Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 4.djvu/571

 appointed for two years at a salary of $50, $65 or $75 a month, according to the size of the city.

After the hard struggle to obtain a law admitting women to the bar in 1877, a long contest followed to secure their admission to the Hastings College of Law, a branch of the State University, which ended in a favorable decision of the Supreme Court. As a result of these efforts the constitutional convention of 1879 incorporated a provision that "No person shall, on account of sex, be disqualified from entering upon or pursuing any lawful business, vocation or profession." This does not, however, include appointive or elective offices.


 * This same constitution of 1879 provided also that "No person shall be debarred admission to any of the collegiate departments of the State University on account of sex." Most of the smaller colleges are co-educational.

The assertion will hardly be questioned that the gifts of women for educational purposes in all parts of the Union, in all time, do not equal those made by the women of California within the last decade. As a memorial to their son, U. S. Senator and Mrs. Leland Stanford erected the Leland Stanford, Jr., University at Palo Alto in 1890 and endowed it with many millions of dollars. Mr. Stanford's death before it was fully completed threw the estate into litigation for a number of years, the legality of even some portion of the university endowment being in doubt. He left the bulk of his great fortune to his wife, and, after the estate was settled and free from all encumbrances, she reaffirmed the titles of all previous gifts and added the largest part of her Own property. The endowment is now about $30,000,000, all but $4,000,000 of this having been given by Mrs. Jane Lathrop Stanford. This is the largest endowment ever made by any one person for one institution, and places Stanford at the head of the endowed universities of the world. It has been co-educational in all departments from the beginning and the tuition is practically free.

In 1894 Mrs. Miranda Lux of San Francisco left a bequest of $750,000 for a school of manual training for both sexes. In 1898 Miss Cora Jane Flood of San Francisco conveyed to the Univer-