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But even if she is personally as well or even better than man, the question is not settled, for she is far more liable than he to overdraw her reproductive power and consume in good looks, activity of mind and body, and other augmentations of her individuality, energy meant for the altruism of home and of posterity. The danger of this subtle process, so attractively masked and insidiously disguised from both the victim and her friends, is probably far greater and more common than any form of measurable deterioration. Almost the only indexes we have of this change are found in marriage-rates and natality, and if we apply these tests higher education for women must be more severely judged.[p. 590]

IV. Nubility of Educated Women. -- Mrs. Howes found about one-fourth and Dewey concluded that 23 per cent of the graduates of women's colleges marry; 21 per cent go into the professions; 28 per cent of coeducation girls marry, and 12 per cent go into the professions. From coeducational colleges 48 per cent teach as against 42 from the women's colleges.

The editor of the Overland Monthly [41] found from the register of the year 1890, including 1,078 names of the New England coeducational colleges, that 24.7 were married as against 14.8 of the graduates of the women's colleges. In New York, of the graduates of the preceding twelve years, these percentages were 25.7 and 20.6 respectively, and of all coeducational colleges 34.8 were married as against 22.9 of the women's colleges. If middle-aged women are excluded and the survey limited to the graduates of the eight years preceding 1859,[42] the New England female colleges showed 11 per cent married, coeducational colleges 26 per cent, the New York female colleges 15.1 per cent, and the Western coeducational colleges 36 per cent. Dewey [43] makes 26 per cent of the graduates of twelve American collegiate institutions at an average age of twenty-seven and six years out of college married, and 74 per cent single. Dr. Smith [44] gathered statistics from 343 college-bred and married women from thirty colleges and from their sisters, cousins, and friends otherwise trained, in order to compare equal social classes. Before 23 she found the number of non-college women married in proportion to married graduates as 30 to 8 per cent; from 23 to 32 as 64 to 83 per cent; and over 33 as 5 to 7 per cent. The age of most frequent marriage for non-college women is 23; for college women 25; and the mean age of marriage for the former is 24.3 years; of the latter, 26.3 years. The average number of years of married life of college-bred girls is 9.6, three years less than their sisters; two less than their cousins; and two and a half less than their friends. More than half the college women [p. 591] studied were teachers and three-fourths had secured economic independence before marriage. Seventy-seven per cent of the graduates married college men as against 51 per cent of the non-graduates.

Miss Shinn [45] later studied the marriage-rate of the Association of Collegiate Alumna comprising fifteen leading colleges. Of 1,805 enrolled in 1895, only 28 per cent were married, the rate for the country at large for women over 20 being nearly 80 per cent; she concluded that "under 25 college women rarely marry," and "that but a small proportion of them have married." Of 277 of the latest three classes but 10 were married; taking only those graduates past 25, 32.7 per cent; after 30, 43.7; after 35, 49.7; after 40, 54 per cent were married. "The ultimate probability of a college woman's marriage, therefore, seems to be below 55 per cent as against 90 per cent for other women." Taking five-year periods, most of them marry between 25 and 30. Of all the 1805 considered, 1,134, "early 63 per cent, are from colleges for women alone, and of these only 25.7 were married against 32.6 of those from coeducational colleges, although the latter average 0.7 of a year older than those from the women's colleges. College women marry least of all in the North Atlantic States, 23.7 per cent as against 37 per cent of the graduates of the Middle States colleges. Many of these graduates become teachers, and for no station in life save that of a nun, we are told, is marriage so unlikely as for resident teachers in a private girls' school, although this is a position mostly preferred by graduates from women's colleges, while women graduates from coeducational institutions prefer teaching in the public high schools. Miss Abbott [46] found that of 1,022 Vassar graduates 37.6 per cent taught, and suggested that the association of alumnæ may be recruited largely from teachers. Her conclusions agree with those of Miss Shinn, that college women marry late and in far less ratio than others.

Bryn Mawr [47] reports that in January, 1900, of the class [p. 592] of 1889, its oldest class, 40.7 per cent were married; of the first six classes ending with graduation in 1894, 30 per cent; of the first nine classes, 20.9 per cent; and of the first eleven classes ending in 1899, 15.2 per cent. This shows the importance of time and also how exceptionally old these graduates marry. The same result is shown by the following table:

It may be wrong to infer that if a small percentage of college women marry, it is the college that diverts them or that they are less desirable to men. Some who go to college desire marriage less or single careers more, so that one writer [48] is surprised that there is not less marriage among girl graduates and thinks college education actually promotes it by making many marriageable who would not be so otherwise. College girls certainly have a prolonged period of probation with diverted interest. During their course, according to another writer, very many receive and reject propositions of marriage in order to complete their education, but of course no statistics are available upon this point. Yet another says [49] that college [p. 593] women as a class need less to look to marriage as a means of support, and most who must at once earn their living teach. A woman, who was earning $60 a month and resigned to marry a man earning $40, exhibited rare devotion. Whether mercenary motives are increased by the luxury and expensive tastes and interests of college; whether, having tasted the fruits of the tree of knowledge, women are not less inclined to renounce it for domestic life, can not be discussed on a basis of facts or statistics.

