One day Doctor Samuel Johnson happened to discuss with his faithful biographer, Boswell, the merits of cultural attainments in marriage. So thoroughly did Boswell disagree with the great lexicographer that he wrote this resume of the discussion: "Johnson maintained to me, contrary to the common opinion, that a woman would not be the worst wife for being learned; in which from all that I have observed ... I humbly differed from him. That a woman should be sensible and well informed I allow to be a great advantage; but I think that Sir Thomas Overbury in his rude versification has very judiciously pointed out that degree of intelligence which is to be desired in a female companion:
"Give me, next good, an understanding wife
By nature wise, not learned by much art."
Since the day of Johnson and Boswell, as before, this debate on brains in marriage has continued. On one hand, there are the enthusiastic anti-intelligence agitators, who decree that mental training spoils a wife and makes her less capable of fulfilling her various matronly duties. For instance, among the qualifications of an ideal wife listed in the Gentlemen's Magazine of 1761, when Dr. Johnson was at the height of his influence, we find among other interesting requisites, these remarkable demands:
"A decent share of common sense, just tinctured with a little seasonable repartee and a small modicum of wit; but no learning (either ancient or modern), I say again and again, upon any consideration whatever.
"Well, but not critically, skilled in her own tongue.
"A proper knowledge of accounts and arithmetic, but no sort of skill in fractions.
"An acquaintance with domestic news, but no acquaintance with foreign.
"No enthusiasm for the guitar."
Champions of similar blissful ignorance are with us today in no small numbers. They may not go to the extremes advocated by Philippe de Novaire, in the thirteenth century, the very heyday of the Middle Ages, who, voicing wide-spread contemporaneous opinion, seriously maintained that girls should not be taught to read. (Crump and Jacob, The Legacy of the Middle Ages, p. 405.) By stressing the biological side of marriage, emphasizing the disproportionately large numbers of women graduates and school teachers who shun matrimony, and pointing to the predominance of divorce in elite circles with all their cultural advantages, those who would restrict the intellectual development of women have succeeded in presenting a case against "brainy" marriages. Count Leo Tolstoy used to refer to a half-wit in his village as the ideal woman. She was a docile creature who never intruded in any one's business. What else could be desired in a woman? his philosophy of life implied. His daughter records (The Tragedy of Tolstoy, p. 73) that, when a friend of the Russian novelist voiced her indignation at the selection of this simple-minded woman as the feminine acme, Tolstoy challenged: "And what does a woman need intelligence for?"
On the other hand, there have always been those who agree with Doctor Johnson that married life is improved by the wife's intellectual training. In our own day we have been so thoroughly converted to the necessity of similar education for both sexes that, according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, there were 52,103 more girls than boys in the secondary schools of the nation in 1934. In our universities and colleges three women received a degree to every four men. With the significant exception of Harvard University, all notable law and medical schools are open to women.
Because of the unparalleled facilities of popular education and the increasing extent to which they are employed, the questions become more acute: Is the acceptance of these educational opportunities detrimental to happiness in marriage? Is there an intelligence quotient (I. Q.) for full marital happiness?
Some fundamental truths, we believe, will help us approach a specific answer. First of all, we may remind ourselves that genius and domesticity are sometimes irreconcilable opposites. In English literature we have the significant examples of Addison and the Countess of Warwick, Lord Bacon and Miss Barnham, Dryden and Lady Howard, Byron and Miss Milbanke, Shelley and Miss Westbrook, Milton and his two wives, Dickens and Miss Hogarth, Lord Bulwer-Lytton and Miss Wheeler. These and many other literati, like Ben Jonson, Sir Thomas Moore, Steele, and Sterne, emphasize the frequency with which genius and domesticity are at swords' points.
This list could be extended to great lengths, especially if the fields of the other arts were investigated; for men and women of applauded genius are frequently too self-absorbed and too assiduously courted by public glamour to be conscious of the duties imposed by marriage and the limitations set by parenthood. There is also a certain one-sidedness to many brilliant lives, by which they become poorly balanced, supersensitive on one side and adamant on the other.
