There is no use pretending about it. It may sound an awful thing to
say, but the women are going to be married. That is, and always has
been, their career; and, what is more, they know it; and even at
college, while they are studying algebra and political economy, they
have their eye on it sideways all the time. The plain fact is that,
after a girl has spent four years of her time and a great deal of her
parents' money in equipping herself for a career that she is never
going to have, the wretched creature goes and gets married, and in a
few years she has forgotten which is the hypotenuse of a right-angled
triangle, and she doesn't care. She has much better things to think
of.

At this point some one will shriek: "But surely, even for marriage,
isn't it right that a girl should have a college education?" To which
I hasten to answer: most assuredly. I freely admit that a girl who
knows algebra, or once knew it, is a far more charming companion and
a nobler wife and mother than a girl who doesn't know x from y. But
the point is this: Does the higher education that fits a man to be a
lawyer also fit a person to be a wife and mother? Or, in other
words, is a lawyer a wife and mother? I say he is not. Granted that
a girl is to spend four years in time and four thousand dollars in
money in going to college, why train her for a career that she is
never going to adopt? Why not give her an education that will have a
meaning and a harmony with the real life that she is to follow?

For example, suppose that during her four years every girl lucky
enough to get a higher education spent at least six months of it
in the training and discipline of a hospital as a nurse. There is
more education and character making in that than in a whole bucketful
of algebra.