Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/238

228 I may claim to have been beside the cradle of Vassar College; for when Dr. Jewett resigned the presidency in 1864, my father named the successor, who was appointed, Dr. John H. Raymond, his lifelong friend. Dr. Raymond came to Rochester to discuss a plan of work, and, knowing my father's interest, I was on tiptoe to hear about the new college. At my earnest solicitation he and Dr. Raymond and President Anderson permitted me to be present at their discussions. I learned to comprehend the value of womanliness to the world by the estimate that those noble educators put upon it. It was evident that they were arranging for those for whose minds they felt respect. They made no foolish remarks about the superiority, inferiority, or equality of the sexes, and had no contempt to throw upon the old education of tutor and library and young ladies' seminary. They did not sneer at the "female mind," but they did talk of the feminine mind as of something as distinct in its essence from the masculine mind as the feminine form is distinct in its outlines. To "preserve womanliness" was a task they felt they must fulfill, or the women for whose good they labored would one day call them to account. The dictum so frequently in the mouths of suffrage leaders, "There is no sex in brain," would have been abhorrent to them. In their view, there was as much sex in brain as in hand; and the education that did not, through cultivation, emphasize that fact, would be a lower and not a higher product. They laid that intellectual corner stone in love, and in the faith that the same womanly spirit which, when there was not college education enough to go round, had said, "Give it to the boys, because their work must be public," would find, through the glad return the boys were making, a way to teach the world still higher lessons of womanly character and influence. Since that time college after college has arisen without a dream on the part of the founders, faculties, or students that "every effort to educate woman, until you accord to her the right to vote, is futile and a waste of labor," and it may well be that the women educated in these colleges will decide that, because political rights do acknowledge sex, therefore the word "male" should not be stricken from any State Constitution.

Before the committee of the New York State Constitutional Convention in 1894, Mr. Edward Lauterbach, who was arguing in favor of woman suffrage, said: "It was only after the establishment of the Willard School at Troy, only after its noble founder, believing that women and men were formed in the same mold, successfully tried the experiment of educating women in the higher branches, that steps for higher education became generally taken." If Mr. Lauterbach imagines that Mrs. Willard was in the most distant way an advocate of woman's doing the same work as man in the same way, he is unfamiliar with her life and work. Mrs.