Chapter 1 of "Sex in Education."
Education for women was a hot-button topic in the nineteenth century in much the same way that mandatory testing is today. In 1875, Edward H. Clarke capitalised on the public’s interest in this topic with a lecture that he turned into a book, Sex in Education: or, a fair chance for girls. The book makes for entertaining but rather disturbing reading.
Clarke argues that a “fair chance” would mean the ability for women to study in “the woman’s way” rather than the “the man’s way,” but is rather vague about what those ways might be (19). He is clear on the destructive effects that too much studying may have on women, detailing several rather lurid stories of young women he has known who have had their health destroyed by over-education, leading to dysmenorrhea, sleeplessness, indigestion, and the worst of all possible horrors, women unable to nurse their children or childless marriages.
Clarke seems in many ways to be buying into or even leading the panic that took place in much of the western world at the end of the nineteenth century over racial degeneration or “male hysteria” or any one of a dozen other synonyms used by those who felt the members of their race, group, or ethnicity were losing their vital force and becoming weak. “Weakness” was often used interchangeably with “feminine” making Clarke’s argument about the nature of education for women particularly interesting: if women are to be educated as women, what does that mean? As far as Clarke’s argument goes, it seems to mean letting them do very little due to the self-evident weakness of their bodies, exemplified by the menstrual cycle and childbearing.
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