Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/185

Rh our scantling of medical women. But, if a girl is not to be one of these three things, the money spent on her college career will be emphatically wasted, so far as relates to the wise employment of funds in reference to a remunerative future.

And then there is always that chance of marriage, which knocks the whole thing to pieces; save in those exceptional cases where two students unite their brains as well as their fortunes, and the masculine M. A. marries the feminine, for the better perfecting of philosophic literature. Even in this rare instance the fact of marriage nullifies the good of the education; and, after a father has spent on his daughter's education the same amount of money as would have secured the fortune of a capable son, it can not give him retrospective satisfaction to see her married to some one who will make her the mother of a family, where nothing that she has gained at so much cost will tell. Her knowledge of Greek and German will not help her to understand the management of a nursery; nor will her ability to solve all the problems of Euclid teach her to solve that ass's bridge of domestic economy—the co-ordination of expenditure with means, and the best way of extracting the square root of refinement out of that appalling x of insufficiency.

To justify the cost of her education a woman ought to devote herself to its use, else does it come under the head of waste; and to devote herself to its use she ought to make herself celibate by philosophy and for the utilization of her material, as nuns are celibate by religion and for the saving of their souls. As things are, it is a running with the hare of self-support and hunting with the hounds of matrimony—a kind of trusting to chance and waiting on the chapter of accidents, which deprives this higher education of anything like noble stability in results, making it a mere cast of the die which may draw a prize or throw blank. But very few women would elect to renounce their hope of marriage and maternity for the sake of utilizing their education, or would voluntarily subordinate their individual desire to that vague thing, the good of society. On this point I shall have something to say further on. Yet this self-dedication would be the best answer to those who object to the higher education for the daughters of struggling professional men, because of the large chance there is of its ultimate uselessness. It would give, too, a social purpose, a moral dignity, a philosophic purity, and a personal earnestness to the whole scheme which would make it solid and organic, instead of, as now, loose and accidental.

So far as we have yet gone, has this higher education had a supremely beneficial effect on the character of women themselves? As intelligences, yes; as women, doubtful. We are not now taking the individual women who have been to Girton or Newnham, but the whole class of the quite modern advanced women. These are the direct product of the movement which has not only given us female doctors