Kansas University Weekly.
281
LITERARY.
Thursday, November the tenth, the "Friends in Council" considered the subject of "Openings for College Graduates." The writer of the paper on "Openings for Women College Graduates" regarded it a mistake for so great a proportion to become teachers. Teaching has seemed almost to be the main purpose of acquiring the higher education, while it should be to make life fuller and broader in all callings. It should seek to break down grades in labor elevating the standard of work, and so reach and uplift the working class.
In woman's work the question of sex has always been too prominent, often restricting, as well as imposing too arduous labors upon her, because belonging to the home. One author was quoted as saying that during the age of chivalry "sex gradually came to take precedence of humanity—the most disastrous thing that can happen to any creature—male or female."
Inasmuch as the college settlement work is impracticable in small towns, a suggestion was made for the women graduates of our own University to combine in establishing here an Industrial school with the hope of thus reaching and casting an influence over, many untrained young people, who are now leading worse than useless lives. If undertaken with sufficient earnestness it might be hoped many of our fellow townsmen would give pecuniary aid to the enterprise and it would certainly have the sympathy and encouragement of all.
"Education must bring labor up and elevate its standard. It must necessarily of itself produce new callings in life. Its diffusion produces new industries. But only as these industries do in the long run effect all labor are the lower walks of life materially benefitted; nor can they be greatly helped by our better educational advantages as long as the educated continue to follow only what are considered "the higher callings." So long as the woman college-graduate seeks only such callings in life as can in no way be performed without a college education, she not only becomes separated farther and farther from the woman-laborer, who has not had her advantages, but she limits more and more her own field of usefulness, while the ordinary working people desire no direct advantage through the constantly increasing numbers of college-graduates.
As long as we are content that the individual be not above her work, that the dressmaker, however proficient in fitting and style, has no thought above the fashion plates she studies, there can be no rapid, progressive, universal advance. Since it is the environment that educates there can be no great progress among the ignorant working classes if always kept within their own atmosphere—receiving only occasionally kindnesses from those of a missionary spirit."
Just as a young man would be advised to follow any calling for which he showed a natural aptitude; so might any individual, man or woman, be expected to follow the work most congenial. To every woman of course first comes the family and the home. But if a young woman showed a natural gift in any especial line, there is no reason why it need be suppressed, because contemplating marriage. If many women had some calling in life it would overcome much of the spirit of unrest so prevalent. It is not only single women who really stand in need of helpful work.
Of most women, family cares engross all the attention; but to many the years of caring for children are more or less limited; and often there is quite a term of life after that period, when she either assumes unnecessary labors, or is despondent because her field of usefulness has passed from her. Indeed she often clings to it with more persistance as she realizes the work that has so entirely engrossed all her attention, and into which she has thrown her whole heart, is no longer needed: taking upon herself needless anxieties and rendering the young people of her household more and more dependent and really dwarfing their develop-