Arguing the Merits of College for Women
ELIZABETH SHEPLEY SERGEANT, Educated for What? (1916)
The imagined fireside conversation Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant drew for readers of The New Republic highlights the ambivalence with which early-twentieth-century Americans considered the subject of women’s higher education. By the time Sergeant was writing in 1916, women’s and coeducational colleges had welcomed young women to the point that some complained about the “feminization” of the university. Still, doubt lingered as to the purpose of women’s education. The Victorian sentimentality describing women as better fitted to the roles of mother and wife came into conflict with the modern, which embraced new opportunities for women’s personal and professional fulfillment. Sergeant herself blazed trails: graduating from Bryn Mawr in 1903 and pursuing a career in journalism, including a stint as war correspondent in 1917 Paris, where she sustained a battlefield injury.
“Why are women in the professions so halfhearted?” asked Tom suddenly. The question fell like a bomb into the group of five that sat lazily drinking tea by his farmhouse fire. Both Jane and Mary — one an unmarried social investigator, the other a doctor as well as a wife — sat up argumentatively in their chairs. But Felicia, the hostess, pointing out that men were in a minority, asked Mary’s husband, Dr. Jim, to speak his mind first.
“Of course we are all feminists here,” he began. “I have given the best proof of it a man can. My own experience of professional women is limited — the only set I’ve known well were Mary’s fellow students at the medical school. But I’m sorry to say I agree with Tom: the first thing that struck me about them was that nine-tenths of them didn’t seem to know why they were there. They weren’t single-minded about their work as men are. You felt a sort of hesitation, a sort of sag in them. The difference in the spirit — well, it was startling.” He shook his head. “Those poor girls seemed sort of haunted.”
“Nagged at,” suggested Mary.
“That’s it. It was as if they had been so nagged at all their lives by non-essentials that they had lost the faculty of keeping their eye on one goal as we two were doing.”
Mary returned his look. Their goal was biological research, and they had been pursuing it together through their young twenties with complete unity and an almost dedicated aloofness.
“These are burning questions to Tom and me,” said Felicia. “Here we are with three girls to educate. We passionately believe that they must all do some self-supporting work in the world. In fact, even if we could afford not to, we should turn them out of the house at the age of eighteen on principle. But where are we going to direct them? So far they themselves show no interest in the subject.”
“Well, it’s up to you,” said Dr. Jim. “I believe it comes back to home training. Girls have never had a profession kept before them as boys have. Till they do, we won’t get anything but amateur professional women.”
“Heaven knows,” broke out his wife, “why girls do well even in college. It’s in spite of their families. Now most of my friends’ parents, like my own, were kind, intelligent people, tolerant of college education for girls. You could go if you wanted, and you could probably go on to something else afterward if you insisted. But nobody cared. What I studied, the marks I got — it was all a matter of course, of indifference. They never asked me or themselves what I was being educated for. It happened by miracle that Jim and my career coincided very early in the game.”
“Aha!” exclaimed Tom, “now we are getting to the point. Where does matrimony come into woman’s education? That is the real question, isn’t it?”
“Rot,” retorted the doctor briskly. “Don’t you go worrying about the mating instinct, Tom. It’s quite strong enough to take care of itself. It comes in anywhere and everywhere, because it has to. What we need to cultivate is the professional instinct. Now take my lovely sisters — can’t do a blessed thing but sit around and wait to get married. I was never allowed to forget for a day that I had to earn a living and ‘make good.’ But nothing was expected of the dear girls but domestic accomplishments.”
“Now, Jim,” protested Felicia, “domestic accomplishments can’t be dismissed so easily. Wait till you have a home and children. You’re speaking as an interne. I want my daughters to have occupations but I also frankly want them to have husbands, so I believe they should be educated also for domesticity. Indeed, I go farther — I think they must have the sort of occupation that makes the two compatible. You scorn ‘odd jobs,’ but who’s going to do them if not women? The men simply haven’t time in the midst of the economic struggle. Of course there are cases where the woman is more creative or a better wage-earner than the man — then he should fill in. But generally speaking, a woman, I don’t care what her profession, has got to be willing and able, well — not only to do the marketing, but to go and see a sick grandmother at the end of a hard day, or sit up with the baby.”
