Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/476

472 her body or her natural instincts; but, as far as the writer can see, she is decidedly an exception. To the average highly intellectual woman the ordinary cares of wifehood and motherhood are exceedingly irksome and distasteful, and the majority of such women unhesitatingly say that they will not marry, unless they can get a man who can afford to keep them in luxury and supply them with their intellectual requirements. The gradual disappearance of the home, which any thoughtful observer must deplore, is, to a large extent, the result of the discontentment of the educated woman with the duties and surroundings of wifehood and motherhood, and the thirst for concerts, theaters, pictures and parties, which keep her in the public gaze, to the loss of her health and the ruin, very often, of her husband's happiness.

Fortunately, nature kills off the woman who shirks motherhood, but, unfortunately, it takes her a generation to do it; and in that short lifetime she is able to make one or many people unhappy.

What about the supply of female school teachers? Is not the very highest education possible necessary for them? From the writer's point of view most of the women who are now teaching school should have been married at eighteen and in a house of their own which might have been the schoolmaster's home. The profession of teaching was once exclusively in the hands of the men, and it can not be denied that they have achieved some great results. But as education rendered an ever-increasing number of women unsuited for marriage, that is, unwilling to marry the available men, they invaded the schoolmaster's rank to such an extent that his salary has been cut down one half, and now he is unable to marry at all. Two well-known consequences have followed this state of affairs; first it is impossible to get men in sufficient numbers to become teachers for the boys' schools; and secondly, even big boys being taught by women, the effeminization of our men is gradually taking place. Although there are some instances of a mother alone having formed her son into a manly man, yet as a rule the boys require the example of a man's character to make them manly men. This subject has recently been dealt with in several elaborate papers by well-known educationalists, to whom it appears to be a real danger to the coming generation.

What about the men? If the higher education prevents the women from being good wives and mothers, will it not prevent the men from being good husbands and fathers? To some extent it does, and in so far it is a misfortune, but to a much less extent than among women, for the simple reason that the man contributes so little towards the new being; while, on the other hand, high intellectual training enables him to win in the struggle for existence much better than if he were possessed of mere brute force. But nature punishes the man