matter how efficient, if they marry or have children. The courts must be enabled to uphold woman's right of marriage and motherhood, instead of, as in some cases at present, upholding school boards in their denial of this right. Contracts which prevent women teachers from marrying or discontinuing their work for marriage should be illegal, and talk about the "moral obligation" of normal school graduates to teach should be discountenanced.
Against the proposal to employ married school teachers, two objections are urged. It is said (1) that for most women school teaching is merely a temporary occupation, which they take up to pass the few years until they shall have married. To this it may be replied that the hope of marriage too often proves illusory to the young woman who enters on the pedagogical career, because of the lack of opportunities to meet men, and because the nature of her work is not such as to increase her attractiveness to men, nor her fitness for home-making. Pedagogy is too often a sterilizing institution, which takes young women who desire to marry and impairs their chance of marriage.
Again it will be said (2) that married teachers would lose too much time from their work; that their primary interests would be in their own homes instead of in the school; that they could not teach school without neglecting their own children. These objections fall in the realm of education, not eugenics, and it can only be said here that the reasons must be extraordinarily cogent, which will justify the enforcement of celibacy on so large a body of superior young women as is now engaged in school teaching.
The magnitude of the problem is not always realized. In 1914 the Commissioner of education reported that there were, in the United States, 169,929