Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/221

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Here, then, is no uncertain testimony as to the effects of the American system of female education: some women who are without the instinct or desire to nurse their offspring, some who have the desire but not the capacity, and others who have neither the instinct nor the capacity. The facts will hardly be disputed, whatever may finally be the accepted interpretation of them. It will not probably be argued that an absence of the capacity and the instinct to nurse is a result of higher development, and that it should be the aim of woman, as she advances to a higher level, to allow the organs which minister to this function to waste and finally to become by disuse as rudimentary in her sex as they are in the male sex. Their development is notably in close sympathy with that of the organs of reproduction, an arrest thereof being often associated with some defect of the latter; so that it might perhaps fairly be questioned whether it was right and proper, for the race's sake, that a woman who has not the wish or power to nurse should indulge in the functions of maternity. We may take note, by-the-way, that those in whom the organs are wasted invoke the dress-maker's aid in order to gain the appearance of them; they are not satisfied unless they wear the show of perfect womanhood. However, it may be in the plan of evolution to produce at some future period a race of sexless beings who, undistracted and unharassed by the ignoble troubles of reproduction, shall carry on the intellectual work of the world, not otherwise than as the sexless ants do the work and the fighting of the community.

Meanwhile, the consequences of an imperfectly developed reproductive system are not sexual only; they are also mental. Intellectually and morally there is a deficiency, or at any rate a modification answering to the physical deficiency; in mind, as in body, the individual fails to reach the ideal of a complete and perfect womanhood. If the aim of a true education be to make her reach that, it cannot certainly be a true education which operates in any degree to unsex her; for sex is fundamental, lies deeper than culture, cannot be ignored or defied with impunity. You may hide Nature, but you cannot extinguish it. Consequently, it does not seem impossible that, if the attempt to do so be seriously and persistently made, the result may be a monstrosity—something which having ceased to be woman is yet not man—"ce quelque chose de monstrueux," which the Comte A. de Gasparin forebodes, "cet être répugnant, qui déjà paraît à notre horizon."