THE REACTION FROM COEDUCATION. 9 



man who intends to live by her brains feels that she must choose between 

 the two. The opportunities open to women in a business career have 

 hitherto been too precarious or too purely clerical to attract extensive 

 attention from college-bred women. It is not necessary to point out 

 the reasons which lead the vast majority of college women, who are 

 looking to self-support, to choose the profession of teaching, nor yet 

 to dwell upon the further reasons which practically confine the larger 

 number of them to work in the secondary schools, whose fate is already 

 largely in their hands. Admitting the facts, we at once have a reason 

 why large numbers of women elect the courses they do in college. It 

 is the old familiar process of demand and supply. In no small 

 measure, then, the educational phenomenon from which we started, 

 i. e., the segregation of the sexes in pursuit of different subjects, is 

 attributable to social and economic causes. 



Women will probably continue their plethoric patronage of the 

 courses in literature and the humanities at coeducational institutions 

 as long as the secondary schools offer them smaller salaries than are 

 paid to properly trained men, and as long as other vocations requiring 

 a college education are closed to them. It is possible that some relief 

 may be found through the dawning of the halcyon days, so longed for 

 by certain eminent educational reactionaries, when required curricula 

 will supersede the elective system, and the humanities once more come 

 to their own. The wandering male sheep would thus be brought back 

 into the fold. Certainly the progressive suicide of the elective system 

 now going on in many institutions under the influence of professional 

 tendencies is most interesting and suggestive. Moreover, there are 

 reasons for thinking that if the opportunities for women teachers of 

 physics and chemistry were larger, and the collegiate courses in these 

 subjects arranged with less of reference to ulterior professional inter- 

 ests of a technological character, the number of women in such courses 

 would be materially increased. Tradition is in these matters of some 

 consequence, and men have so long conducted this work in the high 

 schools that a rapid change is in no case a probability. There are, of 

 course, exceptions to the rule even now. 



When one comes to speak of the influence of native abilities, native 

 tastes and intellectual interests in the election of courses, the avail- 

 able data are altogether less tangible. The prevalent doctrines con- 

 cerning the mental differences of men and women are matters of dogma 

 readily susceptible of neither proof nor disproof. In polite letters, 

 as in society, woman has long figured as the adorable parent of men, 

 not of ideas; as the repository of delicate sentiment rather than of ac- 

 curate knowledge and in general, as the residuary legatee of all those 

 interests which men do not care to cultivate. The evidence adducible 