By corresponding with class secretaries and correlating their data with those kept at the college offices, I have gathered the latest and perhaps the fullest data yet published on the marriage and fecundity of female graduates for three leading colleges.[50] If there remain errors they are those of incomplete returns and show rather too few marriages, births, and deaths than too many, but great effort has been taken to reduce this error to a minimum. If such a census includes all graduates up to within a year or even two of its date, the total number of marriages rarely exceeds one-fourth, for those who wed are slow to do so. The last ten classes to graduate, if taken by themselves, would show a yet far smaller proportion married. From Vassar there were 323 graduates in the first ten classes, 1867-'76, of whom, in the spring of 1903, 179, or 55.4 per cent, had married. In the next ten classes there were 378 graduates, of whom 192 were married, 50.7 per cent. In the third ten classes, 1887-'96, were 603 graduates, of whom 169, or 28 per cent, were married. In Smith College, during the first ten years ending with the class of 1888, there were 370 graduates, of whom, in the spring of 1903, 158, or 42.7 per cent, were married. Of the next ten classes, including that of 1898, there were 1,130 graduates, of whom 331, or 28.3 per cent, were married. In Wellesley, during the first ten years ending with the class of 1888, there were 436 graduates, of whom, in the spring of 1903, 203, or 46.5 per cent, were married. In the next ten classes, ending with the class of 1898, there were 1,162 graduates, of whom 296, or 25.4 per [p. 594] cent were married. From these data it appears that not very far from one-half of the graduates of all these colleges who marry, or about a fourth of all, do so after they have been out of college from ten to fifteen years, at an age of at least thirty, and that a large part of the other fourth who marry do so as late as forty. The results of this late age upon fecundity is, as we shall see later, about what might be inferred.

The tu quoque retort which many women love to make to men has too much basis, although the facts show results only about half as bad. Mr. Deming's admirable figures for Yale show 21.6 per cent of the Yale classes from 1861-'79 as unmarried, and the Harvard record from 1870-'79 is 26.5 per cent. President Eliot's figures for the Harvard classes of 1872-77, although we find them somewhat unfavorably erroneous, show 28 per cent, mostly now between forty and fifty years of age, unmarried. This proportion has greatly increased, for at Yale only about two per cent of the men of corresponding age in the last century were unmarried. Then, also, men married earlier, and it was customary for clergymen, who constituted a far larger proportion of graduates than now, to marry immediately after ordination, the average age of graduation being twenty-one. Indeed, this was necessary, for domestic service was rare, especially in rural districts, and a wife was necessary to do the work of housekeeping. "The average age of marriage for women was under twenty-one, many marrying in the teens, and several marriages at the age of fourteen are recorded."[51] "Remarriage was almost universal for both men and women, economic conditions rendering it a necessity." "Forty per cent of the wives of Yale graduates from 1701-'05 did not live to bring up their children, and it took a second, and frequently in large families a third woman,. to complete the work. The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another woman's children." Of the wives of Harvard graduates between the years 1658-'90 37.3 per cent died under the age of forty-five.

V. Fecundity of Educated Women. -- Here the matter is worse yet for educated women. Natality rates show the [p. 595] springs of national growth or decay, and only the constant influx of foreigners prevents us from realizing the ominous forebodings with which France is facing the problem of a steady decadence of birth-rates, which prompted and circulated such a book as Zola's Fruitfulness. In a significant paper by Dr. Allen,[52] on the New England family, which was the germ of American civilization, and where for two hundred years the homes were well-nigh models, it is shown how the birth-rate has steadily declined for half a century and that at a very rapid rate until it is lower than that of any European nation, France itself not excepted. In 1875, there were 359,000 families in Massachusetts; of these, 23,739 consisted of only one person, 115,456 of only two, and 140,974 of only three persons. Dr. Allen estimated that only one-half of the New England mothers could properly nurse their offspring, and that the number who could do so was constantly decreasing. While failure to do so might be often due to lack of wish, it was usually due to undeveloped mammary glands, feeble digestion, and nervousness. This state of things, he assures us, can be found to anything like the same extent nowhere else and among no other nation or race in history. Foreign families, especially if they acquire property, approach this condition a few years after they land on our shores. The Jews and our grandmothers thought barrenness a curse, but now the bearing and rearing of large families is felt to belong to low life. Love of offspring is less intense; woman's organization is changing under new conditions. Housekeeping, especially as a vocation which used to be one of the most hygienic and ennobling occupations for body and mind, is despised and evaded, and the influence of home is diminishing. Modes of life are artificial and too expensive, so that marriages are later as well as fewer, the death-rate of infants among old New England families is increasing, and so are abortions and divorces. Invalids make poor home-builders, poor husbands, wives, and worse fathers and mothers. From 1886 to 1891, both inclusive, 103,733 children were born in families where both parents were natives; 104,884 where both were foreign;[p. 596] 39,292 in families where one parent was native and the other foreign. During the same years 156,225 native-born inhabitants of Massachusetts and 40,176 foreign born died. The deaths of native Americans exceeded the deaths of the foreign born by 29,796, which, adding half the deaths of unknown or mixed parentage among the foreign of the State, make the births exceed the deaths by 87,824. The foreign-born inhabitants of the State, including less than one-fourth, give birth to more than one-half of the children.[53] First among the causes of the decline, Dr. Ellis [54] places physical and mental inability to bear and care for children, at the proper period, and secondly, he places unwillingness to sacrifice ease, freedom, and enjoyment involved in parenthood, the disposition to put pleasure in place of duty, the effeminacy of wealth, the new woman movement, and foeticide, and he pleads for domestic labor as one of the best correctives. Comparing the forty years ending 1890, the native marriages average 2.3 children each, while those of the foreign born average 7.4 each.

