BETWEEN US GIRLS

In the curent issue of Scribner's Magadine Miss Frances Warfield writes bitterly on the results of education as it is practised in the large women's colleges of the East. She names no names, but by the frequent references to Boston one gathers that it is a college with which all Bostonians are familiar; a secluded place of wooded hills above a lake, which, to the student at a neighboring men's college, at least, does not ordinarily call up ideas of such cruel satire.

The author, a recent graduate of this institution, confines herself to the girl's college alone; but if, as she seems to think, higher education at one of the best feminine institutions is nothing more than a farce, it would be too sanguine to suppose that even the top rank of men's universities are above criticism. Unfortunately for Miss Warfield, however, she does not prove her case. She says with the satiric generalization which has become popular in the last decade, that the typical "college woman." If she hered; and, largely as a result of this veneer, thin but adequate, of culture; learns a few catch phrases to repeat whenever a subject is mentioned about which educated persons are supposed to be informed; and, largely as a result of this veneer comes out into the world with a certain amount of poiso. The wise woman, says Miss Warfield, is she who makes a lucky marriage and has so good a time that she forgets her interest in learning entirely.

The writer also takes it for granted that the only girls who continue that interest in after life are those who in college were intellectual because they had no opportunity to be anything else. In short, she draws a picture of cultural devotion around the woodland lake. That there are some students in women's colleges whose interest in learning, whether the result of a scarcity of dates or not, affords them great pleasure and a deeper outlook on life than Miss Warfield seems to have acquired, she does not for a moment consider. That even those whose undergraduate days were little more than a succession of dances and triumphs in feminine politics and sports may still have profited somewhat, even by the thin veneer of culture, she also leaves out of the question. The article proves nothing except that the whole question of higher education, its advantages and defects, is too broad for one mind too grasp, especially if that mind be more intent on satire than on sympathy.