Genius has often felt itself exempted from the ordinary claims of morality. Chopin and his relations with Madame Dudevant, more familiarly known by her literary pseudonym, George Sand, provoked a large literature. Franz Liszt and his association with Madame la Comtesse d'Agault, known in literary circles as Daniel Stern, his unmarried wife, mother of his three children, aroused a storm of discussion until the composer permitted Cardinal Hohenlohe to ordain him into the Franciscan Order. Lord Byron's wife left him within a year after their marriage because of his loose passions. Carlyle treated his wife with less civility than he extended to the servants. At times he refused to speak to her for weeks. She was not permitted to travel in the same carriage with him and was gradually neglected in favor of other women. Yet at her death he had a beautiful inscription carved on her tombstone, although people believed that "had she lived, he would have tormented her afresh." (Hyslop, Great Abnormalities, p. 54.) Bulwer-Lytton was torn between alternate fits of depression and fiery temper. He once bit his wife on the left cheek and at another time kicked her savagely. Richard Wagner was described to a coast-to-coast audience by Deems Taylor, music commentator for the Columbia Broadcasting System, in these lines: "An endless procession of women marched through his life. His first wife spent twenty years forgiving his infidelities. His second wife had been the wife of his most devoted friend, from whom he stole her. And even while he was trying to persuade her to leave her first husband, he was writing to a friend to inquire whether the friend could suggest some wealthy woman — any wealthy woman — whom he could marry for her money." There seems to be more than a grain of truth in Schopenhauer's confession: "People of genius are not only unpleasant in practical life but weak in moral sense and wicked." — It is perhaps well, then, that there are only 400 geniuses in all history, according to the criteria of Dr. Charles C. Hurst of Cambridge, England.
A more important issue is the question, What influence does a modern college education exert on marriage? Any process of purely mental enlightenment should in itself contribute to the increase of home happiness. A college training should make for a widened intellectual horizon, a deeper appreciation of life's verities, a tolerant attitude toward others, and, introspectively, a consciousness of one's own limitations. Under the inner building impulses of Christian education these radiations are genuine and unmistakable.
Many will agree with Mary A. Hewitt, dean of women at Marquette University: "The cultural training a girl receives in college enables her to appreciate the things on which a finer home life is founded." The recent centennial of women's higher learning in America reminded us that in its original conception the early plans for the education of American women paid special attention to the domestic arts. The Oberlin College catalog for 1835 has this to say about entrance requirements:
"Young ladies of good mind, unblemished morals, and respectable attainments are received into this department and placed under the superintendence of a judicious lady, whose duty it is to correct their habits and mold the female character.
"They board at the public table and perform the labor of the steward's department, together with the washing, ironing, and much of the sewing of the students."
These rules were enacted for the young women at Mount Holyoke College in 1837: "No young lady shall become a member of Mount Holyoke Seminary who cannot kindle a fire, wash potatoes, repeat the multiplication table and at least two thirds of the shorter catechism. Every member of the school shall walk a mile a day unless a freshet, earthquake, or some other calamity prevent. No young lady shall devote more than an hour a day to miscellaneous reading. No young lady is expected to have gentleman acquaintances, unless they are returned missionaries or agents of benevolent societies."
The higher education of women has changed considerably since those Spartan days. While we may answer the criticism of Esther Everstandt Brooke, vocational-guidance counselor (in Good Housekeeping, September, 1933): "The college woman who succeeds in business today owes her alma mater very little thanks. She is the victim of one of the most perfect systems of unpreparedness and misguidance ever devised," by the rebuttal that many girls do not attend college in order to prepare for business, we cannot thus lightly dismiss the charge that the four college years sometimes lead directly away from an intelligent appreciation of Christian home life.
