CHAPTER Xin 

 THE RADCLIFFE TRADITION 



We love to personify our colleges. Harvard is to me as truly human as 

 the men and women that I meet from day to day; a human being of 

 heroic mould, 



"A daughter of the gods, divinely tall, 

 And most divinely fair." 



Radcliffe College is human too; and when we think of her we see what 

 better could we see! that gracious lady who has lived and loved and 

 worked for Radcliffe College from the beginning, of whom the old poet 

 might have thought in prophecy when he wrote, 



"No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace 

 As I have seen in one autumnal face," 



who is herself an Alma Mater, an Alma Mater[in whose "through-shine" 

 face, as the same old poet might have said, rests all that is sweet and true. 

 LEBARON RUSSELL BRIGGS (June, 1904) 



WE have seen what Radcliffe College owes to Mrs. 

 Agassiz in its organization and externals; in its 

 traditions the debt is still greater. Its traditional ideals are 

 those that she expressed first of all in herself. She rarely 

 put them into words except in her public addresses. Selec- 

 tions from some of these have appeared in the preceding 

 chapters, but others are added here which set forth more 

 fully her convictions in regard to the education of women. 



COMMENCEMENT ADDRESS, JUNE 23, 1896 



... I THINK sometimes that in the discussions concern- 

 ing women's higher education which stir the air in 

 these latter days, we hear and talk too much of the 

 claims of women, too little of the responsibilities in- 

 volved therein. We are making a claim; do we always 



