Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/40

30 In 1886 two thirds of the senior class at Wellesley graduated from the classical course; in 1890 more than one half took the degree of Bachelor of Science.

Competition with coeducational colleges made it evident that the women's colleges were offering almost no facilities for specialization and graduate study. To meet this deficiency, and yet to preserve the distinctive ideals of separate education, a new combination was devised. Bryn Mawr proposed to offer opportunities for advanced study similar to those afforded at Johns Hopkins and Cornell, but under social conditions and restraints such as characterized the women's colleges, thus securing womanliness at no cost of intellectual development. Harvard Annex offered approximately the same courses under the same professors as Harvard itself, but with meager equipment and social isolation. Barnard College, and recently the Yale graduate department, have recognized the principle of coeducation in a restricted form.

The tendency to provide the same kind of education for women as for men, and the desire to preserve that intangible quality, womanliness, were constantly at variance in all these different methods, producing some unexpected results. Here and there women who were coeducated specialized. Perhaps Ph. D.'s of Zurich, after a short and brilliant career, fell in love in a hopelessly feminine manner, married, and apparently wasted all. their intellectual achievements in cuddling babies and training the immigrant domestic; all this without any sign of discontent or domestic tragedy. On the other hand, as many sweet, feminine, docile creatures from the women's colleges, whose femininity had been preserved to ideal sweetness, went into law or medicine, declined to marry at all, and lived happy, unregretful lives.

The same contradictions were to be found among educated men. The farmer's boy who had taken a course in scientific agriculture refused to farm and went into journalism; the college professor's son failed in the classics, but made a fortune on a Western cattle ranch; the orthodox became the heterodox, and, behold, everything was topsy-turvy! Given a boy, a girl, and a curriculum results: The boy a poet, the girl a lawyer, and the curriculum something which had somehow missed fire! No anxious parent or zealous professor could be sure of the effect of a given training.

Into the midst of this uncertainty the elective system was projected by one of the most conservative of Eastern colleges; it said, "Let him follow his bent." The thought spread like contagion to the coeducational colleges, where traditions were less fixed, and gradually to the older men's colleges as well; but not to the women's colleges. If a girl followed her bent, who knew what might happen? She might become too "learned for the