women, an ideal which
seems certain to penetrate the whole educational system of the United
States, all the way from the elementary schools to the universities.

The census man groups us into age-periods. The period from twenty-five
to twenty-nine is the most important matrimonially, because it is the
one in which most of us get pretty well fixed into our life work. Out
of every 1,000 women in that period, in the year 1890, the census man
found 254 who were still unmarried. _In 1900, only ten years later, he
found 275._

There is not so much _processional_ as _recessional_ about marriage at
present. In navigating the stormy waters of life in the realistic
pages of the census reports, it is not till we reach the comparatively
serene, landlocked years from forty-five to fifty-four that we find
ourselves in an age period in which the number of single women has
been reduced to less than ten per cent of the total.

The rebound from this fact hits education hard. As marriage recedes,
and as the period of gainful work before marriage lengthens, the need
of real preparation for that gainful work becomes steadily more
urgent, and the United States moves steadily onward into an era of
trained women as well as of trained men.

[Illustration: SIMMONS COLLEGE, BOSTON, WHICH HAS FOUR-YEAR COURSES IN
SECRETARIAL STUDIES, LIBRARY WORK, SCIENCE, AND HOUSEHOLD ECONOMICS.

_Photograph by Baer_]

In Boston, at that big new college called Simmons--the first of its
kind in the United States--a regular four-year college of which the
aim is to send out every graduate technically trained to earn her
living in some certain specific occupation--in Simmons there were
enrolled last year, besides five hundred undergraduate women, at
least eighty other women who had already earned their bachelor's
degrees at other colleges, such as Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Smith,
Vassar, Radcliffe, Leland Stanford, and the University of Montana.

These eighty other women, after eight years in grammar school, four
years in high school, and four years in college, were taking one year
more in technical school in order to be--what? Not doctors or lawyers
or architects. Not anything in the old "learned" professions. Their
scholastic purpose was more modest than that. Yet, modest as it was,
it was keeping them on the learner's bench longer than a "learned"
profession would have kept most of their grandfathers. _These eighty
women were taking graduate courses in order