![]() The so-called career upon which the average college graduate embarks is usually a compromise and it is frequently undertaken as a temporary expediency to tide over the period between Commencement and the hoped-for wedding day. While their eyes are traveling with Chaucer and the Canterbury pilgrims, their minds are likely to be strolling in the moonlight with some real or imaginary lad. ![]() Few of them are impelled by a singleness of purpose in the pursuit of intellectual aims. On the contrary, women students, in spite of their creditable scholarship, are often the despair of educators because of their evident distraction with romantic subjects which are not listed in the curriculum. #ONE OF THE CANTERBURY PILGRIMS CROSSWORD CODE#‘I hate the woman,’ he said, ‘who is always turning back to the grammatical rules of Palaemon and consulting them: the feminine antiquary who recalls verses unknown to me and corrects the words of an unpolished friend which even a man would not observe.’ He then exclaimed with a note of exasperation: ‘Let a husband make a solecism in peace!’ The Juvenalian protest became socialized, and was handed down in the unwritten code of men, until to-day a Bachelor’s degree in the possession of a woman, instead of adding to her matrimonial assets, is likely to set up a series of flight reactions in the male which send him forthwith to the club and her in search of a job!Ĭollege deans and counselors who are fortunate in having the confidence of undergraduate women can testify to the fact that it is a rare senior who declares herself against matrimony. Several centuries later when the fine ladies of Rome had become socially and economically emancipated, and were flocking to lectures on history, philosophy, and literature, Juvenal, the poet, expressed what was, and still is without doubt, the rather general sentiment among men. ![]() But even Ischomachos wasĭestined for disillusionment, for, as he confided to Socrates, his wife became restless, and one day he found her ‘with a lot of powder on her face to make her look whiter, and a lot of rouge to make her look redder, and high-heeled shoes to make her look taller.’ And when he reprimanded her for trying to deceive him, she asked naïvely how she might really be beautiful without just appearing so, and he replied in his charmingly masculine manner that she should ‘look on at the bread-making and stand by while the housekeeper dealt out the supplies, and go about inspecting everything.’ Thus, he declared, she could ‘practise her profession and take a walk at the same time,’ and so get excellent exercise - a first aid to beauty. Because he was strong he would go out and struggle with nature and earn the living for the family and because she was physically weak she should stay home and occupy herself by organizing the slaves, taking charge of storing supplies, clothing the members of the household, and caring for the sick. The purpose of their marriage, he said, was to produce children and keep house. Xenophon, at about the fourth century before Christ, tells of a young Athenian named Ischomachos who, possibly in self-defense, decided to educate his wife according to his own ideas. His perplexity is, indeed, as old as civilization. It then became necessary to begin all over with his original thesis, showing that she is first and last a biological phenomenon, that her duties lie plainly within the home, and that her greatest service can be found only in ministering to the needs of men and their children. And just at those times when he has thought that he had her nicely subdued, she has suddenly upset his plans, and shattered his nerves by undertaking some absurd adventure like going to college, or getting a job, or running for office. ![]() ![]() No other creature in life, perhaps, has been so persistently baffling as this female paradox who is at once his inspiration and despair, the joy and bane of his existence. THE innumerable books which man has written about woman are evidence of the fact that she has been an age-long problem to him. ![]()
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