3. Cease prolonging the educational period past the early twenties. It
is time to call a halt on the schools and universities, whose constant
lengthening of the educational period will result in a serious loss to
the race. External circumstances of an educational nature should not be
allowed to force a young man to postpone his marriage past the age of
25. This means that students must be allowed to specialize earlier. If
there is need of limiting the number of candidates, competitive entrance
examinations may be arranged on some rational basis. Superior young men
should marry, even at some cost to their early efficiency. The high
efficiency of any profession can be more safely kept up by demanding a
minimum amount of continuation work in afternoon, evening, or seasonal
classes, laboratories, or clinics. No more graduate fellowships should
be established until those now existing carry a stipend adequate for
marriage. Those which already carry larger stipends should not be
limited to bachelors, as are the most valuable awards at Princeton, the
ten yearly Proctor fellowships of $1,000 each.
The causes of the remarkable failure of college women to marry can not
be exhaustively investigated here, but for the purposes of eugenics they
may be roughly classified as unavoidable and avoidable. Under the first
heading must be placed those girls who are inherently unmarriageable,
either because of physical defect or, more frequently, mental
defect,--most often an over-development of intellect at the expense of
the emotions, which makes a girl either unattractive to men, or inclines
her toward a celibate career and away from marriage and motherhood.
Opinions differ as to the proportion of college girls who are inherently
unmarriageable. Anyone who has been much among them will testify that a
large proportion of them are not inherently unmarriageable, however, and
their celibacy for the most part must be classified as avoidable. Their
failure to marry may be because
(1) They desire not to marry, due to a preference for a career, or
development of a cynical attitude toward men and matrimony, due to a
faulty education, or
(2) They desire to marry, but do not, for a variety of reasons such as:
(a) They are educated for careers, such as school-teaching, where they
have little opportunity to meet men.
(b) Their education makes them less desirable mates than girls who have
had some training along the lines of home-making and mothercraft.
(c) They have remained in partial segregation until past the age when
they are physically most attractive, and when the other girls of their
age are marrying.
(d) Due to their own education, they demand on the part of suitors a
higher degree of education than the young men of their acquaintance
possess. A girl of this type wants to marry but desires a man who is
educationally her equal or superior. As men of such type are relatively
rare, her chances of marriage are reduced.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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