Eugenics in race and state.

  • International Congress of Eugenics
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Eugenics in race and state. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    398/534 (page 382)
    382 LOUIS I. DUBLIN realize that marriage is desirable, they have lost their attractiveness and cannot compete successfully with the younger and fresher girls who are willing to take the step without so many reservations. The whole situation is crystallizing in the impression on the part of many men that college women do not make desirable wives. I am very well aware that this complicated phenomenon cannot bje explained so easily and that there are other causes at work than those we have listed. Nor am I an apologist for the attitude of men toward college women, nor for the shortsightedness of the community which makes it hard for the professional woman to continue her work after marriage without losing caste. I am attempting simply to emphasize a number of items which can be controlled and which, I believe, are playing a very large part in bringing about the results we all deplore. What then is the remedy? Shall we discourage the higher education of women? I think not. Too much has already been gained in the liberal attitude of the community which gives equal opportunity to its women as to its men and in the desire of women to improve themselves intellect¬ ually. All this is good and must not be lost. If the type of education which young women are now receiving is, iniact, resulting disastrously, the remedy is not less education but rather more and better education. The institutions should be made over to suit our modern needs and fulfil their own great mission. The first requirement, it seems to me, is that the teachers of the girls' colleges should realize their strategic position in determining the thought and conduct of the women who come to them as students. They must themselves have a better sense of values and sin¬ cerely believe in the fundamental importance to the state and to the individual of early marriage and in the continuation of valuable lines of descent unimpaired. In their personal contacts with their students, they have unlimited possibilities of influence. The trouble is, I believe, that teachers, both men and women are largely actuated by a false sociology and their influence is not in the right direction. They stress and encourage individual achievement at the expense of the social good in their own affairs and carry the same lesson over to their pupils. I am asking teachers to be more interested in the eugenic movement to recognize its supreme im¬ portance and to impart its viewpoint to their students. This would shape the thought of the young people to a better appreciation of what is vital and fundamental in life and what constitutes its highest obligation. This attitude on the part of teachers would also have its effect on the curriculum. Those subjects which do not bear directly on the lives of the students would be put into the background, or entirely displaced by those