(a) They are educated for careers, such as school-teaching, where they have little opportunity to meet men.
(b) Their education makes them less desirable mates than girls who have had some training along the lines of home-making and mothercraft.
(c) They have remained in partial segregation until past the age when they are physically most attractive, and when the other girls of their age are marrying.
(d) Due to their own education, they demand on the part of suitors a higher degree of education than the young men of their acquaintance possess. A girl of this type wants to marry but desires a man who is educationally her equal or superior. As men of such type are relatively rare, her chances of marriage are reduced.
(e) Their experience in college makes them desire a standard of living higher than that of their own families or of the men among whom they were brought up. They become resistant to the suit of men who are of ordinary economic status. While waiting for the appearance of a suitor who is above the average in both intelligence and wealth, they pass the marriageable age.
(f) They are better educated than the young men of their acquaintance, and the latter are afraid of them. Some young men dislike to marry girls who know more than they do, except in the distinctively feminine fields.
These and various similar causes help to lower the marriage-rate of college women and to account for the large number of alumnæ who desire to marry but are unable to do so. In the interest of eugenics, the various difficulties must be met in appropriate ways.
Marriage is not desirable for those who are eugenically inferior, from weak constitutions, defective sexuality, or inherent mental deficiency. But beyond these groups of women are the much larger groups of celibates who are distinctly superior, and whose chances of marriage have been reduced for one of the reasons mentioned above or through living in cities with an undue proportion of female residents. Then there are, besides these, superior women who, because they are brought up in families without brothers or brothers' friends, are so unnaturally shy that they are unable to become friendly with men, however much they may care to. It is evident that life in a separate college for women often intensifies this defect. There are still other women who repel men by a manner of extreme self-repression and coldness, sometimes the result of parents' or teachers' over-zealous efforts to inculcate modesty and reserve, traits valuable in due degree but harmful in excess.
When will educators learn that the education of the emotions is as important as that of the intellect? When will the schools awake to the fact that a large part of life consists in relations with other human beings, and that much of their educational effort is absolutely valueless, or detrimental, to success in the fundamentally necessary practice of dealing with other individuals which is imposed on every one? Many a college girl of the finest innate qualities, who sincerely desires to enter matrimony, is unable to find a husband of her own class, simply because she has been rendered so cold and unattractive, so over-stuffed intellectually and starved emotionally, that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company. The same indictment applies in a less degree to men. It is generally believed that an only child is frequently to be found in this class.
On the other hand, it is equally true—perhaps more important—that many innately superior young men are rejected, because of their manner of life. Superior young men should be induced to keep their physical records clean, in order that they may not suffer the severe depreciation which they would otherwise sustain in the eyes of superior women.