The trouble with educated women

Loretta reports:

A short while ago, we learned that the French arranged marriages long after the English gave up the practice, and each side believed their approach assured more happy marriages.

This was before the days of marriage therapy, couples counseling, etc.

Let's move on to the U.S. in the 20th century.

I had heard about Eugenics but was startled to learn that Paul Popenoe, the man behind The Ladies Home Journal ongoing feature, "Can this marriage be saved?" (launched in 1953)—and the man who seems to have started the marriage counseling business— had been a leader in the Eugenics campaign "to sterilize the unfit and urge the fit to marry."

I am indebted to a fascinating article by Jill Lepore, "Fixed: The Rise of marriage therapy, and other dreams of human betterment," (New Yorker 3/29/10--you can listen to audio here ) for sending me to a piece of early 20th century "scientific" writing that made my jaw drop: Applied Eugenics.

Among other things, Popenoe wrote, in 1918, that a college education rendered women unfit for marriage.

"The causes of the remarkable failure of college women to marry" he breaks down into two categories: avoidable and unavoidable. Among the "avoidable reasons"--(1) They desire not to marry, due to a preference for a career, or development of a cynical attitude toward men and matrimony, due to a faulty education." For those who desire to marry but can't, reasons include "(b) Their education makes them less desirable mates than girls who have had some training along the lines of home-making and mothercraft."

Further on he declares, as Lepore quotes, "Many a college girl of the finest innate qualities, who sincerely desires to enter matrimony, is unable to find a husband of her own class, simply because she has been rendered so cold and unattractive, so over stuffed intellectually and starved emotionally, that a typical man does not desire to spend the rest of his life in her company."

Good thing my husband never got around to reading that book.

Photos at top and center left courtesy Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
Top:  The bride's prayer: "Make thy face to shine upon me.  Make my life a life of love." c 1905
Center:  College for Women of Western Reserve University c1913