{"agent_id":"hall","agent_name":"G. Stanley Hall","slug":"the-education-of-women","label":"The education of women: ought the sexes to be educated differently because they differ by nature?","topic":"The education of women","question":"Ought the sexes to be educated differently because they differ by nature?","position":"Man and woman are not two variants of one type but two types, deep and complementary, differing in body and in soul from the ground up; and an education that ignores this, that trains girls exactly as boys and presses them into the same molds and rivalries, works against nature and injures the very womanhood it should ripen. The girl at adolescence is governed by a physiological periodicity and is preparing, whether she knows it or not, for the supreme function of motherhood, on which the future of the race depends. To subject her in just these critical years to the identical strain, competition, and sedentary bookishness we impose on boys is to risk her health, her nerves, and her fertility for the sake of a false ideal of sameness. I would educate her richly, but in accordance with her nature and her destiny — for feeling, for beauty, for the home and the child and the community — rather than assimilate her to a masculine standard that unsexes without truly equaling. The differences are the glory of the sexes, not a defect to be engineered away.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Man and woman are not two variants of one type but two types, deep and complementary, differing in body and in soul from the ground up; and an education that ignores this, that trains girls exactly as boys and presses them into the same molds and rivalries, works against nature and injures the very womanhood it should ripen.","n":[1,2,3]},{"t":"The girl at adolescence is governed by a physiological periodicity and is preparing, whether she knows it or not, for the supreme function of motherhood, on which the future of the race depends.","n":[]}],[{"t":"To subject her in just these critical years to the identical strain, competition, and sedentary bookishness we impose on boys is to risk her health, her nerves, and her fertility for the sake of a false ideal of sameness.","n":[]},{"t":"I would educate her richly, but in accordance with her nature and her destiny — for feeling, for beauty, for the home and the child and the community — rather than assimilate her to a masculine standard that unsexes without truly equaling.","n":[]},{"t":"The differences are the glory of the sexes, not a defect to be engineered away.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"Adolescence (1904, the chapters on the psychology of sex and the education of girls); Educational Problems (2 vols., 1911). Reception: the contemporary and later feminist rebuttal (the answer to Edward Clarke's Sex in Education, in whose hereditarian line Hall stood); the empirical refutation that higher education does not damage women's health or fertility; the modern psychology of small and overlapping sex differences against Hall's categorical account.","works":["Adolescence (1904, the chapters on the psychology of sex and the education of girls)","Educational Problems (2 vols., 1911)"],"reception":"the contemporary and later feminist rebuttal (the answer to Edward Clarke's Sex in Education, in whose hereditarian line Hall stood); the empirical refutation that higher education does not damage women's health or fertility; the modern psychology of small and overlapping sex differences against Hall's categorical account.","status":"Hall's account of sex differences and his opposition to identical higher education for women stood in the hereditarian line of Edward Clarke's Sex in Education (1873) and was used to resist women's advancement in education; it is now repudiated on both empirical and moral grounds. The central empirical claim — that rigorous coeducation damages women's health and reproductive capacity — was false and was refuted by the flourishing of the women's colleges and by direct study. Modern psychology finds sex differences in cognition to be small, heavily overlapping, and environmentally shaped, not the categorical two-types division Hall asserted, and the \"periodicity\" argument has no basis as a bar to education. This is among the positions where Hall's science tracked the prejudices of his era.","era":"1844-1924","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"This is truest of the higher education, and more so in proportion as the tendencies of the age are toward special and vocational training. Woman, as we saw, in every fiber of her soul and body is a more generic creature than man, nearer to the race, and demands more and more with advancing age an ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION education that is essentially liberal and humanistic.","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"},{"n":2,"work":"Educational Problems Vol 1","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The first results of this knowledge and its complete realization will be that woman will accept and crave the whole of periodicity instead of maintaining her anxious concealment or repression of its symptoms and will regulate all her regimen -and environment conformably to its norms. Young pubescent girls especially need to yield to nature with entire freedom, if not abandon.","label":"Educational Problems Vol 1"},{"n":3,"work":"Adolescence Vol 2","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"In many of the new fields opening in biology since Darwin, in embryology, botany, the study of children, ADOLESCENT GIRLS AND THEIR EDUCATION 63S animals, savages {teste Miss Fletcher), sociological investi- gation, to say nothing of all the vast body of work that re- quires painstaking detail, perseverance, and conscience, woman has superior ability, or her very sex gives her peculiar advan- tages where she is to…","label":"Adolescence Vol 2"},{"n":4,"work":"Youth Its Education Regimen and Hygiene","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Again, in these days of intense new interest in feelings, emotions, and sentiments, when many a psychologist now envies and, like Schleiermacher, devoutly wishes he could be- come a woman, he can never really understand das Ewig- Weibliche,1 one of the two supreme oracles of guidance 1 The eternal womanly.","label":"Youth Its Education Regimen and Hygiene"},{"n":5,"work":"Educational Problems Vol 1","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Remarkable, indeed, if any such there l)e, who go through all these long and intricate processes of transformation under the eyes of our precocious American schoolboys unscathed, for it is one of the most try- ing ordeals which womanhood has ever l)een called to face in all her history.","label":"Educational Problems Vol 1"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"recapitulation","label":"Recapitulation: does the development of the individual mind repeat the mental history of the race?"},{"slug":"adolescence-as-storm-and-stress","label":"Adolescence as storm and stress: is the turbulence of youth a biological necessity of development?"},{"slug":"the-psychology-of-religion","label":"The psychology of religion: is religious experience a natural phenomenon of development to be studied genetically?"}]}