For the slow evolution of such a scheme, we must first of all distinctly and ostensively invert the present maxim, and educate primarily and chiefly for motherhood, assuming that, if that does not come, single life can best take care of itself, because it is less intricate and lower and its needs far more easily met. While girls may be trained with boys, coeducation should cease at the dawn of adolescence, at least for a season. Great daily intimacy between the sexes in high school, if not in college, tends to rub of the bloom and delicacy which can develop in each, and girls suffer in this respect, let us repeat, far more than boys. The familiar comradeship that ignores sex should be left to the agenic class. To the care of their institutions, we leave with pious and reverent hands the ideals inspired by characters like Hypatia, Madame de Staël, the Misses Cobb, Martineau, Fuller, Bronté, by George Eliot, George Sand, and Mrs. Browning; and while accepting and profiting by what they have done, and acknowledging every claim for their abilities and achievements, prospective mothers must not be allowed to forget a still larger class of ideal women, both in history and literature, from the Holy Mother to Beatrice Clotilda de Vaux, and all those who have inspired men to great deeds, and the choice and far richer anthology of noble mothers.
We must premise, too, that she must not be petted or pampered with regimen or diet unsuited to her needs; left to find out as best she can, from surreptitious or worthy sources, what she most of all needs to know; must recognize that our present civilization is hard on woman and that she is not yet adjusted to her social environment; that as she was of old accused of having given man the apple of knowledge of good and evil, so he now is liable to a perhaps no less serious indictment of having given her the apple of intellectualism and encouraged her to assume his standards at the expense of health. We must recognize that riches are probably harder on her, on the whole, than poverty, and that poor parents should not labor too hard to exempt her from its wholesome discipline. The expectancy of change so stamped upon her sex by heredity as she advances into maturity must not be perverted into uneasiness or her soul sown with the tares of ambition or fired by intersexual competition and driven on, to quote Dr. R.T. Edes, "by a tireless sort of energy which is a compound of conscience, ambition, and desire to please, plus a peculiar female obstinacy." If she is bright, she must not be overworked in the school factory, studying in a way which parodies Hood's "Song of the Shirt"; and if dull or feeble, she should not be worried by preceptresses like a eminent lady principal,[7] who thought girls' weakness is usually imaginary or laziness, and that doctors are to blame for suggesting illness and for intimating that men will have to choose between a healthy animal and an educated invalid for a wife.