Sex and Education - 1874 Author:Julia Ward Howe Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: VIII. Dr. Clarke's book on " Sex in Education" should be read deliberately, thoughtfully, and in a spirit of fairness, which seeks only to know the real facts... more » in the matter, and not to find arguments for or against any special theory, system, or hobby. Dr. Clarke is an eminent physician. All forms of disease are not only familiar to him, but are forced upon his attention : of course he sees the dark side of life, and judges accordingly. His picture of the condition of women is a terrible one, calculated to excite deep anxiety in parents, and in young women themselves : he sees in the future, if the present system of education is continued, only increasing invalidism, partial development, deformity, and the eventual failure of the American race. This alarming condition of affairs heattributes to various causes; and among the most powerful of these causes he reckons the common system of continuous education for girls. He calls it the boy's method, and means by it not any special curriculum of study, or any share in out-of-doors masculine plays or employments, but simply regular study for five or six days of every week. This, he thinks, is so grave an error, so absolutely criminal a course, that he has given to the world this book of warning, to stay, if he can, this evil; to save, if he can, American girls, to enable them to become mothers ; for, he says, " if these causes- of evil — persistent education chief among them — should continue for the next half century, and increase in the same ratio as they have for the last fifty years, it requires no prophet to foretell that the wives who are to be mothers in our republic must be drawn from transatlantic homes. The sons of the New World will have to react, on a magnificent scale, the old story of unwived Rome and the Sabines." I...« less