Litchfield enquirer., 1873-08-07
co-EDUcATIoN OF THE SEXES.

| conedeU oI UOyS anu g1flS III CLASSICS OI within neighboring premises. We do not see that any injuries to morality would arise from allowing girls to attend college exercises at Harvard. And we think it likely enough that their scholarship would be equal to that of the young men. We are confident on the other hand, that their health would decline as fast as their scbol. arship rose; that their safety even as to nsorGts sOould. be very much due to their u',0ttr0ctiveness and absence Of qCon,ogl- hood. and that all they gained in the way of masculine culture would be at the ex- pense of things more valuable to them selves and more important to society.
 The trial of co-education of the sexes in Western colleges, and especially the sharp and conclusive refutation to Pres. EIliot's insinuations from the professors of those colleges, leave even the "Liberal Christian no ground to believe that co-education would result in immortality. But while ob- liged to concede the fact, the insult with which the concession is accompanied is very characteristic of the clerical anti-suf- fragist. Seeing that the co-education of the sexes does not in practice result in the inn morality the conservative theory of female frailty would require, he quietly attributes the phenomenon to the superior virtue of the male student, not very severely tried, as would have been the case had he been brought in contact with the really femi nine, marketable article turned out by the fashionable boarding school Our first impression on reading so contemptible a slur on womanhood was that the Liberal Christian was liar and the New York Ob- server another. Further reflection, how ever, inclines us to a different opinion. There is probably no place in the world where woman is worse underrated than in the college. Students associate little with ladies, and those mainly of the fashiona- ble, flirtatious kind. The classics they are mainly taught rate women exceedingly low. Many of them are deceived by the Byron-Swinburne notion that attributes all the frailty of the Greek type of woman (barely out of the Asiatic harem) to the English and American lady, and by the want of faith in female virtue that taints everything French, and what are ranked as English and German classics, almost as badly as it taints the literature of Greece and Rome. The monastic con- stitution of our colleges deprives the stu dent of the natural and wholesome cor rective of constant association with young ladies of his own social grade, whose chief business is saot Irritation and whose sole aim in life is aot matrimony.
 That the theological seminary, also monastic, is any better in this regard than the college we see no reason to believe. The Fathers, if they spend much time on them there, view woman much in the light of snare. No doubt intimate associa- tion with good women soon removes from the mind of the minister many of the false notions of the college and the seminary; but some of them stick to him for life. He learns that the woman independent American habits produce, is very differ ent being from the harem- bred Asiatic, or the convent-bred Frenchwoman. Still, he is too apt to consider the exemplary women who are the life and soul of every parish to which he ministers the exceptional product of grace and careful culture. His ideas of the sex at large re- mains uncleansed of much of their early impnrity. So that, occasionally, when some unwelcome reform fayoring woman's independence is proposed, he reverts to his old notions, and talks of the women of America as though they were like the wo- men of Juvenal, of Moliere, of Goethe. of Fielding or of Byron, and speaks of fe- male morality, not indeed with the foul tongue of the old writer and the modern bar-room loafer, but with a propriety of language that half hides the same foul ideal.
 Giving up the objection of immortality the Liberal Christian falls back on the following:
 "We are alarmed at the decline of health l favored class. And we think it due to the strain under which they are put by ambitious teachers and parents at the critical period of their lives. What they | lose nothing can repay. All they give society, intellectually or morally, is noth- ing compared with the physical deteriora- ton they may entail upon their offspring and the unhappiness they may bring into their homes. We trust there will be a long pause before co-education of the sexes in our more advanced colleges gives | fresh impulse to the stilted intellectual l ity which is becoming the bane of Ameri can women; for what spells them ruins the hopes of humanity 1"
 Undoubtedly the training of both boy: and girls is too exclusively mental
 While themind is being trained the body
 goes untrained; the brain works and th'
 muscles lie still. The Greeks, on th'
 contrary, whose literature is parsed s'
 asiduously at our colleges, trained botl
 body and mind; muscles and brain. Bu
 is it not little ludicrous, the spectaclt
 of the minister, the most dyspeptic o
 men, taunting woman with her feebl
 physique? What part of woman's pres
 ent training is it, too, that occasions tn
 ''decline of health and sanity amon
 American women of the favored class :?
 Is it the hours she spends in study or tn
 hours she spends in dressing and novel
 reading, that weaken her physique? Is
 the early hours at German, or the late hour
 at the German 1; the ambitions of school
 or the ambitions of tine parlor, that caus
 the physical deterioration the Libers Christian, and indeed all Christians, ls
 ment? On this point, if there is reall need for proof, the experience of Vassa and of the Western colleges where wome
 are admitted is conclusive. The test