Mis-Education of Women

The career of home-making should be glorified in the colleges and the girls interested in it and prepared to manage households economically and efficiently. The station of mother should be exalted and have attached to it a dignity and honor which women might well covet.

1922 The Northwestern Lutheran

The following article is taken from the July 9, 1922 issue of The Northwestern Lutheran, Volume 9, Number 14, on page 218. A PDF scan of the original issue may be found in the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary Digital Library.

The tendency of educated women to enter spheres of life chiefly occupied by men, or to drift into useless and selfish modes of living, averse to assume the responsibility of home-making, is directing the attention of educators to the question as to whether there is not something quite defective in higher education in the colleges. That so many girls should graduate who manifest a disposition to escape home-making and the rearing of children has been deplored and has made many feel that colleges are responsible for a great deal of miseducation. The proportion of women who leave college and either do not marry or fail to rear children when they do marry is so great as to create considerable doubt as to whether the education of women in the higher schools is worth while. The very women who should be best fitted to raise and train sons and daughters, as a rule, do not have any to raise. Their education tends to either lead them away from matrimony or to rebel against the thought of being mothers. They thus become denatured.

A writer in one of the church papers, who is connected with a life insurance company and has access to information on this subject, strongly advocates introducing into the curriculum of women’s colleges studies on eugenics that shall tend to correct this deplorable state of affairs. He feels that the career of home-making should be glorified in the colleges and the girls interested in it and prepared to manage households economically and efficiently. They should be disabused of the fallacy that marriage and child-bearing are but another name for a burdensome and slavish life. The station of mother should be exalted and have attached to it a dignity and honor which women might well covet. Something of the longing for motherhood which the saintly women of the Scriptures cherished in their bosoms would be far more worthy of womanhood than the prevailing aversion. What the world needs today is educated Christian mothers who esteem it a high and holy mission to give to the world sons and daughters worthy of a succession. We cannot have too many Rebekahs and Hannahs and Ruths.

—The Lutheran.