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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
daily in classes with lessons learned, she may hope for that crowning glory of American youth of both sexes, the high school diploma. “If she is able to appear in classes daily with lessons learned! ” A large “if,” that; an “if’’.which means weary hours of lamplight study to supplement the too short daylight hours; an “ if ” which means little time for play, none for home work.
And what is the relation of this school-life to the home-life—of the times of our great-great-grandmothers—we will say? That home-life meant for girls and misses quiet, seclusion, doing duties and sharing burdens for others. This school-life means a crowd, gregariousness, working for public applause and public honors in the schoolroom and on commencement day. That home-life meant physical activity, many sided, manual training on many lines, developed muscular systems. This school-life means sedentary habits, lack of muscular vigor, distaste for muscular exertion, inefficiency in the practical affairs of life. That home-life meant home, the center of thought and effort, as of daily life. This school-life means the outside world as the center of thought and effort, home the eating and sleeping place. That old time life meant that home duties took precedence of all other demands. In this new time life school duties and responsibilities stand pre-eminent; duties to the home and its inmates, and even to personal health, being ruthlessly pushed aside if they come in collision with school requirements and class grades.
And when these school years are ended, and the maiden of sixteen, seventeen or eighteen turns for the last time from the doors of the high school, bearing proudly her much coveted diploma, is she then ready to take her place in the home and enter upon as careful and thorough training for domestic life as the schools have given her in book lore? Let the great army of young women seeking places as teachers, clerks, bookkeepers, typewriters, dressmakers’ apprentices and factory girls answer; and a still louder answer, if we will listen for it, may be heard from the urgent and wholly unfilled demand for intelligent help in the home.
The fact seems to be, and we may as well face it first as last, modern school-life and training does unfit the girl for domestic life first, by monopolizing the time once given to training for domestic life; second, by accustoming the daughters of rich and poor alike to the excitements of a gregarious public life through all their formative years, thus rendering distasteful to them, by its very strangeness, any work or pleasure to be had in the privacy of the home.
But all this js primary and secondary education. The girl who has finished these stands only on the threshold of the higher education. For the girls w r ho take this there follow four or six years more of study now entirely removed from home influences and surroundings, as well as freed from domestic duties and responsibilities. How will these added years affect the problem of woman’s relation to domestic life? Can they do otherwise than emphasize and exaggerate the evils already pointed out? and must not the A. B. or A. M. or Ph.D., after her four or five or six years given in college halls to Latin and Greek, science and philosophy, literature and mathematics, be even further removed still from both inclination and training for the quite unliterary and the relatively lonely work of superintending and serving in the various relations of domestic life? It would seem to follow that higher education for women must prove a public calamity, since its results must be to remove the picked young women of each community from domestic life, thus relegating home-making—and homes are the recognized corner-stones of society and the state—to second or third rate talent.
But suppose we close the college doors to the women of the future. Have we then averted the evils we fear? We must not forget that the result of our study has been to show that the higher education, at most, only emphasized evils already existing; that it is the primary and secondary education, not the higher, which lies at the root of the trouble, that the primary and secondary schools take not a select few, but the daughters from all our homes, rich and poor, cultured and uncultured homes alike; take them during the most plastic and formative period of life, and, by heavy exactions on time and strength, continued through many years, prevent the formation of tastes