The conservatism shown in clinging to ancient ideals of womanhood is illustrated by the attitude of these learned men toward the admission of women into their ranks on an equality with themselves. “There has prevailed a strong sense that the admission of women to the privileges of the higher learning (as the Eleusinian mysteries) would be derogatory to the dignity of the learned craft. It is, therefore, only recently, and almost solely in the industrially most advanced communities, that the higher grades of schools have been freely opened to women. And even under the urgent circumstances prevailing in the modern industrial communities, the highest and most reputable universities show an extreme reluctance to making the move. The sense of class worthiness, that is to say of status, of an honorific differentiation of the sexes according to a distinction between superior and inferior intellectual dignity, survives in a vigorous form in these corporations of the aristocracy of learning. It is felt that women should, in all propriety, acquire only such knowledge as may be classed under one or the other of two heads: (1) such knowledge as conduces immediately to a better performance of domestic service--the domestic sphere; (2) such accomplishments and dexterity, quasi-scholarly and quasi-artistic, as plainly come in under the head of the performance of vicarious leisure. Knowledge is felt to be unfeminine if it is knowledge which expresses the unfolding of the learner’s own life, the acquisition of which proceeds on the learner’s own cognitive interest, without prompting from the canons of propriety.”[65] Where women enter the higher fields of learning, they show a tendency--although not so marked as in the past--to select those lines of work and thought which have no practical bearing on every day life. In other words, they follow those lines of study which are most similar to those pursued by the students of the Middle Ages who sought knowledge without any thought of its utility. This tendency of women is evident in co-educational institutions where their selection of studies shows their object in the main to be the acquisition of knowledge of a cultural rather than a practical nature. This choice is most suitable to their object in life assuming that object to be matrimony. The other activity followed mostly by college bred women--school teaching, makes little demand outside of the lines of work pursued by most women. Men long ago learned that there is a demand for highly trained minds in fields other than that of teaching. They have adapted themselves to this demand until we see men deserting studies of a purely cultural value, and pursuing those more applicable to every day life. Women are showing the same tendencies in communities where there is a demand for their services in fields other than teaching, and where matrimony has become more of an uncertainty and economic independence a fact.