WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND EDUCATION. 229 



Willard, in setting forth her ideal of woman's education, said : 

 "Education should be adapted to female character and duties. 

 To do this would raise the character of man. .... Why may not 

 housewifery be reduced to a system as well as the other arts ? If 

 women were properly fitted for instruction, they would be likely 

 to teach children better than the other sex ; they could afford to 

 do it cheaper ; and men might be at liberty to add to the wealth 

 of the nation by any of the thousand occupations from which 

 women are necessarily debarred." Old-fashioned wisdom, but 

 choicely good. 



In a woman's club, last winter, a New York teacher, Miss 

 Helen Dawes Brown, a graduate of Vassar College, founder of 

 the Woman's University Club and also one of the founders of 

 Barnard College, in a speech said in part : " The young girl who 

 doesn't dance, who doesn't play games, who can't skate and can't 

 row, is a girl to be pitied. She is losing a large part of what 

 Chesterfield calls the ' joy and titivation of youth.' If our young 

 girl has learned to be good, teach her not to disregard the exter- 

 nals of goodness. Let our girls, in college and out, learn to be 

 agreeable. A girl's education should, first of all, be directed to 

 fitting her for the things of home. We talk of woman as if the 

 only domestic relations were those of wife and mother. Let us 

 not forget that she is also a granddaughter, a daughter, a sister, 

 an aunt. I should like to see her made her best in all these char- 

 acters, before she undertakes public duties. The best organiza- 

 tion in the world is the home. Whatever in the education of 

 girls draws them away from that, is an injury to civilization." 



At the close of an article in The Outlook, written by Eliza- 

 beth Fisher Read, of Smith College, she said, speaking of their 

 last adaptation of athletics : " From the beginning, the policy of 

 Smith College has been, not to duplicate the means of develop- 

 ment offered in men's colleges, but to provide courses and meth- 

 ods of study that should do for women what the men's courses did 

 for them. Emphasis has been put, not on the resemblances be- 

 tween men and women, but rather on the differences. The effort 

 has not been to turn out new women, capable of doing anything 

 man can do, from walking thirty miles to solving the problems of 

 higher mathematics. Instead of this, the college has tried to 

 develop its students along natural womanly lines, not along the 

 lines that would naturally be followed in training men." 



This sounds strangely like Mrs. Willard, who would be the first 

 to rejoice in the new education and in the old spirit that it can 

 develop. Of course, suffrage claims to have the same end in view. 

 Every college woman must decide for herself where she will stand 

 on the question. So far, there never has been any open affiliation 

 between the colleges and the suffrage movement. 



