if one were almost unconsciously feeling along the wall for a door to which the
key was not at hand. Thus some lose their bloom and, yielding to the great
danger of young womanhood, slowly lapse to a anxious state of expectancy, or
desire something not within their reach, and so the diathesis of restlessness
slowly supervenes. The best thing about college life for girls is, perhaps, that it
postpones this incipient disappointment; but it is a little pathetic to me to read, as
I have lately done, the class letters of hundreds of girl graduates, out of college
one, two, or three years, turning a little to art, music, travel, teaching, charity
work, one after the other, or trying to find something to which they can devote
themselves, some cause, movement, occupation, where their capacity for
altruism and self-sacrifice can find a field. The tension is almost imperceptible,
perhaps quite unconscious. It is everywhere overborne by a keen interest in life,
by a desire to know the world at first hand, while susceptibilities are at their
height. The apple of intelligence has been plucked at perhaps a little too great
cost of health. The purely mental has not been quite sufficiently kept back. The
girl wishes to know a good deal more of the world and perfect her own
personality, and would not marry, although every cell of her body and every
unconscious impulse points to just that end. Soon, it may be in five or ten years
or more, the complexion of ill health is in these notes, or else life has been
adjusted to independence and self-support. Many of these bachelor women are
magnificent in mind and body, but they lack wifehood and yet more—
motherhood.
In fine, we should use these facts as a stimulus to ask more searchingly the
question whether the present system of higher education for both sexes is not
lacking in some very essential elements, and if so what these are. Indeed,
considering the facts that in our social system man makes the advances and that
woman is by nature more prone than man to domesticity and parenthood, it is
not impossible that men's colleges do more to unfit for these than do those for
women. One cause may be moral. Ethics used to be taught as a practical power
for life and reënforced by religious motives. Now it is theoretical and speculative
and too often led captive by metaphysical and epistemological speculations.
Sometimes girls work or worry more over studies and ideals than is good for
their constitution, and boys grow idle and indifferent, and this proverbially tends
to bad habits. Perhaps fitting for college has been too hard at the critical age of
about eighteen, and requirements of honest, persevering work during college
years too little enforced, or grown irksome by physiological reaction of lassitude
from the strain of fitting and entering. Again, girls mature earlier than boys; and
the latter who have been educated with them tend to certain elements of maturity