It is quite true that the family often resents her first attempts to be part of a life quite outside their own, because the college woman frequently makes these first attempts most awkwardly; her faculties have not been trained in the line of action.  She lacks the ability to apply her knowledge and theories to life itself and to its complicated situations.  This is largely the fault of her training and of the one-sidedness of educational methods.  The colleges have long been full of the best ethical teaching, insisting that the good of the whole must ultimately be the measure of effort, and that the individual can only secure his own rights as he labors to secure those of others.  But while the teaching has included an ever-broadening range of obligation and has insisted upon the recognition of the claims of human brotherhood, the training has been singularly individualistic; it has fostered ambitions for personal distinction, and has trained the faculties almost exclusively in the direction of intellectual accumulation.  Doubtless, woman’s education is at fault, in that it has failed to recognize certain needs, and has failed to cultivate and guide the larger desires of which all generous young hearts are full.

During the most formative years of life, it gives the young girl no contact with the feebleness of childhood, the pathos of suffering, or the needs of old age.  It gathers together crude youth in contact only with each other and with mature men and women who are there for the purpose of their mental direction.  The tenderest promptings are bidden to bide their time.  This could only be justifiable if a definite outlet were provided when they leave college.  Doubtless the need does not differ widely in men and women, but women not absorbed in professional or business life, in the years immediately following college, are baldly brought face to face with the deficiencies of their training.  Apparently every obstacle is removed, and the college woman is at last free to begin the active life, for which, during so many years, she has been preparing.  But during this so-called preparation, her faculties have been trained solely for accumulation, and she has learned to utterly distrust the finer impulses of her nature, which would naturally have connected her with human interests outside of her family and her own immediate social circle.  All through school and college the young soul dreamed of self-sacrifice, of succor to the helpless and of tenderness to the unfortunate.  We persistently distrust these desires, and, unless they follow well-defined lines, we repress them with every device of convention and caution.