But I am not here trying to elaborate a whole curriculum. I am only
trying to indicate that higher education for the man is one thing,
for the woman another. Nor do I deny the fact that women have got to
earn their living. Their higher education must enable them to do
that. They cannot all marry on their graduation day. But that is no
great matter. No scheme of education that any one is likely to devise
will fail in this respect.
The positions that they hold as teachers or civil servants they
would fill all the better if their education were fitted to their
wants.
Some few, a small minority, really and truly "have a
career,"--husbandless and childless,--in which the sacrifice is
great and the honour to them, perhaps, all the higher. And others
no doubt dream of a career in which a husband and a group of
blossoming children are carried as an appendage to a busy life at
the bar or on the platform. But all such are the mere minority, so
small as to make no difference to the general argument.
But there--I have written quite enough to make plenty of trouble
except perhaps at Cambridge University. So I return with relief to my
general study of Oxford. Viewing the situation as a whole, I am led
then to the conclusion that there must be something in the life of
Oxford itself that makes for higher learning. Smoked at by his tutor,
fed in Henry VIII's kitchen, and sleeping in a tangle of ivy, the
student evidently gets something not easily obtained in America.
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