Sterility [55] is of all degrees, from total up to inability to produce a goodly number of children who mature well through adolescence and can themselves produce healthy offspring. It is vastly more complex in woman than in man, and, according to the averages of statistics from many sources, Duncan concludes, is due to the wife about six times as often as to the husband. In Great Britain, one of the most prolific of all lands, about one-tenth of all marriages are now unfruitful. The relative sterility of the one-child system occurs in England once in about thirteen fruitful marriages, and those without offspring sixteen months after marriage are beginning to be sterile, as also are those who do not at their best period bear a child every twenty months. The average age of cessation in Great Britain is thirty-eight years, and a woman who begins to bear children at the age of twenty to twenty-five should continue for ten or fifteen years. Fertile marriages in England average, in fact, about six living children each.[p. 597] The first child is a source of danger to the mother, about one-fifteenth of whom die, while only one in forty-eight die at the second birth.

The chief cause of all degrees of unfertility is, according to Duncan, overnutrition, and this is true down through the animal and even in the plant world. Overfeeding or fat production in the female is not only unfavorable to fertility, but illustrates how undue emphasis laid upon individuation is antithetical to generation. The relative childlessness of heiresses is a case in point. Excessive sexual indulgence and excitement are potent deterrents. Excess of desire and pleasure are often compensated by defect in reproductive energy, and so are too early marriages. "Women married under twenty years of age have much more sterility than women married from twenty to twenty-four, and the sterility of marriage before twenty is less than that after twenty-four, and from this point it gradually increases with the age of marriage." Premature and postmature women, too, have smaller children. Sterility is not a specific disease, but is the intricate product of causes as complex as modern civilization. While the rapid progress of gynecology has shed floods of light upon it, its larger problems are yet very far from solution.

Duncan had previously found [56] that the mortality of children was less if the mother's age was twenty-one to twenty-five than at any other quinquad; that the age of least puerperal mortality was twenty-five, and increased above and below; that the number of twins reached its maximum between twenty-five and twenty-nine; that children of mothers in these years were heaviest at birth and grew tallest; that the greatest viable fecundity was at twenty-six, the fathers being thirty-one and three-tenths; that although the shortest interval between births was when the mother was twenty-six, marriage when she was below twenty-five was more fertile than after, and that the quinquad of greatest fecundity was twenty to twenty-five. In his Republic, Plato said men should bear children from thirty to fifty-five and women from twenty to forty, while Aristotle thought the man should marry at thirty-seven and the woman at eighteen. Duncan said that [p. 598] while thirty-three women attain the age of eighteen, only twenty-eight men live to be thirty-seven; that in nine measurements the womb grew after twenty (although Hecker thought the number of pregnancies was a factor) and continued to grow in length till near the end of the fertile period; that the mortality of first confinements was twice that of all subsequent ones, and that mothers died least often in second confinement between twenty and twenty-five. Many who marry before twenty have no children, but if only those who do so are included, the years from sixteen to twenty are most fertile.

According to the very careful statistics compiled by Orschansky,[57] the rate of productivity or rapidity of births is greatest in women married at eighteen, and decreases generally afterward. The stature of both boys and girls at birth is greatest when the mother's age is twenty-seven to twenty-eight, and also with the fifth or sixth child born, as most pelvic diameters continue to grow to this age. The productive period ends earlier with mothers who begin to bear children young.

Körösi,[58] who tabulated data for 71,800 married couples, found that the maximal natality of mothers began between the ages of eighteen and nineteen, when the annual probability of birth was 44.6 and 42.2 respectively. This means that nearly one wife out of two will give birth to a child within a year from marriage. From twenty this probability declines, and at twenty-five is only 31.5 per cent; at thirty it is 24; at thirty-five it is 16; and at forty, 8 per cent. Comparable statistics for Berlin and Sweden, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Norway, and Denmark, resembled closely those of Budapest. With fathers, the highest natality is at twenty-five, when it is 38.9 per cent; at thirty it is 31.7; at thirty-five, 23; and at forty, 15 per cent. We may bet, says Körösi, 70 to 1 against a child being born of a mother aged forty-five, and 7 to 1 against a father having a child during his fortieth year. Bigenous natality, i. e., where the age of both parents is considered, gives results quite different from these monogenous tables.[p. 599] By making the complex combination necessary, it was found that for every year between twenty and forty, mothers acquired the highest natality possible to their age with fathers under thirty; while the latter reach their maximal natality with women under twenty, so that men between thirty-five and forty-five should choose wives between twenty and twenty-five, and those of forty-five to fifty, wives of twenty-five to thirty. His data also shows the interesting result that women under twenty-eight should choose older, and those above twenty-eight, younger husbands than themselves, while men at all ages have the greatest chance of offspring with wives younger than themselves. The most prolific marriages are when the woman is eighteen to twenty and the husband twenty-four to twenty-six. In a separate research Körösi showed that if healthy children, or those who lived to mature, be considered, the age of greatest fecundity fell about a year later.[59] If the father's age goes up, that of the mother declines, but not quite in the same degree, i. e., if the father is thirty-one, the mother should be thirty-one, total, 62; if he is forty, she should be twenty-four, total, 64. These lines plotted, Galton calls isogens.[60] If these are based on sufficient data, we can calculate the plus or minus age distance of the husband from his wife at each year which is likely to result in most children.[61]

Compiling from the census reports a table regarding the decreasing average in the size of families in the several sections of the country we have the following:

R. R. Kuczynski [63] shows that in the period from 1883 to 1897 the general marriage-rate of the foreign-born in this country was three-fourths higher than that of the native-born. From 1887 to 1889 the native-born in Massachusetts have the smallest general marriage-rate. In the three censuses of 1885, 1890, and 1895, the proportion of the married among the natives was less than one-third, while the proportion among the foreign-born exceeded one-half. The native population of Massachusetts has a special birth-rate of 6.3 births for one hundred adult women in child-bearing age, whereas in Berlin the annual rate of ten for every hundred women was proven to be not quite sufficient to keep up its population, so that this State is dying at a rapid pace. The number of adult native men living in wedlock in 1885 to 1895 was three-fifths, of foreign-born, two-thirds. The proportion of native adult women living in wedlock was six-thirteenths; of foreign-born, seven-thirteenths. In 1895 the number of women who were married but childless was one-fifth among the natives, and two-fifteenths among the foreign-born. "The average number of children born to every foreign-born married woman was two-thirds higher than for the natives, viz., four-sevenths higher among German women, six-sevenths among Irish, twice as high among French Canadian women." From 1883 to 1897 the special birth-rate of foreign-born adult women was more than twice as high as for the natives.

