Girls are going to college in hordes. Graduating from
college, looking for work, there is usually just one kind of work
toward which they are mentally alert. Their college experience
has seldom roused their minds toward any other kind of work. They
start to teach. They drug the market. And so the teaching trade,
the great occupation of unmarried "middle class" women, ceases to
be able to provide those women, as a class, with an adequate
field of employment.
It is a turning point in the economic history of the class.
At the 1909 annual convention of the Association of Collegiate
Alumnae, in Cincinnati, Miss Susan Kingsbury (acting for a
committee of which Mrs. Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology, and Miss Breckenridge, of the University of
Chicago, were members) read a real essay on "The Economic
Efficiency of College Women."
This essay was not written till detailed reports on income and
expenditure from 377 self-supporting college graduates had been
got together.
Out of these 377 there were 317 who were teachers. There were 183
who had followed up their regular college course with from one to
eight years of graduate study.
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