There is no use pretending about it. It may sound an awful thing to say,
but the women are going to be married. That is, and always has been,
their career; and, what is more, they know it; and even at college,
while they are studying algebra and political economy, they have their
eye on it sideways all the time. The plain fact is that, after a girl
has spent four years of her time and a great deal of her parents' money
in equipping herself for a career that she is never going to have, the
wretched creature goes and gets married, and in a few years she has
forgotten which is the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle, and she
doesn't care. She has much better things to think of.
At this point some one will shriek: "But surely, even for marriage,
isn't it right that a girl should have a college education?" To which I
hasten to answer: most assuredly. I freely admit that a girl who knows
algebra, or once knew it, is a far more charming companion and a nobler
wife and mother than a girl who doesn't know x from y. But the point is
this: Does the higher education that fits a man to be a lawyer also fit
a person to be a wife and mother? Or, in other words, is a lawyer a wife
and mother? I say he is not. Granted that a girl is to spend four years
in time and four thousand dollars in money in going to college, why
train her for a career that she is never going to adopt? Why not give
her an education that will have a meaning and a harmony with the real
life that she is to follow?
For example, suppose that during her four years every girl lucky
enough to get a higher education spent at least six months of it in
the training and discipline of a hospital as a nurse. There is more
education and character making in that than in a whole bucketful of
algebra.
But no, the woman insists on snatching her share of an education
designed by Erasmus or William of Wykeham or William of Occam for the
creation of scholars and lawyers; and when later on in her home there is
a sudden sickness or accident, and the life or death of those nearest to
her hangs upon skill and knowledge and a trained fortitude in emergency,
she must needs send in all haste for a hired woman to fill the place
that she herself has never learned to occupy.
But I am not here trying to elaborate a whole curriculum. I am only
trying to indicate that higher education for the man is one thing, for
the woman another. Nor do I deny the fact that women have got to earn
their living. Their higher education must enable them to do that. They
cannot all marry on their graduation day. But that is no great matter.
No scheme of education that any one is likely to devise will fail in
this respect.
The positions that they hold as teachers or civil servants they would
fill all the better if their education were fitted to their wants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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