2 28 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 tip- 

 toe 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 edu- 

 cators 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 establish- 

 ment of the Willard School at Troy, only after its noble founder, 

 believing that women and men were formed in the same mold, suc- 

 cessfully 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. 



