Page:University Education for Women.djvu/21

 With regard to the housekeeping question, there are of course home arts which every woman who is going to manage a house will require, and a University is not likely to he the best place in which to learn these. Girls with good mothers can probably acquire them at home, and some help in this direction is to be had at most good schools now while there are technical schools and classes where women can take short courses after they know that they will have a house to manage. Even after marriage there may be time for this, for a young married woman whose husband is out all day and who does not do the manual work of her house herself is rather apt to have too much time on her hands. I do not think therefore that all women, irrespective of what they are likely to do afterwards, should be urged to spend time in adult life on acquiring domestic arts which they may not need, to the detriment of training in other things. But anyone with special tastes and abilities in this direction may well go into the matter thoroughly and make herself a really good cook or laundress or dressmaker. "With practical training of this kind based on a good University education in, say, science, a woman, married or unmarried, would find many spheres of usefulness open to her, for it is, I think, generally admitted that there is considerable room for improvement in the average English housekeeping in all classes both as to efficiency and economy. University women should be able to effect improvement here } for the want of a scientific habit of mind and of habits of thorough work are often at the bottom of the failure. But the Universities—at least the older ones—are not the places to go to for direct training in the domestic arts, and I hardly think they ought to be, at least at present.

In what I have said so far there is one aspect of University education on which I have hardly touched, but on which I should like to say a few words before I conclude, as it has too important a bearing on our subject to be omitted. I mean the aspect of it as it is or should be seen from inside by the students who are going through it.