married; and 150, or 19 per cent, are technically unemployed. From one college 1,700, or 57 per cent of its graduates, are thus seen to belong essentially to the home; from the other, 330, or 41 per cent. Thus about 84 per cent of the graduates of the two colleges are either home makers or teachers. As the two colleges chosen are pre-eminent for their standards of scholarship, it would seem to be a fair inference that the college woman graduate of to-day is in general either a home maker or a teacher. Many teachers, however, are but teachers in passing, since, notably through marriage, they subsequently become home makers. The home, even more than teaching, is therefore seen to be the ultimate goal and fruition of the life of the majority of college women.

If it is true that the college woman graduate is, broadly speaking, either a teacher or a home maker, then I would further claim that the two terms, while often convertible by circumstance, are, as a matter of fact, primarily interchangeable. Every woman by nature is an instinctive home maker. All that the world professes to fear from college education for women in the assumption of a mannish independence, the consciousness of superiority to less cultured men, the dedication to pure learning, is usually nothing but a pose, and in the eyes of women themselves an exceedingly patent pose at that. If college women would but make an honest confession, the fear that four years of study could change a woman's heart would be recognized once for all as the absurdity which it is. Fortunately a woman's heart cannot be unsexed by a woman's mind. And the longing for a home of her own is the cry of every woman's heart. Of course that home must be in the deepest and fullest sense a home, built to the measure of the woman's dreams and aspirations, more spacious spiritually as her mind and spirit are more broadly trained by college and by life.

If the specifications are not filled, and the home is not built, the woman will not wear her heart upon her sleeve, but usually with sweet courage and fitting pride, sometimes it is true with foolish denial and assumed superiority, she will turn her hand to that which it is best trained to do, and that is for the most

part teaching. And then she finds, as I have said, that teaching is but a modified form of home making, requiring a somewhat different form of technical training, but demanding her essentially home-making qualities of industry, tact and sympathy.

From the amalgamation, therefore, of the woman who looks to the college to make her a worthy home maker or an efficient teacher, and of the college which professes itself ready to fulfill her demands, we have, broadly speaking, the college woman graduate as she stands to-day.

However, even when my field is thus limited, I find my subject still further pressing for definition. The college woman graduate to what a variety of concepts each word gives birth! Every sort of a college for American education boasts of an amazing number of breeds; every sort of a woman, for no two women are quite alike; and the result, every sort of a graduate. And we are to consider the processes and changes involved in the evolution of the college graduate from the woman. How and why does the fact of her college education distinguish her from the woman without it? Obviously the question is so complex, involving as it does the most intimate as well as the most superficial differences, that any discussion must of necessity be suggestive rather than exhaustive. It can have value only as it rigidly excludes all glittering generalities, and confines itself to an honest statement of fact based upon observation and experience. I shall, therefore, have no apology to make for the fact that all I may say is from the point of view of my own limited horizon.

If the college woman graduate has been, for financial reasons or otherwise, plainly destined to a teacher's life, and if marriage does not enter to change her destination, it is in general to be conceded that the majority of colleges are well fitted to her needs. It is true that she may choose through ignorance subjects for which she has less natural aptitude, and neglect those which would have lightened the drudgery of her teaching by their direct appeal to her interest. This, however, is an unfortunate chance, which must be run at the present time in a world where even education is still more or less of a lottery.

But if one does not see one's way unmistakably to the teacher's profession, as is the case with an ever-increasing percentage of students, if one definitely hopes to be a cultured wife and mother, then on what does the college base its claim to four years of a woman's life? How, in other words, will the college graduate prove a more cultured, more efficient, more cheerful and sturdy wife and mother than the woman whose technical education is finished at eighteen, but whose practical education continues with her expanding domestic and social experience and responsibility?

There can be no question to which the answer is more difficult and complex. It is comparatively easy to say whether a given education fits one to be an adequate lawyer, a skillful doctor, an honorably successful minister. The end is definite; the standard for determining the adaptation of college and university training as a means to this end is, on the whole, sufficiently clear and simple of application. But to say whether a life from the point of view not only of its own development, but of its constructive influence upon other lives, has been more fundamentally valuable because of one sort of training or another, is indeed difficult. It involves of necessity the somewhat arbitrary setting up of a standard of life which will be accepted by some but rejected by others.

