marriage than one who is robust and strong.

_Page 55._

It is in the mistakes and failures made in adapting the education given
in the schools to the exact conditions that present themselves in the
constantly changing Japan of to-day, that the opponents of all
alteration in the education of women find their strongest arguments. The
conservatives point with scorn to this girl whose new ideas have led
her into folly or trouble, or to that one whose health has been broken
down by the adverse conditions surrounding her student life, and say,
"This will be the case with all our women if we continue this insane
practice of educating them along new lines." Advance in female
education, as in all other lines of progress in Japan, is a series of
violent actions and reactions. In 1889, partly through ill-advised
conduct on the part of supporters of the cause, one of the most serious
reverses that has come in the progress of Western education for women
began to show itself. The reaction was helped along by a paper read
before some of the most influential men of Japan, and subsequently
reported and discussed in the newspapers, by a German professor in the
medical department of the imperial University in T[=o]ky[=o]. The paper
was a serious warning to the men of the country that no women could be
good wives, mothers, and housekeepers and at the same time have
undergone a thorough literary education. The arguments were reinforced
by statistics showing that American college women either did not marry,
or that if they married they had very few children. All Japan took
fright at this alarming showing, and for several years the education of
girls in anything more than the primary studies was not encouraged by
the government. The lowest depth of this reaction was reached during or
soon after the Japan-China war, when the growth of national vanity
resulted in a temporary disdain for all foreign ideas. The tide has
turned again now, girls' schools that have been closed for years are
being reopened, young men who are thinking of marrying are looking for
educated wives, and among the women themselves there is a strong desire
for self-improvement. Under this impulse a new generation of educated
women will be added to those already exerting an influence in the
country, and it is to be hoped that the forward movement will be more
difficult to set back when the next reactionary wave strikes the
Japanese coast.

_Page 60._

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