Physical and Intellectual Development : Part 4

Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women
by George S. Weaver

(Page 9 of 17)

We send our girls to these schools to be educated; but educated for what? Why, nothing in particular; but to be educated because it is fashionable; to go home and sit in the parlor educated ladies; to talk about novels and poetry with the gentlemen that come in; to go into ecstasies over some boy's last; to set up for a professional husband. It is to go over, not through, some of the sciences, but do it because it is fashionable; recite and write and go through all the forms of school training, just because it sounds well and will give a lady social position, not literary standing or scientific character, intellectual influence, or dignity of thought and life; and go through it all and graduate with diploma in hand at fourteen or sixteen years of age. Here again women are cheated with a bauble. Little girls are told that they are educated at this tender age, and to prove it are referred to their diplomas, announcing to the world that they have been through a regular course of study at such an institution. Only think of it - a finished education at sixteen!

Why, the majority of our young men can not get ready for college till they are twenty or twenty-five. There they spend four years in hard study and the most vigorous mental discipline, delving in the deep mines of science and untombing the rich archives of history and human thought; then study three years the masters of their professions. And even then they are but boys in thought and action, and must meet the hard discipline of active life before we award to them intellectual manhood. We compare these educated girls with these educated young men, and wonder at the weakness of the female mind! The girls went to school because it was fashionable; the boys at the call of an honorable ambition. The girls studied to appear well in society; the boys to tread life's highway with honor and win laurels from the hand of the world in the duties of useful professions. The girls were stimulated by nothing that was great and noble in action; the boys were fired by all that can stir up human ambition. True, the innate glory of cultivated minds was before them both, but that alone in our present sensuous life has seldom been found a sufficient stimulus to vigorous intellectual discipline. I should be glad to see a class of our strongest young women go through Dartmouth, Yale, and Cambridge colleges with the same preparation and stimulants that our young men possess. If I mistake not, they would graduate with honors, and be heard from in the high field of intellectual life.

But as this can not be at present, our young women must make the best of the opportunities they have. What education they do get should be thorough, practical, and from proper motives. They must fill woman's place, and they ought to prepare for it as thoroughly as possible. They have an intellectual life to live and intellectual duties to perform. How poorly they will live that life and perform those duties without a preparation. Many young women can not attend school and enjoy the common routine of mental discipline; but they may read and study at home; they may cultivate their minds by the fireside; in the lecture-room, in the church, and in the intellectual circle. The midnight hour may impart strength to their minds, and the morning dawn may find them storing them with useful knowledge. The world is full of good books, and from them they may glean invaluable treasures. Every young woman spends time enough in idle gossip and foolish flirtation to educate herself well.

Schools are not necessary - they are only helps to education. Many great minds have been educated without them. To educate is to learn to think. The way to learn to think is to practice thinking; "Practice makes perfect." The archer practices with his bow; the artist with his brush or chisel; the writer with his pen; the mechanic with his tool; the lawyer with his brief. So the student should practice with his mind - practice thinking, reasoning, investigating, analyzing, comparing, and illustrating. This is the practice our young female minds want. They do not think enough. They do not dig for thought, search for ideas, investigate for truth. They are too light, frivolous, and giddy. They will run by a great thought to trifle with a silly whim. They will leave a rich intellectual lecture for a giddy party. They will turn away from a mental feast to enjoy an idle gossip; I mean too many of them will.

How beautiful, how truly captivating, is an intellectual woman! We have many such among us, and their number is increasing. The female mind is awakening from its long slumber. In ten years we shall have many more. Our present female education will soon be too superficial. These surface students will soon be left in the shade. Woman is hearing the voice of God which commands her to use well her talents. Soon He will call for them, and she must answer for their use. It is an omen of good that woman is rising and putting on her strength. She has a rich mind, and I am glad that she is becoming aware of it.

Young women, heed the voice which asks you to educate. If you heed it not, you may look meagre and antiquated by-and-by. In that "good time coming" how sad a thing will be an uneducated woman, one whose mind is barren of thought! You are to live, or ought to live, through two generations. If you live only for to-day, you will be minus to-morrow. If you live for to-morrow, you will be bright lights in your day and generation. There is a work for you to do. You must sanctify the thought of the world. Our men are too worldly and sensual in their intellectuality. You are to redeem their minds from this baseness. We want more pure thought, more sanctified mind, more looking upward toward goodness, heaven, and God. And with your assistance we may be redeemed from this downward tendency. I have often said it: the world wants more woman's thought. It is too masculine, hard, inflexible. Our men think too much by rules of logic. Educated women would be more intuitive, spontaneous, religious. You may remedy this evil. Much responsibility rests upon the young women of to-day. Let them know it, and lay aside their folly and lightness and put on the garments of wisdom and truth.

Fowler and Wells, Publishers, New York, 1856.