IF YOU CAN’T READ GREEK, I WON’T MARRY YOU.

Waipawa Mail, Volume XIII, Issue 2502, 6 September 1890, Page 7

IF YOU CAN’T READ GREEK, I WON’T MARRY YOU.

(fortnightly review.) In Cambridge, some ten years or so back, the regulations by which fellowships were forfeited ©n marriage were relaxed, and a considerable number of the younger Fellows shortly married. Quite recently a lady living in Cambridge, and associating ©hiofly with precisely these husbands and wives, said to me : “ I can’t say that I know one unhappy marriag© among my friends here.” But then, in the ma jority of these cases, the wives are highly-cultivated women, in the truest sense the equals of their husbands. At this stage 1 may perhaps step a little ©ut of the main line of my argument to point ©ut in what way, as it appears to me, a high standard of education among women affects their position with regard to marriage. It makes them undoubtedly more independent of marriage, and at the same time raises their standard of marriage. It makes them unwilling to marry men distinctly inferior to them in education or understanding, and it also, I quite believe, makes them less attractive in the eyes «f si*eh men. In short, it diminishes slightly the probability ©f a woman’s marrying at all, while it diminishes very greatly the probability of Iter marrying unsuitably. A ctudent «f a ladies’ college, summing up the general results of her education, said to roe- “I don’t exactly see why learning Greek should make one feel it impossible to many s, man one did not respect, but it seems to umouxt t© about that.” I thought, for my part, that this whimsical testimony was tlie highest possible tribute to her collegiate training,