College is not a cause. It is a symptom.
Out of the prolongation of infancy in the "middle class" has come the conquest by women of the intellectual freedom of the world.
It was by no vagary of chance that the demand of women for the higher education came simultaneously with the change from the old industrial home to the new, more purely domestic home. (It may be a higher, nobler type of home. We are not here discussing that point.)
As the home ceased to provide its daughters with adequate education and with adequate employment, what was their situation? In the "working class" it was simply this: That they went into factories and that their sweethearts married them somewhat later than had previously been the case, because their share as wives in the support of the family was increasingly smaller. But the "working class" man soon reaches his maximum earning capacity in his craft and stays there. His financial infancy is short, compared with that of the "middle class" man. He therefore marries younger.
In the "middle class," however, Science and System began to lengthen the mental and financial infancy of the men to such an extent that the "old maid" of twenty-three became common. What were the girls in the "middle class" to do while the boys were growing up to be men, in mind and in money?
The father of Frederick the Great used to go about his realm with a stick, and when he saw a woman in the street he would shake the stick at her and say "Go back into the house. An honest woman keeps indoors."
Probably quite sensible. When she went indoors, she went in to a job. The "middle class" daughter of to-day, if her mother is living and housekeeping, goes indoors into a vacuum.
Out of that vacuum came the explosion which created the first woman's colleges.
There was plenty of sentiment in the explosion. That was the splendid, blinding part of it. That was the part of it which even to-day makes us veil our eves before the nobility of such women as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon. They made Troy Female Seminary in the twenties and Mount Holyoke in the thirties in the image of the aspirations, as well as in the image of the needs, of the women of the times.
But the needs were there, the need to be something, the need to do something, self-respecting, self supporting. The existence of these needs was clearly revealed in the fact that from the early women's colleges and from the early coeducational universities there at once issued a large supply of teachers.