Engelmann,[64] from 1,700 cases, found that a little over twenty per cent of married women in America are childless, although his definition of sterility was the condition of those married three years without offspring. (Simpson's standard rate of sterility is eleven per cent.) Thus, he concludes that "the extremes of sterility are reached in this country." Among the laboring classes in St. Louis he found 2.1 children per married couple, in Boston he found it 1.7; in Michigan, 1.8 in recent years, but for the twenty-five years ending in 1895, 2.1. Mrs. Smith finds that among college [p. 602] female graduates the lowest fecundity prevails, 1.6. The relatives of these girls, who do not go to college, are more prolific, 1.89. In England, among female college graduates, there are 1.53 children to a marriage, while the average fertility of English women in the Victorian Year-Book is put down as 4.2. In Engelmann's genealogical records from 1600 to 1750, he found each marriage producing on the average at least six children, a number which at the beginning of the nineteenth century was reduced to 4.5. Benjamin Franklin stated that, one and all considered, each married couple in this country produced eight children. Indeed, Malthus uses the United States and Canada as the basis of his theory for super-fecundation, and, according to his table, the United States leads with a fecundation of 5.2. French Canadians to-day probably exceed all others, with an average fecundity of about 9.2 children per child-bearing mother. In a recent Russian district there were 7.2; in Norway, 5.8 children per family.

Herbert Spencer declared that "absolute or relative infertility is generally produced in women by mental labor carried to excess." This has probably been nowhere better illustrated than by college graduates. Miss Howes found that of 705 graduates, 196 were married, but 66 of these had no children, while the remaining 130 had 232 living children, or 1.7+ each, and had borne 31 who had died. On the important topic of the age of marriage, she says nothing. In Mrs. Sidgwick's census only 10.25 per cent of the English graduates and 19.5 per Cent of their sisters were married, and of these 72.4 and 63.2 per cent respectively had children and of these g and 31 per cent were dead. An anonymous writer [65] computes that of the 27.8 per cent of 2,000 college women who married, 66 per cent had no children. Dewey found that of the married, whom he studied, 37 per cent had no children, although the average number of years of married life was 6.2; 109 bore 202 children, of whom 12 per cent died, and of those who died about one-quarter died from causes connected with parturition. If all married female graduates in this report were taken together, there would be 1.2 children to [p. 603] every five years of married life. If we exclude those bearing no children, there are two children to seven years of married life. The non-graduate English sisters of the four colleges Mrs. Sidgwick included in her survey bore 64 more children than the same number of married graduates. President Thomas, in her valuable monograph, ignores this topic, and there are no available statistics on this subject for Bryn Mawr.

While from the knowledge at hand it is plain that our race would be speedily extinct if it depended upon the rate of replenishment of the educated classes, this is met by the widespread view expressed long ago by an intellectually gifted woman,[66] that further human evolution requires a decline in fertility. High nervous development augments the completeness, intensity, and fulness of individual life, but weakens the power of its transmission. "Evolution is thus seen to provide for the intellectual elevation of woman by constantly decreasing demands upon her for the performance of those functions which are purely physical." When only an average of two children is required, the barrier to woman's intellectual development will be slight. And she even adds that her sexual life is often in danger of unfolding at the expense of intellect, etc. Is not the reverse true of this class.

Two cultured German ladies,[67] who undertook a comprehensive psychological and sociological study, with the aid of an international committee and questionnaire, have collected opinions and data concerning actresses, female musicians, artists, poets, women devoted to science, journalism, agitation, and essay writing, from all of which they are led to conclude that mental work on the part of women in any of the above fields does not interfere with fruitfulness or with nursing. Culture, they deem absolute necessity, and its ideal harmonization with the life of woman a problem practically solved. The individual testimonies are numerous, varied, and interesting, but are by no means all in the line of these conclusions. The professional women, chiefly considered here, certainly on their own testimony have generally excellent [p. 604] health; some even insist that pregnancy gives added power of work. To be sure, some testify, the children of such women lack imagination, moral duality, affection, and other powers, not perhaps so easily obvious to parents as to others. Indeed, a report might be made out from these data that would strongly confirm views almost exactly the reverse of the conclusions of these authors.

My statistics,[68] gathered, like those on marriage-rate, from three colleges by correspondence with the class secretaries, are as follows: The total number of children born to the 55.4 per cent of Vassar graduates of the first ten classes ending with that of 1876 who married was 365, or 3.09 per mother, or 2.03 per married member, 58 married members having no children. Of the next ten classes, ending with that of 1886, 294 children had been born up to the spring of 1903, 2.57 per mother, or 1.53 per married member, 78 married members having no children. The 28 per cent married of the graduates of the next ten years, ending in 1896, bore 135 children, or 1.58 per mother, or 0.79 per married member, 84 married members having no children. Of the Smith graduates of the first ten years, ending with the class of 1888, had been born in the spring of 1903, 315 children, 2.08 per mother, or 1.99 per married member, 7 having no children, and 26 children having died. Of six of the next ten classes ending with that of 1898, reporting, there were 161 children, or 1.22 per mother, or 0.77 per married member, 78 married members having no children, and 9 children having died. Of the eight out of the first ten classes of Wellesley, ending with that of 1888, reporting, there were 311 children, or 2.37 per mother, or 1.81 per married member, 40 married members having no children, and of these children 25 were dead. Of five of the ten Wellesley classes, ending with that of 1898, reporting, there were 176 children, or 1.67 per mother, or 1.04 per married member, 64 married members having no children, and 11 children having died. These figures need no comment.

