lowest level of "female education" seems to have been reached in our Anglo-Saxon civilization. In our own country, in the early days, the vigor of mind as well as of body of both men and women went of necessity into the pioneer building of our mighty States. So much was this the fact that the oft-repeated sneer, "Who reads an American book?" might well have been answered by a showing of Constitutions, Highways, Schools, ordered Settlements, as the front-row volumes in the library of American genius. This practical devotion to doing things that later historians would write about, made the women of colonial and revolutionary and western-pioneering days great persons, but small students. And the opportunity for learning in schools was even less than the incitement toward "the still air of delightful studies." 8 Although in Massachusetts as early as 1636 the General Court established Harvard College, and in 1644 ordered the several towns to make sure that "Evry family alow one peck of corne or 12d. in money or other commodity to be sent in to ye Treasurer for the colledge at Cambridge," and in 1683 voted that "Every towne consisting of more than five hundred families shall set up and maintain scholes to instruct youth as the law directs," no girls were thought of in this connection. The provision of "free schools," "schools for the people," etc., left the girls entirely out of the count. Hartford, Connecticut, indeed, in 1771, began to allow girls to learn "reading, spelling, writing" and sometimes "to add"; but not until the close 'See early records of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

of the eighteenth century did the majority of towns of New England make provision, even in a meagre manner, for the education of girls.

At first all the Common Schools for girls were held between April and October, when the boys were at work on the farms; and as late as 1792 Newburyport most reluctantly allowed girls over nine years of age "instruction in grammar and reading during the summer months for an hour and a half after the dismission of the boys." This opportunity was extended in 1804 to a provision for "girls' schools," "to be kept for six months in the year from six to eight o'clock in the morning and on Thursday afternoons," when the boys, presumably, were not using the school rooms! As late as 1788 the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, voted "not to be at any expense for schooling girls," and only yielded, after an appeal to the courts by the tax-paying fathers of the girls, a small chance to learn in the summer months. Up to 1828 girls did not go to public schools in Rhode Island; and not until 1852 was the "Girls' High School" securely established in Boston itself, and not until 1878 the "Girls' Latin School" of that city to prepare for college.

As Abigail Adams wrote in 1817, when over seventy years of age, speaking of the opportunities of women in her day: "The only chance for much intellectual improvement in the female sex, was to be found in the families of the educated class and in occasional intercourse with the learned." To this should be added the partiality of men teachers to some bright

girls, which gave an exceptional training to a favored few. Thus we read that in 1783 Ezra Stiles, President of Yale, gave a certificate declaring that he had "examined Miss Lucinda Foote, twelve years old," and had found her "fully qualified, except in regard to sex, to be received as a pupil in the Freshman Class of Yale University." We are glad to learn that Lucinda received the full college course, including Hebrew, under President Stiles' private instruction, and that she then proved that learning does not undermine the family, by marrying and having ten children. To similar happy accidents of personal favoritism toward exceptional girls must be added the earliest contributions to co-education made by the religious sects, the Moravians who founded in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1749, the first private institution in America which admitted girls to higher educational opportunities than the elementary school; and the Friends, who established in 1697 the Penn Charter School in Philadelphia which made provision for the education of “all Children and Servants, Male and Female, the rich to be instructed at reasonable rates and the poor to be maintained and schooled for nothing"; although in this provision the boys were provided with a more extended course of study than the girls.

These reminders of the period before the days of the Ladies' Academies for the well-to-do, of which Mrs. Willard's was the most ambitious, and of Mary Lyon's school in which the poorer girls could earn a

'Mary Eastman, History of Women's Education in the Eastern States in Woman's Work in America.

part of their living by housework, cannot be omitted from consideration of the intellectual output of women in the United States. Oberlin, with its "Female Department" and its offers of education to black as well as white, the Cincinnati Wesleyan Woman's College and Ripon and Antioch Colleges, were object-lessons long more observed than followed. The establishment of Normal Schools gave the first great democratic opportunity in education to women in America; and, characteristically in the history of women's higher education, this opportunity was given women not for themselves as human beings entitled to intellectual development, but as women who could give the State a larger and cheaper supply of teachers for the free public schools. Even as such it was an innovation bitterly opposed as too radical. 10 We recall the procession of hoodlums of "property and standing" that made an effigy of the gentle and learned Mr. Brooks and carried it through the streets, putting a fool's cap on the head on which was the legend "A Normal School in the Clouds." The valiant Horace Mann had to work hard and long to bring that vision down from the clouds into the actual public school system; and women teachers, trained in co-educational normal schools, shared his labor at every step. In spite of their poverty in education, however, the women of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries made some good showing in letters; and their struggles for professional training and opportunity, especially in the field of medicine, show an heroic tem

10 Henry B. Barnard, History of Public Education.

per as well as a persistent purpose second to no class of men in a similar effort to obtain rights and chances in the larger life.

There have been so many definitions of the lesser genius that one is at liberty to vary the intellectual challenge to women in order to cover justly the demand upon them. If, for example, as some say, "genius is the power of prodigious industry in some one direction," then women might certainly win some prizes in literature-or in what is called that when it is fresh from the press and becomes "the best seller." 11 Not only Mrs. Southworth with her near a hundred books translated into several languages and sold in six capitals of the world, but also Mrs. Willis Parton with her article each week for sixteen successive years in The New York Ledger, may challenge attention! Then we have Lydia H. Sigourney whose day-school education ceased at thirteen years and who was obliged to do all the rest of her studying by herself, varied only by a short term at a boarding school where she was taught "embroidery of historical scenes, filigree and other finger-works." She produced over fifty books and more than two thousand articles in prose and verse contributed to over three hundred periodicals. No wonder her Muse was anæmic from such exertion on such small sustenance! Mrs. Hall, collaborating with her husband through the forty years. of his editorship in The Art Journal, and Mrs. Barbauld, adding to her large original work the editing

"Helen Gray Cone, Women in Literature in Woman's Work in America.