100 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



was made for women and its doors are still closed to 

 them. 



"The prevailing notion of the purpose of education," 

 declares Charles Francis Adams, in speaking of Harvard 

 College, "was attended with one remarkable consequence 

 the cultivation of the female mind was regarded with 

 utter indifference; as Mrs. Abigail Adams says in one of 

 her letters, ' it was fashionable to ridicule learning. ' " 1 



It was not until 1865 that Matthew Vassar, "recogniz- 

 ing in women the same intellectual constitution as in man, ' ' 

 founded the first woman's college in the United States. 

 This was soon followed by similar institutions in various 

 parts of this country and Europe. In less than ten years 

 thereafter Girton and Newnham colleges were founded at 

 Cambridge, England, in order that women might be en- 

 abled to enter upon a regular university career. 



In all the universities of England, Scotland and Ireland, 

 except Oxford, Cambridge 2 and Trinity College, Dublin, 



1 The wife of President John Adams, descended from the most 

 illustrious colonial families, writing in 1817, regarding the educa- 

 tional opportunities of the girls of her time and rank, expressed 

 herself as follows: 



"Female education in the best families went no farther than 

 writing and arithmetic, and, in some few and rare instances, music 

 and dancing." According to her grandson, Charles Francis Adams, 

 ' ' The only chance for much intellectual improvement in the female 

 sex was to be found in the families of the educated class, and in 

 occasional intercourse with the learned of the day. Whatever of 

 useful instruction was secured in the practical conduct of life came 

 from maternal lips; and, what of farther mental development de- 

 pended more upon the eagerness with which the casual teachings of 

 daily conversation were treasured up than upon any labor expended 

 purposely to promote it. ' ' Familiar Letters of John Adams and His 

 Wife, Abigail Adams, During the devolution, With a Memoir of Mrs. 

 Adams, by Charles Francis Adams, pp. X and XI, New York, 1876. 



2 When the students of Girton and Newnham in 1897, after pass- 

 ing the Cambridge examinations many of them with the highest 

 honors applied for degrees, "the undergraduate world was stirred 

 to a fine frenzy of wrath against ail womankind/' and an aston- 



