Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1904-08-06
AMERICAN COLLEGE GIRL.
She Has Much More Freedom Than
Her European Sister.

From Outlook.
The American woman's college is thing
wholly amazing in European eyes, accord
ing to this critic. No European educational
institution would think of allowing to its
inmates such a righteousness of surround
ings as apears in the American girls col
Iege room, the extreme simplicity of the
food being the only thing common to both
types of education community.
To the unnitated beholder the American
college girls room with flags and posters
and sporting souvenirs and class symbols,
with mems pictures on desks and dressing
t. BILE might be college boy
On the other side of the ocean young wo-
men are supposed not to keep young men S
portraits in their rooms. just as they are
not supposed TO meet on equal terms of
comradeship the subjects of the aforesaid
pictures The absence of books in the room
and the conspicuous presence of candy
boxes and fruit baskets might also strike
the European observer as peculiar.
All this corresponds with a radical diff
ference in the life of women students in
America and in Europe. The European girl
goes to her university purely for learning
and in the lower educational institutions it
is the same. Study is the business of life,
and only those fortunate ones who have
friends and relatives to take the mout oc-
casionally and give them good time ever
get any fun.
In America the college is a school of life.
with all sorts of activities besides study
The European college girl has to find out
after she leaves college everything that her
American sister learns while at college,
though occasionally in old Europe girl has
a chance of getting out of her life perhaps
more experience and at least the same
amount of pleasure as the American girl
does, although in a way entirely different;
this is a girl who attends a university for
men and enjoys in the old world, among
hundreds of men, the perfect freedom of
movement and the feeling of independence
which characterize the happy life of the
American college girf (happy in that she
realizes by herself an ideal of free and in
telligent life, without the inevitable strain
which comes to the same life when lived
by one girl among crowd of men,
The chief characteristic of the American
woman's college is well defined, the critic
proceeds by his historical words, .'life lib
erty and the pursuit of happiness"
To the college girls happiness many ele-
| ments cooperating. among which, no.
| tably, are papa's checks and the advantages
depending thereon; faculty votes forbiddng
| a schedule of over so many hours a week or
more than certain number of courses for
the semester; constant anxiety on the part
| OF "Prex" and M. D. lest the young buds
| of hope break down under the strain of
4 study and so forth.
| This last appears particularly strange to
| the European mind. No one gives thought
| there, 1t appears, to the effects of study on
| sigh or revolt" says the writer; I'VE may
| strike, protest or die in the attempt; from
| the serene Olympus of the faculty the gods
| watch with calm, unruffled brow the strug-
| gle of the nonentities down In the halls of
| learning"