“Every teacher knows that the average girl of seventeen has not reached the physical, mental, or moral development necessary to enter upon this severe and high professional course of studies, and that one year is insufficient for such a course.

“Lengthen the time given to normal instruction,—­make it two years; give in this school instruction purely in the science of education; relegate all general instruction to a good high school covering a term of four years.  In this as in all other progressive formative periods the way out is ahead.

“It will be time enough to talk of doing away with a portion of the girls’ school year when the schools have fulfilled their high mission, when they have sent out a large body of American women prepared, not for a single profession, even the high feminine vocation of pedagogy, but equipped for her highest, most general and congenial functions as the source and centre of the home.”

I am unwilling to leave this subject without a few words as to our remedy, especially as concerns our public schools and normal schools for girls.  What seems to me to be needed most is what the woman would bring into our school boards.  Surely it is also possible for female teachers to talk frankly to that class of girls who learn little of the demands of health from uneducated or busy or careless mothers, and it would be as easy, if school boards were what they should be, to insist on such instruction, and to make sure that the claims of maturing womanhood are considered and attended to.  Should I be told that this is impracticable, I reply that as high an authority as Samuel Eliot, of Massachusetts, has shown in large schools that it is both possible and valuable.  As concerns the home life, it is also easy to get at the parents by annual circulars enforcing good counsel as to some of the simplest hygienic needs in the way of sleep, hours of study, light, and meals.

It were better not to educate girls at all between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, unless it can be done with careful reference to their bodily health.  To-day, the American woman is, to speak plainly, too often physically unfit for her duties as woman, and is perhaps of all civilized females the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks which tax so heavily the nervous system of man.  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 nowadays she is eager to share with the man?

While making these stringent criticisms, I am anxious not to be misunderstood.  The point which above all others I wish to make is this, that owing chiefly to peculiarities of climate, our growing girls are endowed with organizations so highly sensitive and impressionable that we expose them to needless dangers when we attempt to overtax them mentally.  In any country the effects of such a course must be evil, but in America I believe it to be most disastrous.