But grammar-school education, even high-school education, was not long enough for the women in the families in which the prolongation of infancy, and the consequent postponement of marriage, was greatest. While their future husbands were going through the long process of education in school and college and 68 university and then through the long process of commercial and professional apprenticeship, these girls were passing through the grammar-school age, through the high-school age, and then on into what in those days looked like old-maidhood. Their social environment did not lead them into factory work. Yet their families were not rich. How were they to be occupied?
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 into 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 college.
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 dazzles us with the nobility of such women as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon. They made Troy Female Seminary in the twenties and 69 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 those 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.
This flow of teachers goes back to the very fountain-head of the higher education of women in this country. Emma Willard, even before she founded Troy Female Seminary, back in the days when she was running her school in Middlebury, Conn., was training young women to teach, and was acquiring her claim (which she herself subsequently urged) to being regarded as the organizer of the first normal school in the United States.
From that time to this most college women have taught school before getting married. The higher education of women has been, in economic effect, a trade school for training women for the trade of teacher.
But isn’t it the purpose of the colleges to avoid training their pupils for specific occupations? Isn’t it their purpose to give their pupils discipline and culture, pure and broad, unaffected by commercial intention? Isn’t that what colleges are, and ought to be, for?