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Page 19
If the college woman is not thus quietly reabsorbed, she is even
reproached for her discontent. She is told to be devoted to her family,
inspiring and responsive to her social circle, and to give the rest of
her time to further self-improvement and enjoyment. She expects to do
this, and responds to these claims to the best of her ability, even
heroically sometimes. But where is the larger life of which she has
dreamed so long? That life which surrounds and completes the individual
and family life? She has been taught that it is her duty to share this
life, and her highest privilege to extend it. This divergence between
her self-centred existence and her best convictions becomes constantly
more apparent. But the situation is not even so simple as a conflict
between her affections and her intellectual convictions, although even
that is tumultuous enough, also the emotional nature is divided against
itself. The social claim is a demand upon the emotions as well as upon
the intellect, and in ignoring it she represses not only her convictions
but lowers her springs of vitality. Her life is full of contradictions.
She looks out into the world, longing that some demand be made upon her
powers, for they are too untrained to furnish an initiative. When her
health gives way under this strain, as it often does, her physician
invariably advises a rest. But to be put to bed and fed on milk is not
what she requires. What she needs is simple, health-giving activity,
which, involving the use of all her faculties, shall be a response to
all the claims which she so keenly feels.
It is quite true that the family often resents her first attempts to be
part of a life quite outside their own, because the college woman
frequently makes these first attempts most awkwardly; her faculties have
not been trained in the line of action. She lacks the ability to apply
her knowledge and theories to life itself and to its complicated
situations. This is largely the fault of her training and of the
one-sidedness of educational methods. The colleges have long been full
of the best ethical teaching, insisting that the good of the whole must
ultimately be the measure of effort, and that the individual can only
secure his own rights as he labors to secure those of others. But while
the teaching has included an ever-broadening range of obligation and has
insisted upon the recognition of the claims of human brotherhood, the
training has been singularly individualistic; it has fostered ambitions
for personal distinction, and has trained the faculties almost
exclusively in the direction of intellectual accumulation. Doubtless,
woman's education is at fault, in that it has failed to recognize
certain needs, and has failed to cultivate and guide the larger desires
of which all generous young hearts are full.
During the most formative years of life, it gives the young girl no
contact with the feebleness of childhood, the pathos of suffering, or
the needs of old age. It gathers together crude youth in contact only
with each other and with mature men and women who are there for the
purpose of their mental direction. The tenderest promptings are bidden
to bide their time. This could only be justifiable if a definite outlet
were provided when they leave college. Doubtless the need does not
differ widely in men and women, but women not absorbed in professional
or business life, in the years immediately following college, are baldly
brought face to face with the deficiencies of their training. Apparently
every obstacle is removed, and the college woman is at last free to
begin the active life, for which, during so many years, she has been
preparing. But during this so-called preparation, her faculties have
been trained solely for accumulation, and she has learned to utterly
distrust the finer impulses of her nature, which would naturally have
connected her with human interests outside of her family and her own
immediate social circle. All through school and college the young soul
dreamed of self-sacrifice, of succor to the helpless and of tenderness
to the unfortunate. We persistently distrust these desires, and, unless
they follow well-defined lines, we repress them with every device of
convention and caution.
One summer the writer went from a two weeks' residence in East London,
where she had become sick and bewildered by the sights and sounds
encountered there, directly to Switzerland. She found the beaten routes
of travel filled with young English men and women who could walk many
miles a day, and who could climb peaks so inaccessible that the feats
received honorable mention in Alpine journals,--a result which filled
their families with joy and pride. These young people knew to a nicety
the proper diet and clothing which would best contribute toward
endurance. Everything was very fine about them save their motive power.
The writer does not refer to the hard-worked men and women who were
taking a vacation, but to the leisured young people, to whom this period
was the most serious of the year, and filled with the most strenuous
exertion. They did not, of course, thoroughly enjoy it, for we are too
complicated to be content with mere exercise. Civilization has bound us
too closely with our brethren for any one of us to be long happy in the
cultivation of mere individual force or in the accumulation of mere
muscular energy.
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