The girl who has specialized for four years in political economy gives no guaranty that she is equipped for the successful regulation of the affairs of the home. A husband who has gained distinctions in his architectural studies may lack the practical wisdom required for building his own dwelling along lines of lasting value, just as more than one M. D. is unable to render his own household immune to the contagion of domestic ills. Courses on plant morphology, principles of marketing, quantitative analysis, gravimetrics, the writing of the one-act play, Vergil's Eclogs and Georgia, integral calculus, Newtonian dynamics, — these at best affect parental qualities only to an incidental extent. We do not share the claim of a New York elevator-manufacturer who would bum all colleges for women (even including his former exception, Bryn Mawr, which had been excluded from the academic conflagration until he learned that a number of young women at that institution smoked). He told the faculty at Bryn Mawr: "A child born of a woman who has been to college should be taken from the mother as soon as weaned and placed in some institution where it could be properly cared for." But how far from the truth is he when, commenting on a newspaper announcement of the institute at Smith College which is "to reconcile a normal life of marriage and motherhood with a life of intellectual activity," he declares: "To make women normal again after they have spent four years at college, studying psychoanalysis, inferiority complexes, the hereness of the there and the wentness of the gone, is an impossibility"!
A college course that makes marriage merely a temporary arrangement, that glorifies divorce, exalts childless families, and preaches the emancipation of the wife from domestic duties; or any cultural course in which Christianity is attacked, the Bible ridiculed, our Savior caricatured, or the conviction of our faith attacked, even by innuendo, is a satanic device that will shatter the joy of happy marriage into irreparable fragments.
Full companionship is often impossible when a husband is a college graduate and the wife's assets are only physical. Not only will this disparity rule out the mutual enjoyment of good books, music, art, the intelligent discussion of current affairs, but the lack of adequate education may prove a handicap even in the practical affairs of home-life, the rearing of children, and the solution of domestic problems. When ominous shadows lengthen over the home, the uncultured husband of a cultured wife often stands by as a helpless spectator, unable to offer what God and man expect of him.
John Wesley married a middle-aged, wealthy widow with four children, Mrs. Vazeille, a former servant girl, who had little interest in his intellectual life and less understanding of his problems. This mental breach inevitably produced a tragedy from which Wesley suffered for thirty years. Rankling hatred took complete possession of Mrs. Wesley. On occasion she rose up while her husband was preaching in London to ridicule him publicly. At other times she resorted to libel and forgery to besmirch his character and ruin his career. A friend of Wesley is reported to have said to his son: "Jack, I was once in the north of Ireland; I went into a room and found Mrs. Wesley foaming with fury. Her husband was on the floor, where she had been trailing him by the hair of his head; and she herself was still holding in her hand venerable locks which she had plucked up by the roots. I felt as though I could have knocked the soul out of her." (Quoted from a private manuscript in Diamond's Psychology of the Methodist Revival, pp. 69,70.)
The situation may become similarly acute when the wife has enjoyed a superior education. While these pages were written, glaring newspaper headlines told us of an Illinois college graduate, instructor at an agricultural school, who killed his wife and confessed that he did it because she was "socially and intellectually his superior," although both had been graduated from the same university.
This is abnormal; yet many a young woman who has earned the privilege of placing an A. M. or a Ph. D. after her name learns that academic appendages may jeopardize the winning of the matrimonial prefix. John Kirk Folsom, Vassar College sociologist, asserts that "men usually marry downward intellectually." In substantiation he calls attention to a California study in which the average I. Q. of the husbands was found to be eight points higher than that of the wives. Consequently, he concludes, "finding a mate is particularly difficult for highly educated women." Dr. William Robinson, honorary surgeon of the Sunderland Royal Infirmary, insists that a university degree handicaps the marriage probabilities of a girl about 50 per cent.
It is a serious issue, this appeal for a common educational basis. In the flush of eager excitement when young people are momentarily captivated by appearance or popularity, they may overstress physical charm or social applause; yet next to complete spiritual unity mental compatibility is one of the strongest pledges for unalloyed happiness.
Here, too, the ennobling power of Christian faith can exert its blessed influence. Before Michael Faraday fell in love, at the age of thirty, he had made his epochal discoveries in the field of magnetic current. Within two years he would be recognized as one of the world's leading scientists; and his affection fixed itself upon a simple girl who sat in the pew next to his in the chapel where he worshiped every Sunday. Despite educational differences they really "lived happily ever afterward." A Christian woman, gifted with common sense, humility, and understanding, made a happy home for "the greatest scientific experimenter the world has ever seen," to use John Tyndall's tribute to Faraday.
