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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 78

Marriage and Maternity the Natural Goal

page 89

Marriage and Maternity the Natural Goal.

In any ideal community the largest possible number of women must be devoted to maternity, and marriage and support by men must be assumed. Female celibacy must not be the goal for the woman. The accidental and exceptional should not replace the formal and usual. It is not so much the unmarried minority that need attention as the mothers. . . . Dr Playfair, in the 'British Medical Journal,' says that the prime and alarming fault in the heads of high schools and colleges for girls is that they, consciously or unconsciously, assume the absolutely untenable theory that the sexual question is of secondary importance, and that there is little real distinction between girls and boys from fourteen to twenty. . . . When we turn to the subject of geometry, however, we find that the ordinary girl in taking up the subject tries to learn it as she has learned her history or her Latin, by committing the demonstration to memory, but she soon discovers that her teacher has spoiled the plans by reversing the position of the figures or by changing the letters for numerals. She is at once at sea. She is called upon to reason absolutely, while her natural preference is for the concrete and individual. Moreover, she is called upon to offer original demonstrations, when she finds it well-nigh impossible to offer the demonstrations of the book. Her [powers of origination are too often insufficient for the task. If she masters her geometry, it is because she varies considerably from the type, or because she devotes to the subject a disproportionate amount of time. With the acquisition there is likely also to be considerable nervous wear and tear due to the worry arising from the consciousness that she is attempting to do something for which she is not adapted, and in which she will not possibly succeed. She has found that her memory and her intuition, her love for the individual and the concrete, stand her in no stead in pursuing a subject which calls for the exercise of pure reason and inventive genius. . . . Women excel in language and in literature. . . .