Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/15

Rh who intends to live by her brains feels that she must choose between the two. The opportunities open to women in a business career have hitherto been too precarious or too purely clerical to attract extensive attention from college-bred women. It is not necessary to point out the reasons which lead the vast majority of college women, who are looking to self-support, to choose the profession of teaching, nor yet to dwell upon the further reasons which practically confine the larger number of them to work in the secondary schools, whose fate is already largely in their hands. Admitting the facts, we at once have a reason why large numbers of women elect the courses they do in college. It is the old familiar process of demand and supply. In no small measure, then, the educational phenomenon from which we started, i. e., the segregation of the sexes in pursuit of different subjects, is attributable to social and economic causes.

Women will probably continue their plethoric patronage of the courses in literature and the humanities at coeducational institutions as long as the secondary schools offer them smaller salaries than are paid to properly trained men, and as long as other vocations requiring a college education are closed to them. It is possible that some relief may be found through the dawning of the halcyon days, so longed for by certain eminent educational reactionaries, when required curricula will supersede the elective system, and the humanities once more come to their own. The wandering male sheep would thus be brought back into the fold. Certainly the progressive suicide of the elective system now going on in many institutions under the influence of professional tendencies is most interesting and suggestive. Moreover, there are reasons for thinking that if the opportunities for women teachers of physics and chemistry were larger, and the collegiate courses in these subjects arranged with less of reference to ulterior professional interests of a technological character, the number of women in such courses would be materially increased. Tradition is in these matters of some consequence, and men have so long conducted this work in the high schools that a rapid change is in no case a probability. There are, of course, exceptions to the rule even now.

When one comes to speak of the influence of native abilities, native tastes and intellectual interests in the election of courses, the available data are altogether less tangible. The prevalent doctrines concerning the mental differences of men and women are matters of dogma readily susceptible of neither proof nor disproof. In polite letters, as in society, woman has long figured as the adorable parent of men, not of ideas; as the repository of delicate sentiment rather than of accurate knowledge and in general, as the residuary legatee of all those interests which men do not care to cultivate. The evidence adducible