For those who seek the fulfillment of a woman's life in a humble, dependent docility, a sweet innocence rooted in ignorance, a plodding acceptance of domestic responsibilities; who look on her as a necessary buffer to material annoyances, a purveyor of comforts, a living embodiment of rest and of recreation; who in short consider her in the good old-fashioned light of Adam's supplementary rib pleasantly transformed and modified to his advantage. The standard which I must offer would seem to make a fair consideration of the question impossible, inasmuch as I would claim for every woman the potential right to a life as full, and in essentials as independent, as that of a

man.

Such a life would seem always to have been within woman's grasp, its possibility inherent in Nature's scheme of existence; for to woman she has given the most important function which

it was in her power to give-the keeping of the fires of life itself, the bearing and rearing of children. Woman's mission surely is worthy if life is worthy. Its honor grows with life's increasing values. And yet it lacks just those characteristics which to-day make the strongest appeal to the individual. To-day in America it is not the life of the whole, the life of the race and of the country, which primarily determines each man's daily judgments and actions; it is his own advancement, honor, pleasure, comfort. And as it is with the man, it is even so with the woman. She does not care essentially for the human race as it shall be in future generations, made just so much stronger and nobler because to-day she did her duty, effacing herself in suffering, curbing her desires in patience, fashioning and molding for the future in much present weariness and discouragement of mind and body. Rather would she cultivate the garden of her own individuality, whose bloom and freshness so easily bring her pleasure and honor.

If this be true; if woman's mission be at once so exalted that life itself hangs expectant on it, and yet so difficult that in an age of individualism it means the daily denial of the individual, is the college the best agent for preparing woman for her mission?

Self-directing, self-centered, yet, through the freshness of her enthusiasm, the unconsciousness of her attitude, still fluid for the molding, the young girl enters college to be prepared for her womanhood, for the life which requires the outlook of a prophet to perceive its glory through the exalting, wearisome pettiness of its detail. And the college, with its riches of human experience, its lives of heroes, saints and martyrs, its fullness of human endeavor, its glory of human achievement, stands ready to give that outlook as practical life cannot. And later, when the busy years of a woman's life are upon her, when her hands must work and the time of new intellectual acquisitions is past, she does not feel the intellectual barrenness that is the tragedy of many women's lives, because in the years of her leisure she has filled her storehouse with plenty.

The college, in other words, is prepared to give an intellectual background, the value of which can be most fully appre

ciated by a woman bound to the detailed routine of daily home life. One of the merriest women I have ever known, whose life was bitterly hard, said to me once, "Do you know, when the thoughts that mirror my actual conditions are unbearable, I scatter them with the sunshine of what I am going to be and do in heaven." A college education furnishes the ordinary woman a very tangible sort of heaven, and brings memory to the aid of an imagination which might be too weak for the task of building it alone. Fancy, for example, that a woman has a dozen pairs of very disreputable stockings to darn, an evening's work of weaving back and forth, with no very great artistic satisfaction promised as a guerdon, no tangible advancement on that intangible road of self-realization, just a humdrum, stupid task, relentlessly calling for a portion of her precious time. If her mind is just a disorderly chaos of chance gossip and chance incidents, how natural and simple it will be for her to hate her work, her routine day, and finally her routine life, for no discontent spreads quite as fast as that born of a duty unwillingly performed. But if, on the contrary, she can fill that evening with dreams of the world's activity and strength, her fingers ply the needle with unconscious swiftness, the task is done with cheerful satisfaction, and life seems blithe and worth the living after all.

Of course I do not mean to say that no woman is educated to rise above the humdrum details of domestic life except through a definite college education. I do mean to say, however, that in these days of hurry and hustle, only the exceptional woman is so educated. It has been said from the standpoint of psychology, which notes the early passing of the period of disinterested curiosity and of pure intellectual zeal, that the opportunity for acquiring an education is usually past at the age of twenty-five years. If this be true, few of us will question that the ordinary young woman between the age of eighteen, when she leaves school, and the time of her more active married life, rarely makes a serious business of educating herself, unguided and voluntarily.

Neither, of course, do I mean to suggest that there is a distinct time limit to the educating process. Fortunately for us,