Turning to male colleges, we find that of the Harvard classes graduating from 1860 to 1878, the average number [p. 605] of children per married man ranges between the extreme of 1.83 and 2.71. The classes 1870 to 1879 average 1.95 per married man and 1.43 per graduate. Amherst shows a steady decline from four and five children in the earlier decades till, for the six classes ending with that of 1878, the extremes are 2.4, and 2.92 per father. At Wesleyan the six classes ending with that of 1870 show a maximum of 2.71 and a minimum of 1.37 per married man. At Yale the classes 1872 to 1878 average 1.96 per married man, and 1.27 per graduate. At Bowdoin the classes 1871 to 1877 average only 1.23 per class member. The size of families of male graduates has greatly declined, those of six and more being once frequent and now very rare, while families of one, two, and three children only have increased. This is due to many causes, economic and other. Engelmann concludes that the "male college graduate does more toward reproducing the population than does the native American of other classes."[69] But these data for native fecundity are based only on certain classes in two cities and are therefore too meager, while this standard of comparison should be the country. The delay of marriage is often very marked, and the increasing number of men who do marry and have no children now ranges all the way from 10 to 30 per cent. The record of children who die is too incomplete for inferences or comparisons. It would certainly seem that college men who do marry have little if any advantage in fecundity over college women, and that the higher education is sterilizing in its results for both in nearly the same degree. Even families where either parent is a graduate, especially if infant mortality is taken into account, fall considerably short of reproducing themselves, while if we consider classes as wholes, women are nearly twice as far from doing so as men, because but half as many of them marry. Any college that depended on the children of its graduates would be doomed to extinction, less than one-seventh of the entering classes of Harvard, e. g., being descendants of previous graduates. Colleges have grown and educated classes increased till some professions are overcrowded, but old families are being plowed under and lead-[p. 606]ers are recruited from the class below, so that the question of race suicide is a very different matter, and the bearing of these facts upon the question of shortening the college course less direct. Perhaps the inference from all these facts is that the stage of apprenticeship to life should be prolonged, if graduates represent the advance guard of progress, bearing the chief burden of the advance and often falling in the front line of battle, because success is ever harder and progress ever more costly. To give $10,000 tastes and aspirations on $1,000 incomes tends to delay and perhaps repress the desire for a family, and the best: years for genesis are lost. Once marriage and children were felt to be religious, if not also patriotic, duties, and now many, but not all, bachelors who shirk it without adequate excuse should perhaps be taxed progressively beyond a certain age. In the best periods of the best races, too, there has been a wholesome sentiment that both wedlock and parenthood were needed for the full maturity of the individual, and that if this stage of development was not attained, the moral, mental, and physical nature was liable to warp.

(a) Galton has shown us by convincing figures that if a woman is not married before twenty-eight and the man a few years later, even the most fertile races are doomed to extinction far sooner than those with low natality, because there are not enough children born after this age to keep up the population. "Postponement of marriage on the part of a woman conduces to infertility, as the reproductive system, if unused, becomes inoperative." About one-fourth of the children born are of mothers whose age does not exceed twenty-four, according to Coghlan,[70] and before women pass their twenty-eighth year they give birth to one-half their offspring. Women who marry after thirty can not expect more than two children, and after twenty-six not more than three. The age of women at marriage is the chief factor in determining the number of her children, the younger the more numerous the offspring, and this rule appears to hold even where the woman marries at an immature age. The proportion of fertile marriages is becoming very gradually less in most civilized lands.[p. 607]

(b) Again, unless we insist on extreme Weismannism, as few biologists now do we must admit that children born of generations of cultured ancestry have some advantage, even though their parents do not live to see their birth, over those born of the lowest classes, postnatal environment and nurture being the same in the two cases. If this be so, each generation ought to add a little, infinitesimal though it be, to progress in that most ancient form of wealth and worth which birth bestows, so that rotation of classes, while it may have many advantages, is thus bought at a very dear price.

(c) Another principle involved, suggested by the statistics of natality and by biological considerations, is that, while children born of parents slightly immature are liable to remain undeveloped, or, at least, have peculiar difficulties in coming to full maturity of powers of mind and body, those born of parents in slightly post-mature years tend more or less to precocity. The generalization here important is that by youthful parents heredity is more confined to older and lower dualities, so that those who attain sexual maturity early do not advance the phyletic series. Species and individuals, on the other hand, that attain propagative power late, make for progress of the stock, because they have not only the wealth of heredity in its completeness, but contribute individual additions, infinitesimal though they may be. Very early marriages, therefore, tend to the decay of culture and civilization, and all conditions that make for its "neotenia" are retrogressive, and each generation must reacquire everything anew because young parents transmit nothing not transmitted to them. Conversely, if we follow Mehnert,[71] hyperheredity due to long delay of propagation may be a factor for accounting for the overgrowth of the horns of certain stags, some of the monsters of the geologic past, and other hypertrophied organs of individual species and functions, even those of genius.

(d) Closely connected with this is a law brought out with ominous suggestiveness by child study, viz., that only children, and, to some extent, offspring limited to a pair of children, tend to be feeble and need special care.