“Look here,” protested Jane, “I claim the right to speak at last, and I object strenuously to sex distinctions in the matter of patchwork — as I do to Felicia’s assumption that the professional woman is not in the economic struggle. She is there. That’s the crux of the matter, and the odd job has got to be either eliminated or shared. Even now we are so handicapped by the necessity of doing our so-called ‘woman’s work’ as well as the other, that it’s no wonder the Mme. Curies are unique. Give us five hundred years of really equal opportunity, and, as Jim says, equal psychological expectancy and see what happens. Give us co-education in the professional school and you won’t find the sag he noted. I don’t believe the women at Johns Hopkins are half-hearted.”
“You are trying to evade the issue, Jane,” objected Tom. “The handicap, as I see it, is chiefly nature. Surely you don’t deny woman’s instinct for service? Even in your case, if there’s a choice between your work and a human being the work suffers. I myself have seen you wobble.”
“You haven’t,” protested Jane indignantly. “Or if you have it’s only because the odd job is there to do, not because I want to do it. And I assure you that if I had been what Felicia calls educated for domesticity I shouldn’t have got anywhere at all. It was my academic training that kept me going and made me cherish my small spark.”
“You talk, my dear,” objected Felicia, “as if you were being less creative when you help to make beautiful human relations than when you write your sociological treatises.”
“Can’t you understand why the college graduate of my generation takes it hard when radicals like you and Tom turn on her? We had just barely achieved the right to our opportunity against those who claimed it would injure our chances of matrimony. It had even been conceded that we might be old maids if we chose. And now we are wept over because we wither on the tree, and asked to revert to domestic science. What if I prefer a book to a husband? Jim is right: a little mental discipline, a little objectivity of purpose, will do more for us, married or single, than any lessons in dusting.”
“Dusting, nothing!” said Tom. “We are speaking scientifically, I hope. Go on and marry your old book, though the state needs your children, also, and the real problem before feminists to-day is whether it can or can’t have both. It’s positively ostrich-like to go on assuming that you are training women to be just doctors and sociologists. The college professor knows it isn’t so and is bothered, and the modern father, hang it, does insist on knowing what his daughter is being educated for. Can’t he pretty well assume it is half for motherhood?”
“So that’s what you’re driving at, Tom?” remarked Jim. “But reflect that if the lack of outlet for the maternal instinct were the only difficulty, trained nurses — I forgot to mention them before — would be perfectly happy. They are satisfying their instinctive motherhood every hour of the day, yet it is the very exceptional nurse, as I see her, who gets much out of her job but filthy lucre.”
“And who isn’t ready to cut it all to hook on to the first available man?” added Tom. “Just so. Having chosen to earn her living by satisfying her strongest need, she follows the need through to its logical conclusion.”
“The nurse’s case is a little outside of our argument,” commented Felicia, “but there must be something significant in the enormous proportion of college graduates who go in for teaching and social work — the so to speak maternal professions.”
“Nonsense,” said Jane. “Those callings attract many besides the born mothers; first because they are obvious, traditional; second because they are cheap and easy so far as higher training goes — by comparison, I mean, with law or medicine.”
“But are social workers whole-hearted?” insisted Tom. “Only the exceptional again. And the Lord knows we all complain of the way school teachers dry up. What America needs is more mixing up of work and matrimony, instead of the present artificial separation.”
“What women need,” said Mary, “is, I insist, professional training. Now science has given me all the weapons I need for life if I can only use them; clearness of sight, economy and honesty of mind, straightness of emotion. It doesn’t allow any side tracks or any falterings. So when I have children I shall not hang broodingly over them as you do, Felicia; I shall firmly engage a competent nurse and firmly send them off to a good school later. They will be expected to get more out of my biological discoveries than from my constant attention. But even if I should give up research to-morrow,” she added reflectively, “it would be worth the grind and the sacrifice of these last years.”
Tom burst into a delighted laugh. “There’s where I score,” he exclaimed. “Six years of medicine in order to be a good wife!”
“Not at all,” said Mary, stiffly. “It is true that my profession helps me to stand behind Jim, prevents me from quarrelling with his inevitable detachment as most scientists’ wives do. What I personally get out of medicine is a sense of having a share in the independent world of impersonal truth. Half-hearted? Not if I never have children.”
“The answer to that is, wait till you do have them, Mary,” said Felicia. “Then we shall really be able to judge whether — excuse my pompous language — you can serve both science and the race.”
Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, “Educated for What?” The New Republic, vol. V (January 1, 1916): 219–220.
READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS