Old Maid Teachers for College Girls

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/October 13, 1910

President Frederick P. W. Hamilton of Tufts College is worried about the college girl. He says that the college girl will never do as much as she should in the world ’till she gets someone to teach her besides a corps of old maids. 

“The highly cultured, middle aged, unmarried woman is a fine type individually,” says President Hamilton, “but it is not the proper type to create the atmosphere for girls at the formative period of their lives.”

Well, perhaps you’re right, President Hamilton, but what in the world are we going to do about it? 

Who do you want for teachers in our women’s colleges—men? 

Do you think that men are the proper type to “create the atmosphere for girls at the formative period of their lives”? 

The average man understands an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl just about as well as an elephant understands a mockingbird. 

I may not care for the manners nor the outlook nor the general appearance of a nice, comfortable hen, but I’d rather have her bring up a flock of chickens any day in the week than to trust those chickens to the most amazing eagle who ever cleft the ambient air with his defiant wings.

And the married women aren’t teaching in colleges, thank you, professor. 

They have all they can do to teach the little tykes at home. 

So what are you going to do about the old maid teacher in the girls’ college? 

Let her alone, I say. She is not the ideal person in the ideal place, but she’s the nearest we seem to be able to come to right now; and, whisper, President Hamilton, don’t you think you lay a little too much stress upon the importance of the personality of college teachers, anyway?

It only takes four years for a girl to go through college. 

A good deal of that time she’s making fudge and getting ready for the senior prom. and writing letters home and having crushes on some other girl and looking at a photograph of some young fellow back home and writing letters to Harvard or to Yale or wherever her particular student happens to be at that particular time. She isn’t taking college half so seriously as you seem to think, and as for forming herself on the model of teachers there, did you ever hear a bunch of college girls sit around and roast marshmallows—and the teachers, at the same joyous moment?

The average college girl is just about as much affected by the average college teacher as the average college boy is affected personally by the average college professor. 

I wish you would cross your heart, President Hamilton, and tell us honestly and truly just exactly how much you think that is.