The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1901-09-18
NoN-MARRYINa GRAnuArEs.


Some interesting statistics have found
publication of late on the subject of the
college woman in her relation to matri-
mony. They do not tend to confirm the
warning of the Illinois professor who
declared that God would have to help
the man who married college woman
They very clearly show, so far as they
are to be relied on, that the college wo-
mans greatest weakness Is not toward
matrimony, and that the disposition of
the lady college graduates toward mar
ried life is on the decline in recent years
The condition is best stated thus: Col
lege women marry later than others;
fewer of them marry at all, and the
proportion of them who do marry has
been growing less steadily in the past
twenty years.
This seems quite natural. No girl can
graduate from university before she
is % She usually reaches from % to
rs years before graduation. The ten
dency on the part of all classes of Amerf-
can girls is away from early marriages.
Yet the margin that is left after the age
OF q is not, in point of eligibility, re-
garded as very wide one. especially by
the sex itself. Any woman, however, is
likely to marry at any age on the sunny
side of forty.
1t cannot be said to be absorption In
study, or the lateness of the graduating
year, which furnishes the explanation of
the smallness of the proportion of col
lege women, relatively as well as alb
solutely, who marry. The advocates OF
the higher education of women Will do
well to look into the effect which college
education evidently exercises on women
with reference to the mating instinct.
Some years ago a report of the Col
legiate Alumnae association stated that
the true explanation of the failure of
college women to marry was found in
their adoption of a higher standard of
husbands. 1t might have added,
and of higher standard of living than
the average husband is able to give them
at least at the outset. It was affirmed
in that report that college women were
not disposed, as weaker mortals might
be, to resort to marriage as an escape
from poverty, hard work, social odfum
or ennui. What the report evidently did
not take into account, but what sensible
persons readily recognize, is that the
chief obstacle in the college womau's
path toward matrimony is the difference
In scholastic attainments between her and
the average man who has been out hust-
ling while she has been in studying No
seif-respecting woman, who is old enough
to understand such matters, wants to
marry man who is intellectually her
inferior; and. so far as the unfortunate
man Is concerned, he usually literally
flies from the presence of the woman
VINO, he sees, can accurately gauge how
big a chump he is intellectually.
However we may speculate on the ten
dency of the college woman graduate to
steer clear Of marriage, the fact itself Is
no longer open to serious question. There
are still a. few old-fashioned people left
in the world who wonder whether there
IS any result yet made visible from the
higher education of woman which will
compensate society for the visible eff
feet of creating a dislike for matr1mony
on the part of large numbers of nice
girls, who, If they were not college bred,
would probably long before be the moth
ers of healthy children.