Page:University Education for Women.djvu/20

 even granting that any serious preparation for work is a useful preliminary to marriage or home life generally, there still remain points in relation to marriage to be considered. As I said it is in a sense a profession for women and part of the business of a married woman is usually to manage a house. We may therefore ash whether a University education prepares her directly for this. Again agreeing that a happy marriage is the happiest career for a woman, it is reasonable to ask whether University education effects the probability of marriage either favourably or unfavourably.

To this second question I can give no clear answer. I think the considerations are so mixed and so impossible to estimate that the safest plan is to assume that they balance one another and that we need not take account of the question at all. I do not think a University education disinclines a woman for marriage, and I do think a cultivated mind and developed intelligence is likely to make her a better companion for a man similarly endowed, and a better guide and helper for her children. And I know many happy marriages exemplifying this. On the other hand any development of her faculties is likely to give a woman a higher standard and therefore to some extent to makes her less likely to find the man she can care for among the men she happens to be thrown with. But this of course is one of the ways in which the chance of ill-assorted marriages is diminished. Looking at the matter again from the point of view of the men—some seem to be most attracted by women unlike themselves, and some by those of similar tastes; some like frivolous and doll-like women, and imagine they will prefer them as wives; others may prefer women developed on the practical rather than the intellectual side, but others again will like those who can sympathise with or supplement their own intellectual tastes. Altogether it seems safest I think to let each individual of either sex train the capacities nature has endowed him or her with and hope that circumstances will bring together those who ought to marry.