of the father in her boy's mind; and so it will actually lighten her task as chief family teacher.

Her burden will be lessened still more, if the father may be called back from the office to the home to take his proper share in the training of the boy. Two things are urgently needed in the process of socialization: that the woman should have an opportunity to do a full share of the world's work; and that the man should take a full share in the work of the home. It is very true that woman's place is in the home. It is not less true that man's place is in the home. But the home is not merely a house, a physical dwelling place. It is a psychic, a spiritual fact; a group of ideals, relations, activities. It is vain to turn back the hand on the dial of progress. Marriage will indeed be holy when it rests on the troth-plight of equals. The home is indeed the human soul's most sacred temple. It will not be less sacred when through it flows the swift current of the larger social life. For, first and last, do not all human ideals, aims, and strivings center in the triad of personalities, the mother, father, and child?

THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN AND SEX EQUALITY

BY GERTRUDE S. MARTIN,

Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y.

The agitation for sex equality began, as Ellen Key has intimated, when Eve reached for the apple. It entered upon its final stage in modern civilized society when peace loving and indulgent, if somewhat sceptical, husbands, fathers, college boards, and school commissioners began at last gradually to yield, during the first half of the nineteenth century, to the nagging of their women folk and decided, albeit with many misgivings, to let them try their minds on the man's curriculum.

Up to that time the education of women both here and in Great Britain had been at best, except in the case of a few fortunate individuals, a thing of shreds and patches. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the great majority of our foremothers must have been nearly, if not quite, illiterate. In one direction only was the girl thoroughly and soundly trained. No pains were spared to perfect her in the manifold, if somewhat primitive, industrial processes carried on within the household; and if the processes themselves and the methods of instruction tended to develop only manual dexterity rather than mental capacity, they were nevertheless truly educative so far as they went. It must be admitted that it still remains for modern education to develop a technique equally well adapted to the present organization of the household.

Except in this direction, however, the education of women even at the close of the first quarter of the nineteenth century had gone little, if any, beyond the point looked upon as desirable by the gentlemen of the court of Charles II, who "thought that women were educated enough if they could spell out the recipes of pies and puddings, the manufacture of which nature had entrusted to their tender mercies." It was not until 1852, as Miss Talbot has pointed out in her book on the Education of Women, that a public high school education of any kind was available for girls in Boston, and the opening of the Girls' Latin School in 1878 gave them their first opportunity to prepare for college.

The story of the struggle for the education of women is beginning now to get itself told. Histories of the education of women in the United States or in particular states; biographies of leaders in the movement, such as Emma Willard, Mary Lyon, and Alice Freeman Palmer; magazine articles dealing with current phases of the educational problem-coeducation, the woman's college, vocational education-all these studies, issuing from the press in increasing numbers, are making it possible to trace with growing certainty the origin and tendencies of the movement. That means that one phase of it, at least, is fairly complete; that certain ideals that have been struggling for realization have at last got themselves established in our external social arrangements, and that the bearers of these ideals or their disciples now have a moment's breathing spell in which they can look back over the work and tell the rest of the world what the vision was that led them on and how it was wrought out into external reality.

They were quite clear in their minds as to what they wanted, these pioneers in the movement for women's education. Margaret Fuller made the classic statement of their demand:

It is not the transient breath of poetic incense that women want; each can receive that from a lover. It is not life-long sway; it needs but to become a coquette, a shrew, or a good cook, to be sure of that. It is not money, nor notoriety, nor the badges of authority which men have appropriated to themselves. If demands, made in their behalf, lay stress on any of these particulars, those who make them have not searched deeply into the need. The demand

is for that which is the birthright of every being capable of receiving it, the freedom, the religious, the intelligent freedom of the universe to use its means, to learn its secret, as far as nature has enabled them, with God alone for their guide and judge.

