The Business of Being a WomanTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
General
The Business of Being a Woman
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Women -- Social and moral questions
The strength of woman's attack on man's life, apart from the essential
soundness of the impulse which drove her to make it, lay then in its
directness and practicality. She began by asking to be educated in
the same way that man educated himself. Preferably she would enter his
classroom, or if that was denied her, she would follow the
"just-as-good" curriculum of the college founded for her. In the last
sixty or seventy years tens of thousands of women have been students
in American universities, colleges, and technical schools, taking
there the same training as men. In the last twenty years the annual
crescendo of numbers has been amazing; over ten thousand at the
beginning of the period, over fifty-two thousand at the end. Over
eight thousand degrees were given to women in 1910, nearly half as
many as were given to men. Fully four fifths of these women students
and graduates have worked side by side with men in schools which
served both equally.
Here, then, is a great mass of experience from which it would seem
that we ought to be able to say precisely how the intellects of the
two sexes act and react under the stimulus of serious study, to decide
definitely whether their attack on problems is the same, whether they
come out the same. Nevertheless, he would be a rash observer who would
pretend to lay down hard-and-fast generalizations. Assert whatever you
will as to the mind of woman at work and some unimpeachable authority
will rise up with experience that contradicts you. But the same may be
said of the mind of man. The mind--_per se_--is a variable and
disconcerting organ.
But admitting all this--certain generalizations, on the whole correct,
may be made from our experience with coeducation.
One of the first of these is that at the start the woman takes her
work more seriously than her masculine competitor. Fifty years ago
there was special reason for this. The few who in those early days
sought a man's education had something of the spirit of pioneers. They
had set themselves a lofty task: to prove themselves the equal of
man--to win privileges which they believed were maliciously denied
their sex. The spirit with which they attacked their studies was
illumined by the loftiness of their aim. The girl who enters college
nowadays has rarely the opportunity to be either pioneer or martyr.
She is doing what has come to be regarded as a matter of course.
Nevertheless, to-day as then, in the coeducational institution she is
more consciously on her mettle than the man.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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