And what we have to fear is a deadening of physical and spiritual response that must tend to follow from this suppression. For what is a girl’s life? She works and rests from work, eats, and sleeps, and plays, and all the while she remains wrapped in the closest egoism, her strongest instincts smouldering beneath the dull weight of an education that is not an education, but an unstimulating and conforming pretence, and not fitted to the needs, of living. Even when she is free and is turned out at last, apathetic and obliterated, she carries with her vague dreads of positive acts and new ideas. How seldom does she succeed in urging out of herself the inmost vital part she has stifled. She is compacted of numbed faculties and inhibited desires.
The inmost Self yearns to get out and away, to spend itself, to find its due share in the ever-creating life. But the confidence and possession of the Self has been destroyed; the ego is left alone with its dread, with the distrust of desires not understood and instincts thrust back within.
And do you not see the result of this conflict to the sensitive soul of the adolescent? The terrible evil of disharmonies first started during these pregnant and inceptive years that should be the infancy of the higher powers of womanhood? Robbed of a just confidence and pride in her sex, her own stifled instincts become to a girl hateful and as something of which she should be ashamed; she begins to chafe against her womanhood and spurn it, bemoaning the limitations of her sex. She lapses into boy’s ways, methods of work and ideals; she comes to live gaily enough and to laugh carelessly, not knowing what she has lost; to care nothing to be herself—content to choke the vision in her own life.
So it has been with you, with me, with all of us. Are we content that this blighting shall be suffered by our daughters?
The evil is happening for want of a generous guidance from us who have gone before. I write of what I know. Great and unending is the misery that we make possible by our folly, sickness of body and soul, so that the repressed nature rots away and doubt eats into natural faith. Nature is violated at every step, and _after we have educated her_, in nine cases out of ten, the girl emerges a mere residuum of decent minor dispositions. There is need to change.