All four speeches illustrate the chief desideratum in after-dinner speaking, brevity. They show, too, that brevity does not preclude so mingling grave and gay that an audience is led to think of fundamental questions in education; does not preclude strong emotional effect, phrasing for the first time ideas which become the beliefs of the next generation, or even facing a grave political crisis so skilfully that the speech in large part prepares the solution of it. I. RACHEL K. FITZ. A Five Minute Address. At a Luncheon of the Class of '94, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, I HAVE been asked to discuss "Radcliffe as a Matrimonial Training School." Now, as you doubtless know, matrimony is the one subject of which every college girl is popularly supposed to be shy, because either she wants to get married 5 and is afraid that she won't, or she doesn't want to get married and is afraid that she will! To lessen the fears of the girl who is afraid that she won't, we are urged to compile elaborate statistics to prove the college woman distinctly marriageable, but in the meantime she looks at the meagre 10 list of married names in our college catalogue and her fears are strengthened. The girl who is afraid that she will, looks at the same list and her fears are not diminished. She thinks of all the might-have-beens which weren't because the college girl wouldn't! And they tell her that Radcliffe is a 15 matrimonial training school. 20 But for us the question is, Is Radcliffe a successful training school? Does she not only make a woman distinctly eligible to this highest of all positions, but does she enable her to fill it, honestly, ideally to fill it? I wish, I cannot tell you how earnestly, that I could say yes unqualifiedly, because to me this, and not co-education or Ph.D.'s, or woman's exact intellectual relation to man, is the vital issue in college economics. In the five minutes at my disposal I cannot hope to tell you why this is for me, and I believe should be for all, the vital issue; I cannot hope to persuade you (if, indeed, you need persuasion) that married life is woman's ideal life. We who are married are like the philosophers who said that those in the dark might think that they were in the light, whereas those in the light knew 5 that they were. If, then, you will grant me that married life is woman's truth, we may ask, In how far does Radcliffe prepare her for the revelation; in how far does it fail to prepare her? It prepares her in one way, grandly, in that it makes her 10 the intellectual equal of man. She can think with him, work with him, aspire with him; his thoughts are her thoughts, though spiced and enriched by her own individuality. Intellectually their married life is a union with all the rare intuition of sympathy, the consummate helpfulness and 15 strength which the word union rightly stands for. Do you remember how Socrates longed to die because then he could know the thoughts of the men he admired, could talk with them face to face, soul to soul? It is that sort of knowledge of the thoughts of the man whom she supremely admires that 20 Radcliffe fits its daughter for. It enables a wife to enter into the kingdom of her husband's mind and, by entering in, to possess and to enlarge it. Look over There are In Socrates' heaven this would be enough, but for us it is only much. We are alive and life is practical. Does Rad- 25 cliffe fit us for the practical side of married life? her list of courses and you will have the answer. Latin and Greek, Logic and Metaphysic, Anglo-Saxon and Gothic, Trigonometry and Analytic Geometry, and many others of a similar nature. They are all very good — but 30 practical? A married woman has the care of a household, and, as a supreme trust, of children; and what is her preparation? You try to think of a possible relation between what she has learned and what she is now called upon to do, and at last you answer that as a result of her course of study she 35 has a well trained mind, a well formed character. And, therefore, you would assume that she is prepared to manage a household though she knows nothing of the processes of nutrition, of the chemistry of food, of sanitation? To care for children, though she is as ignorant as her babe of physi5 ology and of hygiene? The assumption' is logically preposterous. Its general acceptance passes unchallenged because, forsooth, we are mothers by Divine Right; because the vividness of what our child is in strength, endurance and character obscures the image of what he might have been; 10 because finally our sins of omission and commission have such large results that shrinking we place the burden upon a remote heredity. Some would make excuse for college women upon the ground that they fail no more critically than other women. 15 We know that we demand the ideal of our college, and it is with that demand only that she herself will be satisfied. Until Radcliffe refuses to sanction the heresy that the home work of a woman is so trivial that under the guidance of ignorant tradition it may be learned by the doing, and 20 accepts as a vital part of her mission the task of dignifying through science its daily routine; until acting upon her acknowledgment that strength of character and of mind are products of the method not of the subject matter of study, she teaches us with the rest that which our life work demands 25 that we know; until, in short, she prepares us for the practical revelation of our married life, she has done but half her duty toward us. She has made us to run swiftly with the left us lame with the other. one foot, she has But this is not all; she has made us think that we run 30 swiftly with both feet; she has made us even satisfied. And later when the needs come and we fail to meet them, we are only too apt to be dissatisfied with the needs and not with our failure. And then we make the dissatisfied wives and mothers who bring disrepute upon the college life for women 35 in the eyes of the world, who deny before our younger sisters the truth of a woman's life. |