Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/412

398 one else to dispute what she has to say. The lady to whom I refer is Mrs. Sidgwick, and this is what she says:

The students that I have known have shown no inclination to adopt masculine sentiments or habits in any unnecessary or unseemly degree; they are disposed to imitate the methods of life and work of industrious undergraduates just as far as these appear to be means approved by experience to the end which both sets of students have in common, and nothing that I have seen of them, either at the university or afterward, has tended in the smallest degree to support the view that the adaptation of women to domestic life is so artificial and conventional a thing that a few years of free, unhampered study and varied companionship at the university has a tendency to impair it.

So far as I am aware, only one other argument has been, or can be, adduced on the opposite side. This argument is that the physique of young women as a class is not sufficiently robust to stand the strain of severe study, and therefore that many are likely to impair their health more or less seriously under the protracted effort and acute excitement which are necessarily incidental to our system of school and university examinations. Now, I may begin by remarking that with this argument I am in the fullest possible sympathy. Indeed, so much is this the case that I have taken the trouble to collect evidence from young girls of my own acquaintance who are now studying at various high-schools with a view to subsequently competing for first classes in the Cambridge triposes. What I have found is that in some of these high-schools—carefully observe, only in some—absolutely no check is put upon the ambition of young girls to distinguish themselves and to bring credit upon their establishments. The consequence is that in these schools the more promising pupils habitually undertake an amount of intellectual work which it is sheer madness to attempt. A single quotation from one of my correspondents—whom I have known from a child—will be enough to prove this statement:

I never begin work later than six o'clock, and never work less than ten or eleven hours a day. But within a fortnight or so of my examinations I work fifteen or sixteen hours. Most girls, however, stop at fourteen or fifteen hours, but some of them go on to eighteen hours. Of course, according to the school time-tables, none of us should work more than eight hours; but it is quite impossible for any one to get through the work in that time. For instance, in the time-tables ten minutes is put down for botany, whereas it takes the quickest girl an hour and a half to answer the questions set by the school lecturer.

These facts speak for themselves, and therefore I will only add that in many of those high-schools for girls which are situated in large towns no adequate provision is made for bodily exercise, and this, of course, greatly aggravates the danger of overwork. In such a school there is probably no play-ground; the gymnasium, if there is one, is not attended by any of the harder students; drill is never thought of; and the only walking exercise is to and from the school. Let it not be supposed that I am attacking the high-school system.