When the master of proverbs exalts wisdom, spirit-seeking, truth-promoting knowledge, and declares it to be "more precious than rubies" (Prov.3:15), he is not indulging in oratorical comparisons. He means exactly what he says, namely, that the acquisition of sound. God-fearing wisdom is a better asset than a treasure-trove filled with pigeon-blood rubies. Crown jewels may be plundered, diamonds melted, brittle emeralds broken, but nothing short of insanity or accident can destroy the treasures of accumulated reading, study, and culture.
That sage of the Old Testament, devoting verse upon verse to the exaltation of wisdom, continues and declares: "Through wisdom is an house builded; and by understanding is it established" (Prov.24:3); and these inspired epigrams entitle us to conclude that Christian culture can brighten the rich glow of a happy home. There may be, of course, a rare companionship even in those homes where a sixth-grade education marks the upper limit of school attendance, provided the spiritual walls are stout and strong. A Gemuetlichkeit, that untranslatable German synonym of happy serenity, may radiate its cheering comfort from that hearthstone, while the modish apartments of high-strung savants reverberate with the crash of family conflicts. But any Christian home will be the richer and the happier for every added measure of culture with which it is endowed. True education offers new contacts, varied points of view, a softer insistence, a more charitable interpretation, a sense of cooperative living, and altogether the wider panorama of a more abundant life.
By the development of latent talents and the pursuit of cultural advancement forward-looking young people can often make a notable contribution to the happiness of their later home-life. This truth will be conceded because it is based on Scripture and common experience. The difficulty lies in an altogether different sphere and is voiced in the question: "How can we carry on and continue an educational program in the face of these disheartening years?"
In the midst of the greatest educational era that any country in any age has ever enjoyed, tens of thousands of splendid young people have not been able to accept the opportunities of a college education because of financial stress. Since there may be personal disappointment in the hearts of some readers who were obliged to go to work after graduation from high school or to drop out of college after the freshman or sophomore year I give them these words of encouragement.
If you are eager to continue your education, believing that a college degree would be a stimulus to your intellectual growth and indirectly a contribution to your future home-life, remember that you can reach this goal even though you may be employed — or unemployed. In addition to the opportunities afforded by evening schools, many representative colleges and universities have built up a splendid system of extension and home study courses, designed especially to meet the requirements of those for whom personal attendance at college is impossible. This program is carried out under the auspices of the National University Association. The instruction is given by correspondence, sometimes supplemented by the radio, and is usually designed for the individual, although groups have been organized into voluntary classes. Many of the schools permit the students to take one half of the four years' course in this extension work, while some give credit for as much as two thirds. Most of the students take two or perhaps three courses a year, since it has been found that it is not advisable for employed students to enroll for more work. Young people who are not working can in a single year earn thirty-two hours' credit or the full year's rating. The courses offered embrace practically all the major subjects taught in the wide field of American education today, and almost all the courses listed in the regular curriculum are open to home students.
This plan has met with wide acceptance. The 1938 annual convention of the National Extension Association, representing fifty member universities, reported more than 200,000 individual students enrolled in college and high-school extension and correspondence courses.
Enrolment does not restrict one to an arduous, every night routine of study. That price might be too high even for the benefits of education. A systematic planning of one's leisure or unemployed time will show that the twenty-four-hour daily schedule which God has given every one of us can be arranged by simple efficiency plans to allow for this extra cultural effort. Prof. A. R. Lauer of the department of psychology at Iowa State College feels that college students can save seven hours a week merely by following mechanical rules in their reading and recording. He requires, for example, that students force themselves to read faster, that they make an effort "to see phrases rather than words." If, as he claims, thirty-six days may be saved in a year by the mere mechanics of reading, how much more time can the average young person gain in the six or seven hours of daily leisure!
This new day with the laborsaving devices and efficiency systems will never revert to old standards. We shall continue to live in an era of emphasized ease. If the youth of today will prepare itself for these increased responsibilities by self-culture, well-planned reading, and systematic study, it can convert the over plus of time into tangible benefits for the harmony and happiness of the homes which, please God, they may be privileged to build.