PREFACE.✦

These essays, arranged in the order of the dates at which they were written, dating from 1819 to 1892, have no relation to each other but a logical one, and their logic is the logic of events. Professor Maria Mitchell’s article was published in Education, Mrs. Runkle’s in The Century Magazine, Mrs. Palmer’s in The Forum, Professor Salmon’s in The Academy, and the paper on The Private School in HARPER’S MAGAZINE. That so many periodicals offered material so valuable shows how wide-spread is the interest in the training of our girls, and how general and how intelligent is now the demand for the best. The change which has come about in these seventy years needs no emphasis for those who read in these pages the pleading words of Mrs. Willard to the members of the New York Legislature in behalf simply of a girls’ seminary, and then look through the collection to find that two of the articles have been written by women professors in girls’ colleges, and one of them by a woman who was for many years president of a girls’ college. She tells us that at present the women’s colleges of this country reckon more than 50,000 students.

The facts speak for themselves. It is significant that we could find no words to present here written during the period of the Civil War. Then women found their opportunity practically to demonstrate to the world that opportunity was all they needed.

But in all that has been written since there is nothing more subtile than the argument presented by Mrs. Willard in 1819 in behalf of an education “giving strength and expansion to the minds of women,” whom she asserts to be “an essential part of the body politic,” with her warning to the law-makers of America to avoid the example of other republics, where “women have repaid the nations with ruin for their folly” in neglecting them.

A difference of tone in the essays is also exceedingly suggestive: In 1819 Mrs. Willard appeals to the “enlightened politicians” of her time; in 1881 Maria Mitchell writes, “All that women ask for is the enlightenment of our present rulers.”

ANNA C. BRACKETT.

NEW YORK, 1893.

WOMAN AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION.

A PLAN FOR IMPROVING FEMALE EDUCATION.

BY MRS. EMMA WILLARD.

An address to the public, particularly to the members of the Legislature of New York.

The object of this address is to convince the public that a reform with respect to female education is necessary; that it cannot be effected by individual exertion, but that it requires the aid of the Legislature; and, further, by showing the justice, the policy, and the magnanimity of such an undertaking, to persuade that body to endow a seminary for females as the commencement of such reformation.

The idea of a college for males will naturally be associated with that of a seminary, instituted and endowed by the public; and the absurdity of sending ladies to college may, at first thought, strike every one to whom this subject shall be proposed. I therefore hasten to observe that the seminary here recommended will be as different from those appropriated to the other sex as the female character and duties are from the male. The business of the husbandman is not to waste his endeavors in seeking to make his orchard attain the strength and majesty of his forest, but to rear each to the perfection of its nature.

That the improvement of female education will be considered by our enlightened citizens as a subject of importance, the liberality with which they part with their property to educate their daughters is a sufficient evidence; and why should they not, when assembled in the Legislature, act in concert to effect a noble object which, though dear to them individually, cannot be accomplished by their unconnected exertions?

If the improvement of the American female character, and that alone, could be effected by public liberality, employed in giving better means of instruction, such improvement of one-half of society, and that half which barbarous and despotic nations have ever degraded, would of itself be an object worthy of the most liberal government on earth; but if the female character be raised, it must inevitably raise that of the other sex; and thus does the plan proposed offer, as the object of legislative bounty, to elevate the whole character of the community.

As evidence that this statement does not exaggerate the female influence in society, our sex need but to be considered in the single relation of mothers. In this character we have the charge of the whole mass of individuals who are to compose the succeeding generation during that period of youth when the pliant mind takes any direction to which it is steadily guided by a forming hand. How important a power is given by this charge! Yet little do too many of my sex know how either to appreciate or improve it. Unprovided with the means of acquiring that knowledge which flows liberally to the other sex, having our time of education devoted to frivolous acquirements, how should we understand the nature of the mind so as to be aware of the importance of those early impressions which we make upon the minds of our children? Or how should we be able to form enlarged and correct views, either of the character to which we ought to mould them or of the means most proper to form them aright?

Considered in this point of view, were the interests of male education alone to be consulted, that of females becomes of sufficient importance to engage the public attention. Would we rear the human plant to its perfection, we must first fertilize the soil which produces it. If it acquire its first bent and texture upon a barren plain, it will avail comparatively little should it be afterwards transplanted to a garden.

In the arrangement of my remarks I shall pursue the following order:

I. Treat of the defects of the present mode of female education, and their causes.

II. Consider the principles by which education should be regulated.

III. Sketch a plan of a female seminary.

IV. Show the benefits which society would receive from such seminaries.

DEFECTS IN THE PRESENT MODE OF FEMALE EDUCATION, AND THEIR CAUSES.

Civilized nations have long since been convinced that education as it respects males will not, like trade, regulate itself; and hence they have made it a prime object to provide that sex with everything requisite to facilitate their progress in learning; but female education has been left to the mercy of private adventurers; and the consequence has been to our sex the same as it would have been to the other had legislatures left their accommodations and means of instruction to chance also.

Education cannot prosper in any community unless, from the ordinary motives which actuate the human mind, the best and most cultivated talents of that community can be brought into exercise in that way. Male education flourishes because, from the guardian care of legislatures, the presidencies and professorships of our colleges are some of the highest objects to which the eye of ambition is directed. Not so with female institutions. Preceptresses of these are dependent on their pupils for support, and are consequently liable to become the victims of their caprice. In such a situation it is not more desirable to be a preceptress than it would be to be a parent invested with the care of children and responsible for their behavior, and yet depending on them for subsistence, and destitute of power to enforce their obedience.

Feminine delicacy requires that girls should be educated chiefly by their own sex. This is apparent from considerations that regard their health and conveniences, the propriety of their dress and manners, and their domestic accomplishments.

Boarding-schools, therefore, whatever may be their defects, furnish the best mode of education provided for females.

Concerning these schools it may be observed:

1. They are temporary institutions, formed by individuals whose object is present emolument. But they cannot be expected to be greatly lucrative; therefore, the individuals who establish them cannot afford to provide suitable accommodations as to room. At night the pupils are frequently crowded in their lodging-rooms, and during the day they are generally placed together in one apartment, where there is a heterogeneous mixture of different kinds of business, accompanied with so much noise and confusion as greatly to impede their progress in study.

2. As individuals cannot afford to provide suitable accommodations as to room, so neither can they afford libraries and other apparatus necessary to teach properly the various branches in which they pretend to instruct.

3. Neither can the individuals who establish these schools afford to provide suitable instruction. It not unfrequently happens that one instructress teaches, at the same time and in the same room, ten or twelve distinct branches. If assistants are provided, such are usually taken as can be procured for a small compensation. True, in our large cities preceptresses provide their pupils with masters, though at an expense which few can afford; yet none of these masters are responsible for the general proficiency or demeanor of the pupils. Their only responsibility is in the particular branch which they teach, and to a preceptress who probably does not understand it herself, and who is therefore incapable of judging whether or not it is well taught.