Book Review

A first look at Dr Edward Clarke's Sex In Education: Giving Girls a Chance

In reviewing Dr Edward Clarke’s newest work Sex In Education: or, A Fair Chance for Girls the reader is lulled into a false sense of ease by the first few pages. “Certainly this is a book that will justify the equal education for girls!” one might be tempted to think. “This is a physician aware of the strength, both physical and emotional of the female sex!” may happen to cross the reader’s mind.

This writer was sinking into the same sense of ease and gratification when she reached the 18th page of the manuscript. Imagine this writer’s shock when upon turning the page she read “it is not true that [woman] can do all this, and retain uninjured health and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system, if she follows the same method that boys are trained in.”

But perhaps the manuscript may redeem itself in later pages. As the introduction continues, Dr Clarke assures the reader that it is for the “mode of life which gives the finest nurture to the brain, and so enables those [educational] processes to yield their best result” that he mourns. That he seeks to rid schools of the educational methods that “are, to a large extent, the cause of ‘the thousand ills’ that beset American women.” Clarke does clarify though that “an immense loss of female power may be fairly charged to irrational cooking and indigestible diet.”

Dr Clarke does continue on to blame several “female maladies” on the tightness women’s of corsets and the width of her of skirts. He even goes so far as to call for “some inspired prophet of clothes…who should teach the coming woman how, in pharmaceutical phrase, to fit, put on, wear, and take off her dress.”

While it remains to be seen how the views of Dr Clarke play out in the continuation of this discourse and whether they fit within the current discourse on co-education this writer will now leave her desk to continue her perusal of the manuscript at hand.