Page:Democratic Ideals (Olympia Brown).djvu/15

Rh to read while still very young. She read everything to which she had access, committing to memory both poems and hymns which came in her way. In one of her lectures she was in the habit of giving a humorous account of making butter with the old-fashioned dash churn, keeping time with the strokes of the dash by reciting those fearful hymns which threatened in glowing language the "fires of hell."

At the age of nineteen she went to Madison to live with her grandmother, Mrs. Chilton, whose care and instruction had a great influence on her life and were remembered by her with the utmost gratitude. Here she entered the Wisconsin University, then in its infancy, and, like several of our state universities in their beginning, struggling with the question of co-education. Her brilliancy and determination as a student in the Normal School, then a department of the University, enabled her to exert a marked influence in securing the admission of women to the University and the adoption of the principles of co-education in Wisconsin. She was graduated in 1869 as the valedictorian in the first class of women graduated from the University. It was the same year that Wyoming adopted Woman's Suffrage, and that the first suffrage convention was held in Washington, D. C. [{c|14}}