Of course, it is we of the older generation—the mothers—who are to blame. We have left our daughters in a dangerous position; we did not see where modern education, with its effort to obliterate sex, must inevitably lead.
Education may be either a most helpful or a most dangerous process. And what is most to be feared is the shut-in instincts that tend to twist the nature from its simple fulfilment. There is something essentially harmful in any failure or wrong expression of a special function. Now, we have insisted upon repressions, and what we believed to be a high moral and efficient working character for girls, not knowing that what we so mistakenly were straining for was really something very like an entire absence of any kind of womanly character. The real nature of girls is wild, and our fears have been very great. And for this reason have we held that the nakedness of the adolescent’s new-born womanhood must be clothed with conventionalities and draped with culture.
It is this fear of sex that directs our educational system: there is too much drill and too much strain. Girls’ schools are governed too much, for girls need, not less, but more liberty than boys. The teachers are dull and narrow in their own outlook and in their experience of life; they are not trained to understand the needs of adolescent girls, only to teach them facts that as a rule are of no real service; they do not trouble to train the inner and hidden instincts that really form character, they do not even look for them; they reck nothing of early development or late, of the presence of strong passion or its absence; they have no kind of understanding of the unceasing action of sex, forcing its expression in unconscious acts, which alone give the clue to character; of all this (the only knowledge that matters) the teachers are profoundly ignorant; but they measure out girl-humanity for the conventional standard of efficiency like a dressmaker measures out her material with a yard measure. There is no thought, at least none is betrayed, that the school is a preparation for living. No kind of training is given for the part the girls will have to play in the life of sex for their own health and happiness and the regeneration of the race. The sexual life is persistently ignored.