The Indianapolis journal. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1867-1904, 1902-10-26
OF INTEREST TO WOMEN
HOW sELF-sUPPORTING COLLEGE
WOMEN ARE HANDICAPPED.
A Few Women Exercise Inventive
Faculties - When the Evening
Caller COmes-Odds and Ends.

The girl who attempts to work her way
through college finds herself handicapped
in at least two ways, says a writer in the
New York Post. In the first place few
women possess the physical strength re-
quisite to such a course. They may, of
course, spend their summers tutoring, and
when one is lucky enough to get po-
sition in a rich family where the work
occupies only the morning hours, and the
rest of the day is spent resting and read
ing in the grounds Of a charming country
place, one may consider the time very
pleasantly as well as probably. put in.
A girl goes back to college after summer
of this kind benefited bodily and mentally,
with perhaps an added knowledge of social
graces. But tutoring is not always so easy.
Usually 1t results in the girl going back to
her work weary and listless.
The college woman is further handicap
ped in the limited number of occupations
which tradition allows her. 1t is a singular
thing that, while a man may wait on table,
deliver papers, sell milk. tend furnaces,
and do a dozen such tasks, losing no caste
with his instructors or his friends, the wom-
an student is restricted to certain ar
bitrary lines. Unfortunately, the work al
lowed her Is not all we'll paid for. Darning
stockings, washing dishes after class
spreads, backing boots, painting dinner
cards and valentines, making shirt waists,
catching frogs for laboratory dissection,
ETC., mean, after all, inconsiderable earn
ings. They sound better than they pay.
There is usually room. at very small wages,
for few library and laboratory assistants,
In the main 1t is felt that the students
should give the best of their energies and
the bulk of their time to their college work:
1t must not be thought that the limited
field of work allowed college women ar
CUES an aristocratic tendency in their in
situations. 1t is acknowledged that women s
colleges are much more democratic than
the larger colleges and universities for
men. At no women's college does money
buy any social advantage. There are no
societies or students associations to which
usage and tradition assign only rich or
socially prominent students. At Barnard,
for example. one of the brightest and most
admired girls Is an East Side resident a
Jewess; who worked, and still works, dur
ing vacations, in a factory. That girl Is
as likely to be chosen for fraternity MEM
bership as her Fifth-avenue classmate.
One reason for this disregard for wealth
is the fact that the girl who goes to col
lege is never so well supplied with spend
ing money as her brother at Yale or Har-
ward. There is never the same luxury in
furnishing of. rooms, for instance, at girls
colleges.
In the infancy of woman's higher educa-
ton this was even more manifest than 1t
is at present. Several colleges started
out with the so-called domestic system,
whereby the students paid all or part OF
their tuition by doing the household work
of the college. So universal was the neces-
sity of helping women to obtain college
education.
Latterly the loan system, in vogue in al
most all mems colleges, supersedes the
other. 1t is the testimony of many college
presidents that an honor loan to an i'm
pecunious student has resulted much better
to the student and to the college than re-
mitted tuition fees even a scholarship.
The faintest tendency to pauperiZe is a bad
thing, and while IL Is little hard to begin
life with a debt of two three hundred
dollars, in the long run the student Is
helped to self-respect and self-activity by
the thought that he has paid for his own
education.
Harvard and other large colleges have
generous endowments for loans to students,
such fund. Their loans are made almost
entirely through students aid societies and
alumnae associations. Vassar, Smith,
Wellesley and Barnard have well-organ-
lied and prosperous aid societies, and they
exist also In most other prominent insti-
tutions.
The consensus of opinion is that these
honor loans are perfectly safe ones to
make. Some are tardily paid, and few
are said to be more Invariably conscien-
tious In the matter than men. The system
is hardly old enough, however, to make
comparisons.