Iron County register. [volume] (Ironton, Iron County, Mo.) 1867-1965, 1904-03-24
THE LIMITED EXPRESS.
What Is Wrong with the Picture ?
COLLEGE GIRLS IN EUROPE.
There Is a Great Difference Between
Their Surroundings and Those of
Students in This Country.

In some respects college girls in all
parts of the world are similar in dis
position, ambitions and desires, but
those of Europe have many characteris-
tics wholly dissimilar to those possessed
by the American girl of erudition. The
American woman's college is a thing
wholly amazing in European eyes, says
an educational journal. No European
educational institution would think of
allowing it's inmates such a luxurious
ness of surroundings as appears in the
American girls college room, the ex-
IRENE simplicity of the food being the
only thing common to both types of edu-
%cational community.
To the uninitiated beholder the
American college girls room, with flags
and posters and sporting souvenirs and
class symbols, with mems pictures on
desks and dressing table, might be a
college boys. On the other side of the
ocean young women are 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 Europe. The European
girl goes to her university purely for
1porpipc anI in thc 1ou,or educational
institutions it is the same. Study is
the business of life, and only those for
tunate mes who have friends and rela-
tives to take them out occasionally and
give them a 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 every
thing that her American sister learns
while at college, though occasionally in
old Europe a girl has a chance of getting
out of her life more experience and at
least the same amount of pleasure as
the American girl does, although In a
way entirely different; this is the girl
who attends a university for men and
enjoys in the old world, among hundreds
of men, the perfect freedom of move
ment and feeling of independence which
characterizes the happy life Of The
American college girl (happy in that.
she realizes by herself an ideal of free
and intelligent life without the inevita-
BILE strain which comes to the same life
when lived by one girl among a crowd
Of menO. .
The chief characteristic of the Ameri-
can woman's college is well defined, the
critic proceeds, by the historical words
life, liberty and the pursuit of hap
piness." To the college girls happiness
many elements are cooperating, among
which, notably, are papa's checks and
the advantages depending thereon; fac
ulty votes prohibiting a schedule of over
so many hours a week or more than a
certain number of courses for the
semester; constant anxiety on the part
of "Prex" and I'M. D." lest the young
buds of hope break down under the
strain of study, and so forth.
This last appears particularly strange
to the European mind. No one gives a
thought there, it appears, to the effects
of study on the health of the students.
I'VE may moan, sigh or revolt" says the
writer; 1--WE may strike, protest or die
in the attempt; from the serene Olym-
pus of the faculty the gods watch with
calm, unrufTled brow the struggle of the
nonentities Gown in the halls of learn