lves. 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. She has much better things to think of.

At this point some one will shriek: "But surely, even for marriage,
isn't it right that a girl should have a college education?" To which I
hasten to answer: most assuredly. I freely admit that a girl who knows
algebra, or once knew it, is a far more charming companion and a nobler
wife and mother than a girl who doesn't know x from y. But the point is
this: Does the higher education that fits a man to be a lawyer also fit
a person to be a wife and mother? Or, in other words, is a lawyer a wife
and mother? I say he is not. Granted that a girl is to spend four years
in time and four thousand dollars in money in going to college, why
train her for a career that she is never going to adopt? Why not give
her an education that will have a meaning and a harmony with the real
life that she is to follow?

For example, suppose that during her four years every girl lucky
enough to get a higher education spent at least six months of it in
the training and discipline of a hospital as a nurse. There is more
education and character making in that than in a whole bucketful of
algebra.

But no, the woman insists on snatching her share of an education
designed by Erasmus or William of Wykeham or William of Occam for the
creation of