“Every Jack has his Jill.” It is a tender twilight thought, and it more or less settles Jill.
When the census man was at work in 1900, however, he went about and counted 2,260,000 American women who were more than twenty-five years old and who were still unmarried.
It is getting worse (or better) with every passing decade, and out of it is emerging a new ideal of education for women, an ideal which seems certain to penetrate the whole educational system of the United States, all the way from the elementary schools to the universities.
The census man groups us into age-periods. The period from twenty-five to twenty-nine is the most important matrimonially, because it is the one in which most of us get pretty well fixed into our life work. Out of every 1,000 women in that period, in the year 1890, the census man 42 found 254 who were still unmarried. In 1900, only ten years later, he found 275.
There is not so much processional as recessional about marriage at present. In navigating the stormy waters of life in the realistic pages of the census reports, it is not till we reach the comparatively serene, landlocked years from forty-five to fifty-four that we find ourselves in an age period in which the number of single women has been reduced to less than ten per cent of the total.
The rebound from this fact hits education hard. As marriage recedes, and as the period of gainful work before marriage lengthens, the need of real preparation for that gainful work becomes steadily more urgent, and the United States moves steadily onward into an era of trained women as well as of trained men.
SIMMONS COLLEGE, BOSTON, WHICH HAS FOUR-YEAR COURSES IN SECRETARIAL STUDIES, LIBRARY WORK, SCIENCE, AND HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS.
Photograph by Baer
In Boston, at that big new college called Simmons—the first of its kind in the United States—a regular four-year college of which the aim is to send out every graduate technically trained to earn her living in some certain specific occupation—in Simmons there were enrolled last year, besides five hundred undergraduate women, 43 at least eighty other women who had already earned their bachelor’s degrees at other colleges, such as Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith, Vassar, Radcliffe, Leland Stanford, and the University of Montana.