Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/96

92 not an exaggeration to say that to the average cost of each girl's education through the high school must be added one unborn child.

Our system of coeducation is favorable to conventional morality, but not to romantic love. A man is no more a hero to his girl chums than to his valet; a certain distance is necessary before the halo about a girl's head becomes visible. Small doses confer immunity to the larger passions. The 40,000 girls now in our colleges are putting off marriage beyond the age when impulse is dominant. This is regarded as one of the merits of the system; but it means that half of them will not marry and that the other half will have families of the average size of two children. Women of this sort ask too much of the men. They want a kind of education and a kind of interests that can not be universal; they are not content to begin with the simple servantless menage that satisfied their parents. It is well for family happiness when husband and wife have interests in common; a university professor can have to advantage a college-bred wife. But the superficial culture of the American woman, the reading of the monthly magazines and best-selling novels, the frequenting of those theaters, art exhibitions and women's clubs, for which the husband has no time or taste, are not conducive to harmony and homogeneity in family life.

The economic employment of women in sedentary work and work away from home, which is such a marked development of modern and especially of American conditions, obviously tends to prevent marriage, to limit the number of children and to break up the family. When spinsters can support themselves with more physical comforts and larger leisure than they would have as wives; when married women may prefer the money they can earn and the excitement they can find in outside employment to the bearing and rearing of children; when they can conveniently leave their husbands should it so suit their fancy—the conditions are clearly unfavorable to marriage and the family. It is further an important consideration that men who must compete in the market with women can not afford to marry and support a family. Here again the school and the employment of female teachers are dominant factors.

There are in the United States about 400,000 women employed as teachers, and the numbers are continually increasing. In our cities there were at the time of the last census 76,348 female and 6,302 male teachers, and the proportion of females has since increased, so that now probably not more than one teacher in fifteen is a man. In one Ohio town there are about 200 female teachers without a single man. In the graduating class of a California normal school this year there were 272 girls and one man. In Germany, on the other hand, about two thirds of the teachers are men.

This vast horde of female teachers in the United States tends to