Omaha daily bee., 1910-02-20
RATHER DEFINITE LIFE
AIMS OF BOSTON GIRLS
A College Degree Not a Necessity
Social Demands On Them
Are Light.

Are Light.
BOSTON, Feb. 10. "A complete college
course leading up to a degree and per-
haps to a professional education is what
most Boston boys OF comfortable means,
and many Of little or none, are accus-
toned to expect, but II is different with
Boston girls. ollege degrees are not
deemed a necessity by the daughters OF
wealthy and fashionable Bostonlans.
Some such girls do take degrees at
home institutes or elsewhere, and a
few go on to a professional education,
but the colleges for women in and about
Boston are mainly filled by the daughters
Of Bostonians who make no great pre-
tense to fashion and by girls from other
parts OF New England and the west.
Boston has fashionable schools where
girls are prepared for college, but many
who pass through these schools either do
not enter college or do not seek a degree.
1t is perfectly well recognized that
the brothers Of the girls in the fashionable
preparatory schools shall make ready
for ? college, and many boys, especially
in the suburbs, go to local hlgh schools
which their sisters for the most part do
not attend. At II, IS or 10 the boy, IL
his name is not Sldis. gets through the
high school or other preparatory school
and enters college, but the girl OF a
fashionable family is apt at about the same
age to enter not college but society.
In the first two years of the boys col
lege life, when he is finding his place
among his fellows in his studies and in
athletics, many of the girls of his own
set are going all winter long to two or
three dances a week, to as many dinners
or more, to luncheons, the theater and
the opera, to every form Of fashionable
dissipation that the Town affords. In fact
the debutantes and the second year
girls to use the phrase that the world
of fashion has borrowed from the pad
dock, are very gay and very busy.
OF course concessions are made to the
spirit of culture by a few afternoon lee
lures on art or literature, by attendance
at conferences in French and the like,
and some young women Just out of the
preparatory schools go in for Stun work
and other social undertakings, but mostly
the first two years out Of school is q period
of gayety.
Fashionable Boston does not AXE the
trouble to formulate it's reasons for this
policy, but one of them is that a girls
mother and her mothers friends are
thought to be better suited for forming
girls than professors Of either sex, and the
social life of a proper set is held to be
more wholesome than the associations OF
a girls college. There may also be the
more practical consideration of giving the
young women when they are In the first
flush OF youth the opportunity Of meeting
the kind of men they ought to marry.
As q matter of fact a great many of the
men whom the girls meet at dances and the
like in those two years are undergraduates
at Harvard and in other colleges. Now
the undergraduate has a strong preference
for debutantes and second year girls, and
perhaps this is one reason why a good
many OF the young women after their Sec
ond winter of social dissipation, drop out
of the rush and enter college.
They have already passed examinations
in enough subjects to enable them to take
an Irregular course or perhaps even to
enter for a degree, and some of them have
kept their studies going so that they may
take up college work without embarrass-
ment. Perhaps they choose a moderately
easy course In languages and literature.
Others enter a local college where there are
practical courses in housekeeping and the
like. Some specialize In history or in art.
Many live at home and attend regular
colleges; others go away to colleges where
they may be thrown upon their own re-
sources. A few a k horses, servants and
dogs to college. but that is not a common
practice.
One OF two years is apt to prove suffi-
cient for the higher educational needs of
such young women, and the course at
college may be cut short at any time by
marriage. Girls who have gone through
such a social training before entering col
lege are apt to be pretty sharply differen-
tiated from those who have been busy UNI
interruptedly at their books.
In this matter Of education, as in others,
the fashionable world of Boston has its
imitators. Girls who make no pretense to
fashion are heard rather poohpoohing the
idea Of a full college course, and mothers
Of families In moderate circumstances
whose daughters are not under actual me-
cessity OF fitting themselves for gainful
occupations recognize that a girl who
passes her life from IS to % in college and
a professional school is apt to be too busy
to meet a great many marrying men.
That is a practical consideration of i'm
portance in a region where there is a sur
plus Of many thousand women.
On the whole, while there were never be-
fore so many women In and about Boston
eager for the higher education, a full col
lege course is less popular with the daugh-
ters Of the well to do than 1t was, say,
twenty-five years ago. 1t is in "silas
Lapham'' that Mr.. Howells makes one of
his Boston grandes DANES say that the lit
erary set is not fashionable.
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