The Man‐Made World
Physical culture, for both boys and girls, will be part of such a modified system. All things that both can do together will be accepted as human; but what either boys or girls have to retire apart to practice will be frankly called masculine and feminine, and not encouraged in children.
The most important qualities are the human ones, and will be so named and honored. Courage is a human quality, not a sex‐quality.
What is commonly called courage in male animals is mere
belligerence, the fighting instinct. To meet an adversary of his own sort is a universal masculine trait; two father cats may fight fiercely each other, but both will run from a dog as quickly as a mother cat.
She has courage enough, however, in defence of her kittens.
What this world most needs to‐day in both men and women, is the
power to recognize our public conditions; to see the relative importance of measures; to learn the processes of constructive citizenship. We need an education which shall give its facts in the order of their importance; morals and manners based on these facts; and train our personal powers with careful selection, so that each may best serve the community.
At present, in the larger processes of extra‐scholastic education, the advantage is still with the boy. From infancy we make the gross mistake of accentuating sex in our children, by dress and all its limitations, by special teaching of what is “ladylike” and “manly.”
The boy is allowed a freedom of experience far beyond the girl. He
learns more of his town and city, more of machinery, more of life, passing on from father to son the truths as well as traditions of sex superiority.
All this is changing before our eyes, with the advancing humanness
of women. Not yet, however, has their advance affected, to any large extent, the base of all education; the experience of a child‘s first years. Here is where the limitations of women have checked race progress most thoroughly. Here hereditary influence was constantly
offset by the advance of the male. Social selection did develop higher types of men, though sex‐selection reversed still insisted on primitive types of women. But the educative influence of these primitive women, acting most exclusively on the most susceptible years of life, has been a serious deterrent to race progress.