They are thus more delicately poised and any kind of stress or strain--cerebral, nervous, or muscular--is more likely to produce serious disturbance and requires an accurate adjustment to their special needs.
The fact that it is stress and strain in general, and not necessarily educational studies, that are injurious to adolescent women, is sufficiently proved, if proof is necessary, by the fact that sexual arrest, and physical or nervous breakdown, occur with extreme frequency in girls who work in shops or mills, even in girls who have never been to school at all.

Even excesses in athletics--which now not infrequently occur as a reaction against woman's indifference to physical exercise--are bad.

Cycling is beneficial for women who can ride without pain or discomfort, and, according to Watkins, it is even beneficial in many diseased and disordered pelvic conditions, but excessive cycling is evil in its results on women, more especially by inducing rigidity of the perineum to an extent which may even prevent childbirth and necessitate operation.

I may add that the same objection applies to much horse-riding.

In the same way everything which causes shocks to the body is apt to be dangerous to women, since in the womb they possess a delicately poised organ which varies in weight at different times, and it would, for instance, be impossible to commend football as a game for girls.