Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 7.pdf/7



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Something like a hundred years ago Maria Edgeworth, with gentle insistence, pleaded for the higher education of women in a quaint book called "Letters to Literary Ladies." She was a pioneer in recognizing the relation to national life of woman to national life; of educated woman to civilization. Charlotte Bronte, some fifty years later, in 1849, wrote a book in which her most lovely character urges that women of the middle class be allowed some variety. "They are only expected," she writes, "to cook and sew all their lives long as if they had no germs or faculties for anything else. Keep your girls' minds narrow and fettered and they will be a care and anxiety. Cultivate them, give them scope and work, they will be your gayest companions in health, your tenderest nurses in sickness, your most faithful prop in age."

These two books urging larger knowledge and freedom, higher education, scope and variety in aim and work, were faint voices dimly heard as they pleaded for what to-day enlightened nations recognize as wise for woman and wise for the race.