I have seen such young witches myself,--if I may keep the word: I
like it,--in colleges such as Wellesley in Massachusetts and Bryn
Mawr in Pennsylvania, where there isn't a man allowed within the
three mile limit. To my mind, they do infinitely better thus by
themselves. They are freer, less restrained. They discuss things
openly in their classes; they lift up their voices, and they speak,
whereas a girl in such a place as McGill, with men all about her,
sits for four years as silent as a frog full of shot.
But there is a deeper trouble still. The careers of the men and
women who go to college together are necessarily different, and
the preparation is all aimed at the man's career. The men are going
to be lawyers, doctors, engineers, business men, and politicians.
And the women are not.
There is no use pretending about it. It may sound an awful thing to
say, but the women are going to be married. That is, and always has
been, their career; and, what is more, they know it; and even at
college, while they are studying algebra and political economy, they
have their eye on it sideways all the time. The plain fact is that,
after a girl has spent four years of her time and a great deal of her
parents' money in equipping herself for a career that she is never
going to have, the wretched creature goes and gets married, and in a
few years she has forgotten which is the hypotenuse of a right-angled
triangle, and she doesn't care.
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