If so, it is desirable to avoid reducing the wages of
married men too much by the competition of single women.
To attain this end, without working any injustice to women, it seems
wise to modify their education in general in such a way as to prepare
women for the kinds of work best adapted to her capacities and needs.
Women were long excluded from a higher education, and when they secured
it, they not unnaturally wanted the kind of education men were
receiving,--partly in order to demonstrate that they were not
intellectually inferior to men. Since this demonstration is now
complete, the continuation of duplicate curricula is uncalled for. The
coeducational colleges of the west are already turning away from the old
single curriculum and are providing for the election of more
differentiated courses for women. The separate women's colleges of the
east will doubtless do so eventually, since their own graduates and
students are increasingly discontented with the present narrow and
obsolete ideals. If the higher education of women, and much of the
elementary education, is directed toward differentiating them from men
and giving them distinct occupations (including primarily marriage and
motherhood) instead of training them so the only thing they are capable
of doing is to compete with men for men's jobs, the demand of "equal pay
for equal work" will be less difficult to reconcile with the interests
of the race.
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