(e) Another general consideration also pertinent in this [p. 608] discussion is, that the children of the rich tend to be prematurely or over-individualized, and those of the poor to be under-individualized by their postnatal environment, even where the age of parenthood remains the same.

(f) Not only are families produced by parents who marry late, small; but another consideration, often overlooked in this discussion, is that they are still more outbred by those who marry young, because, while the latter have four or sometimes even five generations per century, the former have perhaps three or even less. This reduces still more the ratio of increase.

(g) Yet another principle which I think may be suggested as following from the above is that if the children of post-mature parents mature early, such children themselves, if they marry, should do so earlier than those who mature late; hence, if they marry at the same age at which their parents did, they are biologically and psychologically older when they do so than were their parents, so that the evils of post-mature fertility increase in successive generations even if the age of marriage remains the same.

(h) One test of the complete domestication of an animal species is not only that it tends to grow larger than its wild congeners, but to breed well. This, too, is a test of the possibility of permanent captivity. Now, if we consider civilization as the domestication of man by himself, we may apply this criterion as an effective test of its soundness. This principle, too, would seem to apply to any trade or industry, or to any social class, or to educated classes. If so, it follows either that education is per se bad, when considered from a large racial point, or else that a postulate is laid upon us to find, as the right way of education, one which shall not tend to sterility. Otherwise, if higher education became universal, posterity would gradually be eliminated and the race progressively exterminated by schools and teachers.

With these ideas in view a peculiar pathos attaches to those who early in life have not wanted offspring, but do so when it begins to be a little too late. Many such parents console themselves by lavishing upon one or two care enough for half a dozen children. The result of this is, that instead of broadening by retarding their development, their offspring are [p. 609] robbed of many elements of a proper childhood, pass too rapidly over the developmental stages, and are hastened on to maturity by the excessive stimulus of too much adult environment and influence and too little wise neglect. They are infected too early with the insights and sometimes even the sentiments of early senescence, and show all the mingled charm and sadness of precocity. Their life has the flavor of fruit that ripens before its time. The buds are picked open and the tree of knowledge blooms and bears its fruit too early. A larger view is that we must develop such a system of higher education as shall conserve youth and increase not only viability but natality.

Excessive intellectualism insidiously instils the same aversion to "brute maternity" as does luxury, overindulgence, or excessive devotion to society. Just as man must fight the battles of competition, and be ready to lay down his life for his country, so woman needs a heroism of her own to face the pain, danger, and work of bearing and rearing children, and whatever lowers the tone of her body, nerves, or morale so that she seeks to escape this function, merits the same kind of opprobrium which society metes out to the exempts who can not or who will not fight to save their country in time of need. In an ideal and progressive state those exempted from this function would be at the bottom among those least fitted to survive, but where the birth-rate goes down in proportion to intelligence and education, either the principle of the survival of the best is false or else these classes are not the best, or are impaired by their training or environment. While we need not consider the cranky and extreme left wing of this movement, which strives to theoretically ignore and practically escape the monthly function, or the several coteries of half-cultured scientific women, personally known to the writer, who devote time, money, and effort to investigating artificial methods of gestation (which will probably be arrived at when Ludwig's humorous dream of injecting prepared chyme into the veins and dispensing with eating and the alimentary tract to release lower nutritive energy for higher uses is realized), we find wide-spread among the most cultured classes the one or two child system which would atone for numbers by lavishing wealth and even care to safeguard and bring the few [p. 610] to the highest possible development. But only children are usually twice spoiled -- first by enfeebled heredity at birth, and second by excessive care and indulgence, as Bohannon [72] has shown. The enfeebled nature of only children often needs exceptional incubating all through childhood and youth, but with the decline of reproductive vigor not only the wise neglect but the sound motherly good sense in treatment is prone also to lapse toward the senile and grandmotherly overfostering, so that partial sterility always involves the danger of perverted motherly instincts. From a biological point of view, there is an unutterable depth of pathos in the almost morbid oversolicitude of the invalid and highly educated mother for an only child to whom she has transmitted her enfeebled existence, and among the decadent families of New England this spectacle is not infrequent.

As Augustine said, the soul is made for God and is not happy till it finds rest in him, so woman's body and soul are made for maternity and she can never find true repose for either without it. The more we know of the contents of the young woman's mind the more clearly we see that everything conscious and unconscious in it points to this as the true goal of the way of life. Even if she does not realize it, her whole nature demands first of all children to love, who depend on her for care, and perhaps a little less, a man whom she heartily respects and trusts to strengthen and perhaps protect her in discharging this function. This alone can complete her being, and without it her sphere, however she shape it, is but a hemisphere; she is a little détraqué, and her destiny is more or less disarticulated from her inmost and deepest nature. All ripe, healthful, and womanly women desire this, and if they attain true self-knowledge confess it to themselves, however loath they may be to do so to others, and some who attain it too late wear their lives out in regret. Nothing can ever quite take its place, without it they are never completely happy, and every other satisfaction is a little vicarious. To see this is simple common sense and to admit it only common honesty. In an ideal society, with ideal men in it, woman's education should focus on motherhood and wifehood,[p. 611] and seek in every way to magnify these functions and to invest them with honor.