To most men that sounded rankly heretical. To the few leaders of the thought of the age it was only the logical next step in the democratic movement already well under way. During the previous century great masses of men had been very busily and successfully engaged in making and enforcing this same demand for themselves against other men, those of the privileged classes; but when women, in their usual unforeseen and unforeseeable fashion, made this demand for themselves against men-likewise a privileged classthe latter at first stood somewhat aghast and then conscientiously set in motion all the old forces of inherited belief, custom, and prejudice to oppose the spread of so pernicious a heresy.

Doubtless every privileged class that ever existed has been firmly persuaded that the continuance of its privileges was necessary to the truest welfare of the community of which it formed a part. And where such a class does not use its powers too despotically, it often succeeds, partly by its moderation, partly because of the very sincerity of its belief in its own beneficence, in imposing a like belief upon considerable numbers of not too perspicacious persons who do not share its privileges. This is the explanation of the feminine anti-suffragists.

So now the leaders of this movement for the liberation of feminine personality found arrayed against them the powerful forces of conservatism. Most men and some women joined in the chorus of protest, admonition, warning, and appeal. "Remember," cries Mrs. Barbauld, an excellent lady of wide culture and no small talent, but without the gift of prophecy, addressing the budding womanhood of her time, "Remember, your best, your sweetest empire is to please." It is exactly the sort of advice that a Turkish odalisque might expect from a benevolent slave dealer. Half a century later, the eloquent Mr. Ruskin, sugar coating the pill, to be sure, in his own charming fashion, was still offering to his feminine readers in Great Britain mental physic of this sort:

All such knowledge should be given her [the girl] as may enable her to understand, and even to aid, the work of men: and yet it should be given, not as knowledge—not as if it were, or could be, for her an object to know; but only to feel and to judge.

And again:

A woman in any rank of life, ought to know whatever her husband is likely to know, but to know it in a different way. His command of it should be foundational and progressive, hers, general and accomplished for daily and helpful use. Speaking broadly, a man ought to know any language or science he learns, thoroughly, while a woman ought to know the same language, or science, only in so far as may enable her to sympathize in her husband's pleasures, and in those of his best friends.

Even granting Ruskin's underlying assumption in regard to the relation of the sexes-"He for God only, she for God in him"the sort of education he outlines would be wholly inadequate for the purposes indicated, but that is beside the point. What it is important to note is the fact that even while Ruskin was struggling to

clothe his somewhat puerile and futile thought on the subject of the education of girls in language sufficiently beautiful, the Zeitgeist had passed on. At almost the same time on the other side of the water Matthew Vassar was meditating his great gift and formulating his profoundly simple statement of his belief in the right of women to absolute equality of opportunity with men. A few years more and hundreds of young women, and some older ones, were standing at the doors of higher institutions of learning everywhere, demanding or begging for admission according as their individual natures prompted.

In vain did timid feminine souls plead with these bolder, liberty loving sisters not to "unsex" themselves, not to throw away their lovely feminine charm for the empty bauble of a trained intellect, which would, besides, get them no husbands. Equally in vain d'd learned divines and distinguished statesmen and educators mark out for them the divinely set boundaries of woman's sphere, which they could pass only at their peril. They were too keenly conscious of themselves as individuals, too deeply aware of their capacity to know and to do, too driven by the irrepressible demand for self-expression, too completely caught, in short, in the great forward surge of the democratic movement, to turn back.

It has been accounted folly on the part of those early advocates of women's rights that they minimized sex differences; that they insisted upon the fundamental likenesses between men and women and ignored or denied the differences; that they conceived of sex equality as possible only through identity of training, activity, and function. They saw far more clearly than their critics. It was literally true that the only path to any general recognition of sex equality for all women, college trained or not, lay through the successful accomplishment by large numbers of women of the curriculum of the man's college, and subsequent successful work in fields traditionally assigned to men.

Old beliefs and prejudices die hard. In a world whose intellectual and religious leaders had debated solemnly, not so many centuries before, whether women really had souls, it is perhaps not to be wondered at that the masculine mind in general still clung tenaciously to the persuasion that where woman was concerned, man had been admitted to the counsels of the Almighty while woman herself had been carefully excluded; and that it was therefore his high duty and responsibility to determine the conditions under