PREFACE.
Reading edition
These essays, arranged in the order of the dates at which they were written, dating from 1819 to 1892, have no relation to each other but a logical one, and their logic is the logic of events. Professor Maria Mitchell’s article was published in Education, Mrs. Runkle’s in The Century Magazine, Mrs. Palmer’s in The Forum, Professor Salmon’s in The Academy, and the paper on The Private School in Harper’s Magazine. That so many periodicals offered material so valuable shows how wide-spread is the interest in the training of our girls, and how general and how intelligent is now the demand for the best. The change which has come about in these seventy years needs no emphasis for those who read in these pages the pleading words of Mrs. Willard to the members of the New York Legislature in behalf simply of a girls’ seminary, and then look through the collection to find that two of the articles have been written by women professors in girls’ colleges, and one of them by a woman who was for many years president of a girls’ college. She tells us that at present the women’s colleges of this country reckon more than 50,000 students.
The facts speak for themselves. It is significant that we could find no words to present here written during the period of the Civil War. Then women found their opportunity practically to demonstrate to the world that opportunity was all they needed.
But in all that has been written since there is nothing more subtile than the argument presented by Mrs. Willard in 1819 in behalf of an education “giving strength and expansion to the minds of women,” whom she asserts to be “an essential part of the body politic,” with her warning to the law-makers of America to avoid the example of other republics, where “women have repaid the nations with ruin for their folly” in neglecting them.
A difference of tone in the essays is also exceedingly suggestive: In 1819 Mrs. Willard appeals to the “enlightened politicians” of her time; in 1881 Maria Mitchell writes, “All that women ask for is the enlightenment of our present rulers.”
Anna C. Brackett.
New York, 1893.