But the world is not right, and this career is not always optimal. Man is not always manly, but prone to be selfish and even sensuous, and so woman must strive to make the best of the second best and follow the principle of cypres, which English law admits for wills when it is impossible to carry them out exactly according to the testator's intent. This by no means signifies that every woman who takes to other absorbing pursuits has been disappointed. Happily for her, perhaps she often does not know her true rights but misconstrues them. She often loses a little light-heartedness, but is not consciously, or it may be even unconsciously, wearing off heartache. She feels a little lack of purpose. She had tasted adoration and felt her womanhood a noble thing, and in its place comes a little distrust, her self-respect is not quite so invincible, and she catches herself at self-justification that she is unwed. Her yesterdays seem a little dusty and her to-morrows a trifle faded. She craves something different and afar, and drags her anchor and perhaps slips adrift. Her joy in the many substitutes provided for her true happiness is nervously intense, yet she is harder to please and feels a trifle at odds with the world. As the years pass she perhaps grows fastidious and lavishes care upon herself, her regimen and toilet, and becomes, what I believe there is justification for calling, overcleanly in her person and all its surroundings in a way that suggests misophobia. She craves the costly; if unoccupied, grows inactive, luxurious, capricious, and freaky even in appetite, or gives herself up to Vanity Fair and develops a peculiar Americanized type, or else, in store or office, goes a trifle off in dress or form. Her disposition sags from its wonted buoyancy and the haze of ill-health slowly gathers in her horizon. Her opinion of men is less favorable, and she perhaps at last falls a conscious prey to the gospel of the feminists, and learns that for ages woman was a drudge and man a brute whom women should now rise and subdue or at least insist for herself on all his rights and positions.

Fortunately few and now ever fewer reach this extreme. Among the greatest achievements of our race, I esteem the work of woman, largely in the last generation or two, in work-[p. 612]ing out manifold new careers for herself, wherein those whom men exclude from it can rebuild so fair a substitute for their original Eden. So happy can the unwed now be in self-supporting vocations of charity, teaching, art, literature, religious and social vocations, and lighter manual callings requiring skill, fidelity, taste, in many of which lines she naturally excels man, that she finds not only consolation but content and joy. Here she is making the best possible original solution of her great problems, imposed on her by existing conditions, while many declared she could never do so, and no lover of his kind can fail to bid her so hearty a godspeed in all these endeavors. Those who see most clearly that bad conditions have forced her to compromise with her ideals, most fervently trust that her success in so doing may never make them forgotten.

VI. Education. -- The long battle of woman and her friends for equal educational and other opportunities is essentially won all along the line. Her academic achievements have forced conservative minds to admit that her intellect is not inferior to that of man. The old cloistral seclusion and exclusion is forever gone and new ideals are arising. It has been a noble movement and is a necessary first stage of woman's emancipation. The caricatured maidens "as beautiful as an angel but as silly as a goose," who come from the kitchen to the husband's study to ask how much is two times two, and are told it is four for a man and three for a woman, and go back with a happy "Thank you, my dear"; those who love to be called baby, and appeal to instincts half parental in their lovers and husbands; those who find all the sphere they desire in a doll's house, like Nora's, and are content to be men's pets; whose ideal is the clinging vine, and who take no interest in the field where their husbands struggle, will perhaps soon survive only as a diminishing remainder. Marriages do still occur where woman's ignorance and helplessness seem to be the chief charm to men, and may be happy, but such cases are no farther from the present ideal and tendency on the one hand than on the other are those which consist in intellectual partnerships, where there is no segregation of interests but which are devoted throughout to joint work or enjoyment.

A typical contemporary writer [73] thinks the question [p. 613] whether a girl shall receive a college education is very like the same question for boys. Even if the four K's, Kirche, Kinder, Kuchen, and Kleider, are her vocation, college may help her. The best training for a young woman is not the old college course that has proven unfit for young men. Most college men look forward to a professional training as few women do. The latter have often greater sympathy, readiness of memory, patience with technic, skill in literature and language, but lack originality, are not attracted by unsolved problems, are less motor-minded; but their training is just as serious and important as that of men. The best results are where the sexes are brought closer together, because their separation generally emphasizes for girls the technical training for the profession of womanhood. With girls, literature and language take precedence over science; expression stands higher than action; the scholarship may be superior, but is not effective; the educated woman "is likely to master technic rather than art; method, rather than substance. She may know a good deal, but she can do nothing." In most separate colleges for women, old traditions are more prevalent than in colleges for men. In the annex system, she does not get the best of the institution. By the coeducation method, "young men are more earnest, better in manners and morals, and in all ways more civilized than under monastic conditions. The women do more work in a more natural way, with better perspective and with saner incentives than when isolated from the influence of the society of men. There is less silliness and folly where a man is not a novelty. In coeducational institutions of high standards, frivolous conduct or scandals of any form are rarely known. The responsibility for decorum is thrown from the school to the woman, and the woman rises to the responsibility." The character of college work has not been lowered but raised by coeducation, despite the fact that most of the new, small, weak colleges are coeducational. Social strain, Jordan thinks, is easily regulated, and the dormitory system is on the whole best, because the college atmosphere is highly prized. The reasons for the present reaction against coeducation are ascribed partly to the dislike of the idle boy to have girls excel him and see his failures, or because rowdyish tendencies are checked by the presence of women. Some think that girls do [p. 614] not help athletics; that men count for most because they are more apt to be heard from later; but the most serious new argument is the fear that woman's standards and amateurishness will take the place of specialization. Women take up higher education because they like it; men because their careers depend upon it. Hence their studies are more objective and face the world as it is. In college the women do as well as men, but not in the university. The half-educated woman as a social factor has produced many soft lecture courses and cheap books. This is an argument for the higher education of the sex. Finally, Jordan insists that coeducation leads to marriage, and he believes that its best basis is common interest and intellectual friendship.

