Values of College Training for Women

Values of College Training for Women

by Mary E. Woolley

President of Mount Holyoke College

from Harper's Bazar, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 9, September 1904

College training for women - What is it worth? The question is inevitable in an age in which the thought of "values" is uppermost. It is not the intention of this article to discuss women as wage-earners, or the industries or professions which they should enter, but it should be borne in mind that the number of women dependent upon themselves for support is rapidly increasing, and the question of the best preparation for their work is a vital one. A college woman says in a recent article that five million women in the United States are engaged in four hundred different wage-earning occupations, and while the percentage of those trained in the college will always be small in the great industrial army, and there are forms of education other than the academic, the college training is necessary as a part of the preparation for many professions and desirable for many more. In clerical work as well as in teaching, in the more practical lines of domestic science and horticulture as well as in the practice of medicine or law, the training and discipline of the class-room have much to do with success. President Angell tells the story of a Baptist brother of a generation ago, who after preaching to empty pews and writing a book no one read, applied for a professorship in Brown University, and in response to the very natural query as to the chair which he was qualified to fill, answered, "Well I dun'no', but I think I could kinder slide into 'most any on 'em." The day of "kinder slidin' inter 'most any on 'em" is past, and in all lines of work it is the specialist, the man or woman thoroughly trained, who is in demand.

But it is not the utilitarian value, the ability to reduce education to dollars and cents, which I wish to emphasize. There is a higher value to be found in all forms of educational life, whether the training be manual or academic. Dr. Frissell of Hampton Institute, in a recent article on "Negro Education," reiterates the truth that "character is the main object of education" - while, at the same time, "the relative importance of providing young people with broad mental culture and of preparing them to earn their own living must be considered in any system." Culture of the mind and the ability to earn one's own living, whether it is necessary to put that ability into practice or not, are undeniably important; but mental culture simply for its own sake may become as selfish, if not as sordid, an aim of life as the desire for education solely as a means to earning a livelihood. Assuming, then, that "the foundation of character must be the first consideration," of what value to a woman is a college training? The answer to so broad a question, drawn from several years' study of college girls in their undergraduate days, and of college women in their life after graduation, does not attempt to be comprehensive, but simply to make plain the results which have impressed me.

First, a college training gives purpose to life. Kate Douglas Wiggin, in one of her inimitable sketches of Penelope's Progress, says that on a rainy night in the north of Ireland, there were eight persons packed into a second-class carriage, and totally ignorant of their whereabouts, when the porter, opening the door hastily, shouted, "Is there annyone [sic] there for here?" Is there annyone [sic] there for here has been too often the characteristic of life among women, more often than among men, an admission which can be made with equanimity only by recalling Mrs. Poyser's dictum: "I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men." It is not strange that the sons of the American family have less frequently led an aimless life than the daughters. This follows naturally from the force of popular opinion and training. Except in the two extremes of social life, an idle man, without occupation or aim, has been despised, while his sister, drifting without responsibility for the home or for the manifold interests outside of it, has been accepted as a matter of course. It is inevitable that the college training should establish a different standard. Every day has its schedule; the entire course a definite aim. The insight into the history of achievement in literature and science, the association with earnest, purposeful men and women, have their untold influence in the formation of an ideal of life. The college graduate who is content to drift with the current is the rare exception, rather than the rule. Not that every holder of a degree is to vindicate her right to it by entering upon a "career," in the commonly accepted meaning of that term. At first she erred on the side of overstrenuousness, her ideal was that of "the achieving woman," and she failed to realize that achievements within the home were quite as essential, and...