Page:Thirty years' progress in female education.djvu/10

6 arrangements, which had the stamp of common approval upon them. In the public provision made for elementary education, this assimilation was adopted at once without controversy. In our primary school system, the education for the one sex runs side by side with that for the other, with very slight differences. Girls are taught very nearly the same things as boys, and examined by the same Inspectors in precisely the same manner; the pupil teachers of the one sex have a nearly identical training with that of the other; and there are female Training Colleges, very closely resembling the male Training Colleges. And no one, so far as I know, has uttered any protest against this assimilation as unnatural or improper or injurious. It would be impossible for any one to desire more for the female sex in secondary or higher education than what has been conceded as a matter of course, and with confessedly the best results, in primary education. The old notion, that girls ought to have a totally different education from that of boys, has however lingered on with obstinate vitality. Nature itself seemed to many to prescribe that boys should learn the classics and mathematics, and girls the arts and modern languages; that boys should continue their formal studies to the age of 21 or 22, girls to the age of 17 or 18. Is not the female nature slighter and weaker, it was asked, than the male? Then let girls have a light, and boys a solid, education. But suppose this reasoning transferred from the mind to the body. It is the physical nature that is so obviously less robust in women than in men. Ought there not then to be an entirely distinct diet for the two sexes, meat and beer for the male, pastry and creams and light wine for the female? Ought not their hours of taking food to be different? No one supposes that Nature prescribes these distinctions. Women sit at the same table and have the same dishes offered to them as men. I do not say that they eat or drink as much; but they are under no formal restrictions; they partake of a common diet with men, in such proportions as Nature and their own discretion suggest. Now, it is not contended by any that the minds of the two sexes differ more than their bodies; and the utmost that is asked on behalf of women, is that there should be the same kind of community in intellectual studies as now exists with universal consent in physical diet.