Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/1125

 The character of the work accomplished by those holding fellowships made it possible for the association to establish, three years ago, a Council to Accredit Women for Advanced Work in Foreign Universities. Any woman applicant, college graduate or otherwise, found qualified in work, character and serious purpose, receives a certificate properly signed and attested which will secure for her, if possible to any woman, the courtesy and privileges desired at a foreign university.

The organization contributes to the support of the Association for Maintaining the American Woman’s Table at the Zoological Station at Naples and to that for Promoting Scientific Research by Women. The latter pays $500 annually for the support of the Woman’s Table, and to promote research has just offered a prize of $1,000, which offer, it is expected, will be renewed biennially.

The A. C. A. Committee on Corporate Membership maintains a high standard of colleges whose graduates are admitted to this organization, which has done much in a quiet way to raise the standards of department work, equipment and endowment of American colleges admitting women.

For the past three years the association has published a magazine containing the addresses and reports given at its annual meetings. Among its other publications are statistics relative to the Health of College Women (1885); a Bibliography of the Higher Education of Women (1897) ; a full descriptive list of the fellowships for graduate study open to women in this country, together with a list of the undergraduate scholarships offered to women in the nineteen colleges belonging to the A. C. A. (1899). It will soon issue studies of the growth and development of colleges, a supplement to the Bibliography of the Higher Education of Women, a study of the child from the point of view of parents and teachers, and a comprehensive statistical investigation into the health, occupations and marriage-rate of college and non-college women.

The work of the national association is carried on largely by standing committees which are under the leadership of the women most notable in education—college presidents, deans and professors. Meanwhile, the president, six vice-presidents and presidents of the various branches, acting through a salaried secretarytreasurer, give coherency and support to the development of its various objects. In addition, each branch has committees which deal with local issues, such as public school work of all kinds, home economics, development of children, civil service reform, college settlements, etc. The investigation of the sanitary conditions of the Boston public schools, 1895-1896, started the wave of schoolhouse cleaning which has swept across the country and which has not stopped at schoolhouses but has included school boards and systems of school administration. The Chicago branch has just issued a summary of laws relating to compulsory education and child-labor in the United States, which shows the inadequacy of the first (except in three States) and the lack of correlation between the two which makes for lawlessness and crime. It is hoped that