“How to be efficient though incompetent” is the title suggested by a distinguished psychologist for the vocational appeals of the moment.  Among these raucous calls none is more annoying to the ear of experience than the one which summons the college girl away from the bounty of the sciences and the humanities to the grudging concreteness of a domestic science, a household economy, from which stars and sonnets must perforce be excluded.  We have, indeed, no quarrel with the conspicuous place now given to the word “home” in all discussions of women’s vocations.  Suffragists and anti-suffragists, feminists and anti-feminists have united to clear a noble term from the mists of sentimentality and to reinstate it in the vocabulary of sincere and candid speakers.  More frankly than a quarter of a century ago, educated women may now glory in the work allotted to their sex.  The most radical feminist writer of the day has given perfect expression to the home’s demand.  Husband and children, she says, have been able to count on a woman “as they could count on the fire on the hearth, the cool shade under the tree, the water in the well, the bread in the sacrament.”  We may go farther and say that our high emprise does not depend upon husband and children.  Married or unmarried, fruitful or barren, with a vocation or without, we must make of the world a home for the race.  So far from quarrelling with the hypothesis of the domestic scientists, we turn it into a confession of faith.  It is their conclusions that will not bear the test of experience.  Because women students can anticipate no more important career than home-making, it is argued that within their four undergraduate years training should be given in the practical details of house-keeping.  Any woman who has been both a student and a housekeeper knows that this argument is fallacious.

Before examining it, however, we must clear away possible misunderstandings.  Our discussion concerns colleges and not elementary schools.  Those who are loudest in denouncing the aristocratic theory of a college education must admit that colleges contain, even today, incredible as it sometimes seems, a selected group of young women.  It is also true that the High Schools contain selected groups.  Below them are the people’s schools.  The girls who do not go beyond these are to be the wives of working men, in many cases can learn nothing from their mothers, and before marriage may themselves be caught in the treadmill of daily labor.  It is probable that to these children of impoverished future we should give the chance to learn in school facts which may make directly for national health and well-being.  But the girls in the most democratic state university in this country are selected by their own ambition, if by nothing else, for a higher level of life.  Their power and their opportunities to learn do not end on Commencement Day.  The higher we go in the scale of education, until we reach the graduate professional schools, the less are we able and the less need we be concerned to anticipate the specific activities of the future.