Note 1 — Front matter

That their admission was due in large part to the stress of circumstances is shown by the fact that in the very states in which these coeducational schools had been established there was manifested on other occasions a most illiberal attitude toward girls’ education. In the few cities of the Atlantic seaboard, where European conservatism was too strong to allow girls to be taught with boys in the new high schools, and where there were boys enough to fill the schools, girls had to wait much longer before their needs were provided for at all, and then most inadequately. In Boston, where the boys’ and girls’ high schools were separated, it was impossible until 1878 for a Boston girl to be prepared for college in a city high school, whereas, in the country towns of Massachusetts, where boys and girls were taught together in the high schools, the girl had had the same opportunities as the boy for twenty-five or thirty years. Indeed, it was not until 1852 that Boston girls obtained, and then only in connection with the normal school, a public high-school education of any kind whatsoever. In Philadelphia, where boys and girls are taught separately in the high schools, no girl could be prepared for college before 1893, neither Latin, French, nor German being taught in the girls’ high school, whereas, for many years the boys’ high school had prepared boys for college. In Baltimore the two girls’ high schools are still, in 1900, unable to prepare girls for college, whereas the boys’ high school has for years prepared boys to enter the Johns Hopkins university. The impossibility of preparing girls for college is only another way of stating that the instruction given is very imperfect.