THE EVIL EFFECTS OF SCHOOLING AND THE "MODERN WAYS" OF 1873 ON AMERICAN GIRLS

Abstract

Too many hours of schooling, particularly for girls, was thought by many well-known 19th century physicians to be a pernicious practice and a major source of ill health in young women. Edward H. Clarke of Boston in 1873 wrote as follows: "The sick chamber not the school room; the physician's private consultation, not the committee's public examination; the hospital, not the college, the workshop or the parlor–disclose the sad results which modern ways . . . have entailed on women. Examples of them may be found in every walk of life. On the luxurious couches of Beacon Street [Boston]; in the palaces of Fifth Avenue [New York City]; among the classes of our private, common and normal schools; among the female graduates of our colleges; behind the counters of Washington Street [Boston] and Broadway [New York City], may be found numberless pale, weak, neuralgic, dyspeptic, hysterical, menorrhagic, dysmenorrheic girls . . . improper methods of study, and a disregard of the reproductive apparatus and its functions, during the educational life of girls . . . are (not) the sole causes of female diseases . . . But it is asserted that the number of these female graduates (from our schools and colleges) who have been permanently disabled to a greater or less degree by these causes is so great, as to excite the gravest alarm, and to demand the serious attention of the community, if these causes should continue for the next half-century, and increase in the same ratio as they have for the past 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.