Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/841

764 cisco. Among these physicians two make a specialty of the eye and ear, one in San Francisco and one in San José. Two women have been graduated from the State Dental College, located in San Francisco. In April, 1875, the Pacific Dispensary Hospital for women and children was founded by women. In 1881 a training-school for nurses was added. The hospital department, although admitting women, is intended especially for children, and is the only children's hospital on the coast. The dispensary is for out-patients, both women and children. The board of ten directors, the resident and attending physicians of the hospital, and five out of the seven connected with the dispensary are women. From a small beginning the institution has increased to importance, and bids fair to continue in its present prosperity and capacity for good work. I have written thus lengthily that you may see how energetic our women have been in originating and carrying on such an institution.

The most prominent literary woman of the coast is undoubtedly Miss. M. W. Shinn. She is a graduate of our State University and was the medal scholar of her class. At present she is the editor of the Overland Monthly, and the excellent prospects of the magazine are largely the result of her own courage and the hard work she has done.

The higher education in the State is being put upon a secure basis. Hon, Leland Stanford and his wife, Jane Lathrop Stanford, have recently given a great part of their vast fortune for the establishment of a university which bids fair to be the foremost educational] institution on the continent. In a letter specifying his views in regard to the management of the university, Governor Stanford says:

We deem it of the first importance that the education of both sexes shall be equally full and complete, varied only as nature dictates. The rights of one sex, political and other, are the same as those of the other sex, and this equality of rights ought to be fully recognized.

There are many men and women throughout the State who have faithfully advocated political equality for all citizens.

Mendocino county has the honor of claiming as a citizen, one of the earliest and ablest women in this reform, Clarina Howard Nichols, who may be said to have sown the seeds of liberty in three States in which she has resided, Vermont, Kansas and California. Since 1870, her home has been with a son in Pomo, where she finished her heroic life January 11, 1885. Though always in rather straitened circumstances, Mrs. Nichols was uniformly calm and cheerful, living in an atmosphere above the petty annoyances of every-day life with the great souls of our day and generation, keeping time in the march of progress. She was too much absorbed in the vital questions of the hour even to take note of her personal discomforts. Many of her able articles published in magazines and the journals of the day, and letters from year to year to our