Feminism - Women and Memory Forum

WOMEN AND WORK 217
alone, and are shutting your eyes to the future.*^ Found a
college for males, and you are aiding the advancement of the
race. Found a college for females, and you are abetting racesuicide.
Already the statistics of some of our female colleges
show that barely one-half of the graduates marry ; that of these a
fifth have no children ; and that the remaining forty per cent.
(of the whole number) have a trifle over two children apiece, so
that, if half of these be boys, every hundred female graduates
leave behind them in the next generation about forty-four daughters.*^
At this rate (which in reality is still lower, since some
of the children are sure to die before reaching maturity) the
class from which these highly educated women and their husbands
come is doomed (but for possible action by the other highly
educated men who marry non-collegiate women) to speedy
diminution and gradual extinction. But, though our male college
graduates, on the whole, show a somewhat better result (it has
been reckoned half as good again), it is by no means satisfactory
from the point of view of future generations. And for this
poor showing by the men the existence of so many female colleges
is also to a great extent responsible, as they subtract so
many otherwise eligible partners. Things being so in the green
leaf, what will they be in the sere? When the feminist goal is
reached and as many young women as young men are educated
not only in colleges but in post-graduate departments and in
business schools for all the professions, the birth-rate in the upper
classes may be expected to sink to the vanishing point.*^
41 Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman doctor in the nineteenth century (the modern
Agnodice), is a good example. In her Autobiographical Sketches entitled Pioneer
Work m Opening the Medical Profession to Women, she tells us she was one of nine
diildren. and. rejoiced in the "great advantage" of having "been born one of a
large family ^roup " (p. i of Everyman's ed.). Yet she deliberately chose to become
a physician and " thus place a strong barrier between me and all ordinary marriage,"
23. She therefore never entered even an extraordinary marriage (whatever
tliat might be), but adopted a daughter; and two of her sisters, who followed her in
the woman's rights movement, and one of them in the medical profession, likewise
did not marry and each adopted a daughter. Thus the advanced females of a talented
family, successful in their careers, ceased to propagate their line.
42 See an article by ll^r. and Mrs. John Martin in The New York Times, Aug. 29,
1915, whicli cites all the investigations that have been made on the subject.
43 Mill actually took this restraining influence upon marriage and the size of families
as a reason why women should receive the franchise and have all occupations opened
to them. Political Economy, II. xiii. § 2, and IV. vii. § 3;— and if the opening of
occupations to women exerts such an influence, much more will the preparation of
them for them exert it. Having worked out his philosophy in days pre-Darwinian
and pre-Galtonian, Mill knew nothing about the correlation between discouraging
breeding from the incapable and encouraging it from the capable. Instead, he had an
indiscriminate antipathy to much breeding, and showed no apprehension of any danger
from under-breeding going too far. For, though the passages referred to were
concerned mostly with tbe labouring classes, the following shows that he extended
his views to the upper classes. " Little improvement," he wrote, " can be expected
in morality until the producing large families is regarded with the same feelings as
drunkenness or any other physical excess. But while the aristocracy and the clergy
are foremost to set the example of this kind of incontinence, what can be expected
i. How those who can support large families
from the poor! " foot-note in II. xiii. I
and have them can set an example to those who cannot support them and yet have