They say that college girls marry late. It’s true enough. But it’s not well put.
The girls in the social group from which most college girls are drawn marry late.
Late marriage was not started by college. It would be safer to say that college was started by late marriage.
Out of the prolongation of infancy, out of the postponement of marriage, came the conquest by women of the intellectual freedom of the world.
We can learn something about the nature of education by following the history of that conquest.
When the old New England homestead furnished adequate employment to all its daughters, and when those daughters passed directly from girlhood to wifehood and were still most adequately employed, there was really little reason why they should attend the schools in which their brothers were being taught the knowledges of the outside world. The girls did not belong to the outside world. Nor did the outside world have anything to teach them about their work in the household.
In such circumstances it is hardly surprising that in 1684 the New Haven Grammar School should have ordered that “all girls be excluded as improper and inconsistent with such a grammar school as the law enjoins.”
In proportion, however, as the work of the household was shifted out into the outside world, and in proportion as women began to follow that work out into the outside world, the knowledges of the outside world became appropriate and necessary for them. Hence, a hundred years later, in 1790, it was as much a changing industrial condition as a changing psychological one which caused the school authorities of Gloucester, Mass., to resolve that “two hours (in each school-day) be devoted to the instruction of females, as they are a tender and interesting branch of the community.”