BABIES IN THE CURRICULUM 
Education Given Girls in Separate Colleges Dwarfs Instead of Developing Their 
Emotional Nature—An Example of Natural Education That Was Successful 
A. E. HaAmitton, 
Interlaken School, Roiling Prairie, La Porte County, Indiana 
UR Women’s Colleges are on the 
() defensive. The wide press pub- 
licity given to the JOURNAL OF 
HEREDITY articles! on the low 
marriage and birth rates of graduates 
from women’s colleges drew broadsides 
from many quarters. College deans, 
professors, alumnae and students fired 
inky eloquence at the eugenicists’ thesis, 
but nowhere do they seem to have hit 
the real issue a telling shot. Miss 
“Alumna, A.B.,’”’ speaking a whole page 
of The Ladies’ Home Journal? at 
several million readers, for instance, 
says that college does not unfit a 
woman for motherhood, nor does it 
drown the desire for wifehood and 
motherhood, nor in any way make a 
girl fundamentally less a true woman. 
She says the reason she never married 
is because she was never asked, and the 
principal reason she was never asked is 
because young men thought themselves 
economically unable to support her and 
preferred marrying a girl outside their 
own social set to waiting until their 
salaries could foot the supposedly neces- 
sary bills. She quotes her own brother 
as saying: 
“We brand our love with a dollar sign. 
We're all slaves of front. That’s the 
reason young men in our set don’t marry 
young girls in our set. They think they 
can’t support them. They think the 
girls think the same thing. So they pick 
out a girl to whom $25 a week looks as 
big as $50 looks to you.” 
She regretfully cites the fact that 
working girls in her own community are 
marrying the men in her own college 
set, attributing this to economic con- 
siderations only, and saying, of these 
men: 
“Nearly all the men calling on me were 
making small salaries, with larger salaries 
ahead, far ahead. I wondered if they held 
the same views that Tom held. As for 
my views, none of them ever gave me a 
chance to state them!” 
Now in that last sentence lies the 
crux of the whole matter. In our 
co-ed colleges, like the University of 
Wisconsin, for example, young men and 
women have a fairly wide range of 
opportunity for finding out each other’s 
views. They get used to talking about 
things that do not ordinarily crop up 
in drawing room conversations in the 
post-college social world. They dis- 
cuss present affairs, and what they will 
do with themselves afterward. They 
live on a fairly democratic plane where 
economic differences are largely levelled. 
Courses in biology, sociology, psychol- 
ogy and political economy break the 
ice for individual and collective talkings 
about marriage, divorce, parenthood 
and even eugenics as though they were 
living issues instead of esoteric mysteries 
or uni-sexual affairs. 
In our exclusive women’s colleges girls 
grow up in a traditional atmosphere 
of femininity heavily tinctured with 
a fossil “‘culture”’ that is only beginning 
to be modified by the present-day and 
practical. That nature has built a 
goodly number of women in such a 
manner that they survive living for 
four years in this medium and bring 
their womanliness through unscathed 
1 Johnson, Roswell H., ‘‘Marriage Selection,’ JOURNAL OF HEREDITy, V, pp. 102-110, 
March, 1914. Johnson, Roswell H. and Stutzmann, Bertha J., ‘‘Wellesley’s Birth Rate,’’ JOURNAL 
oF Herepity, VI, pp. 250-253, June, 1915. 
Sprague, Robert J., “Education and Race Suicide,”’ 
JOURNAL OF HEREDITY, VI, pp. 158-162, April, 1915. 
2 June, 1916. 
387 