From the available data it seems, however, that the more scholastic the education of women, the fewer children and the harder, more dangerous, and more dreaded is parturition, and the less the ability to nurse children. Not intelligence but education by present man-made ways is inversely as fecundity. The sooner and the more clearly this is recognized as a universal rule, not, of course, without many notable and much vaunted exceptions, the better for our civilization. For one, I plead with no whit less earnestness and conviction than any of the feminists, and indeed with more fervor because on nearly all their grounds and also on others, for the higher education of women, and would welcome them to every opportunity available to men if they can not do better; but I would open to their election another education, which every competent judge would pronounce more favorable to motherhood, under the influence of female principals who do not publicly say that it is "not desirable" that women students should study motherhood, because they do not know whether they will marry; who encourage them to elect "no special subjects because they are women," and who think infant psychology "foolish." Various interesting experiments in coeducation are now being made in England.[74] Some are whole-hearted and encourage the girls to do almost everything that the boys do in [p. 615] both study and play. There are girl prefects, cricket teams are formed sometimes of both sexes, but often the sexes matched against each other, one play-yard, a dual staff of teachers, and friendships between the boys and girls are not tabooed, etc. In other schools the sexes meet perhaps in recitation only, have separate rooms for study, entrances, playgrounds, and their relations are otherwise restricted. The opinion of English writers generally favors coeducation up to about the beginning of the teens, and from there on views are more divided. It is admitted that, if there is a very great preponderance of either sex over the other, the latter is likely to lose its characteristic qualities, and something of this occurs where the average age of one sex is distinctly greater than that of the other. On the other hand, several urge that, where age and numbers are equal, each sex is more inclined to develop the best qualities peculiar to itself in the presence of the other.

Some girls are no doubt far fitter for boys' studies and men's careers than others. Coeducation, too, generally means far more assimilation of girls' to boys' ways and work than conversely. Many people believe that girls either gain or are more affected by coeducation, especially in the upper grades, than boys. It is interesting, however, to observe the differences that still persist. Certain games, like football and boxing, girls can not play; they do not fight; they are not flogged or caned as English boys are when their bad marks foot up beyond a certain aggregate; girls are more prone to cliques; their punishments must be in appeals to school sentiment, to which they are exceedingly sensitive; it is hard for them to bear defeat in games with the same dignity and unruffled temper as boys; it is harder for them to accept the school standards of honor that condemn the tell-tale as a sneak, although they soon learn this. They may be a little in danger of being roughened by boyish ways and especially by the crude and unique language, almost a dialect in itself, prevalent among schoolboys. Girls are far more prone to overdo; boys are persistingly lazy and idle. Girls are content to sit and have the subject-matter pumped into them by recitations, etc., and to merely accept, while boys are more inspired by being told to do things and make tests and experiments. In this, girls are often quite at sea. One writer speaks of a certain [p. 616] feminine obliquity, but hastens to say that girls in these schools soon accept its code of honor. It is urged, too, that in singing classes the voices of each sex are better in quality for the presence of the other. In many topics of all kinds boys and girls are interested in different aspects of the same theme, and therefore the work is broadened. In manual training girls excel in all artistic work; boys, in carpentry. Girls can be made not only less noxiously sentimental and impulsive, but their conduct tends to become more thoughtful; they can be made to feel responsibility for bestowing their praise aright and thus influencing the tone of the school. Calamitous as it would be for the education of boys beyond a certain age to be entrusted entirely or chiefly to women, it would be less so for that of girls to be given entirely to men. Perhaps the great women teachers, whose life and work have made them a power with girls comparable to that of Arnold and Thring with boys, are dying out. Very likely economic motives are too dominant for this problem to be settled on its merits only. Finally, several writers mention the increased healthfulness of moral tone. The vices that infest boys' schools, which Arnold thought a quantity constantly changing with every class, are diminished. Healthful thoughts of sex, less subterranean and base imaginings on the one hand, and less gushy sentimentality on the other, are favored. Foe either sex to be a copy of the other is to be weakened, and each comes normally to respect more and to prefer their own sex.

Not to pursue this subject further here, it is probable that many of the causes for the facts set forth are very different and some of them almost diametrically opposite in the two sexes. Hard as it is per se, it is after all a comparatively easy matter to educate boys. They are less peculiarly responsive in mental tone to the physical and psychic environment, tend more strongly and early to special interests, and react more vigorously against the obnoxious elements of their surroundings. This is truest of the higher education, and more so in proportion as the tendencies of the age are toward special and vocational training. Woman, as we saw, in every fiber of her soul and body is a more generic creature than man, nearer to the race, and demands more and more with advancing age an [p. 617] education that is essentially liberal and humanistic. This is progressively hard when the sexes differentiate in the higher grades. Moreover, nature decrees that with advancing civilization the sexes shall not approximate, but differentiate, and we shall probably be obliged to carry sex distinctions, at least of method, into many if not most of the topics of the higher education. Now that woman has by general consent attained the right to the best that man has, she must seek a training that fits her own nature as well or better. So long as she strives to be manlike she will be inferior and a pinchbeck imitation, but she must develop a new sphere that shall be like the rich field of the cloth of gold for the best instincts of her nature.

Divergence is most marked and sudden in the pubescent period -- in the early teens. At this age, by almost worldwide consent, boys and girls separate for a time, and lead their lives during this most critical period mole or less apart, at least for a few years, until the ferment of mind and body which results in maturity of functions then born and culminating in nubility, has done its work. The family and the home abundantly recognize this tendency. At twelve or fourteen, brothers and sisters develop a life mole independent of each other than before. Their home occupations differ as do their plays, games, tastes. History, anthropology, and sociology, as well as home life, abundantly illustrate this. This is normal and biological. What our schools and other institutions should do, is not to obliterate these differences to make boys more manly and girls more womanly. We should respect the law of sexual differences, and not forget that motherhood is a very different thing from fatherhood. Neither sex should copy nor set patterns to the other, but all parts should be played harmoniously and clearly in the great sex symphony.