she is excused from them all during the whole term of her education. As the result, the young women in some of our country towns are, in mental culture, much in advance of the males of the same household; but with this comes a physical delicacy, the result of an exclusive use of the brain and a neglect of the muscular system, with great inefficiency in practical, domestic duties. The race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls, that used to grow up in country places, and made the bright, neat, new England kitchens of olden times—the girls that could wash, iron, bake, harness a horse and drive him, no less than braid straw, embroider, draw, paint, and read innumerable books—this race of women, pride of olden time, is daily lessening; and in their stead come the fragile, easily-fatigued, languid girls of a modern age, drilled in book learning, ignorant of common things. The great danger of all this, and of the evils that come from it, is, that society, by-and-by, will turn as blindly against female intellectual culture as it now advocates it, and having worked disproportionately one way, will work disproportionately in the opposite direction.” E. G. W.