New Man in the Ladies' Den

Like many a mere man, James Madison Wood likes to say that a woman is a woman. What makes his truism noteworthy is his insistence on applying it to women's education. After all, says he, 72% of all women ultimately marry. As president of Missouri's Stephens College (for women), Dr. Wood has trained 2,000 young women in the arts & sciences of wifehood, motherhood and homemaking. Even the college's psychology, literature and economics courses are, as he says, "geared . . . to its homemaking objective." He seems to be on the right track, for at last count 85% of the Stephens "Susies" land a man within five years of graduation.

Though critics accuse Stephens girls of spending more time on their lipstick than on their Latin, amiable Dr. Wood has built the college from a 1912 enrollment of 52 (and a $100,000 deficit) into a thriving academy that picks & chooses its lucky girls. Stephens has had such attractions as 75-year-old Maude (Peter Pan) Adams as a dramatics teacher. Talent scouts--who are called "admissions counselors"--give prospects the onceover, report (among other things) on their "comeliness" and home-town popularity. Stephens prefers not to waste its makeup, clothing and budget clinics, its courses in nutrition and home management, on the hopelessly homely or the misfits.

Stephens girls generally learn quite a bit about horses, planes, and the Bible. They attend the world's largest collegiate Bible class (with choir and orchestra). The college has a $75,000 riding arena, with 45 horses, and an aviation program with 30 planes. A faculty committee on "education by travel" is now planning a revival of the well-publicized continental grand tours Stephens girls took before the war.

Last week 71-year-old Dr. Wood decided that "thirty-five years of living with 2,000 women is all any man is entitled to. . . ."As his successor, Stephens curators picked popular Homer Price Rainey, 50, ousted president of the University of Texas and recently defeated candidate for governor of Texas. Rainey intends to spend six months at Stephens before he says what he thinks about it all.

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