true when tackling the problems more immediately affecting women, because these are the truly difficult problems.  Whatever touches man’s side of life alone is comparatively simple and easily understood, and therefore easier of solution.  So in the rough and ready, often cruel, solutions which nature and humanity have worked out for social problems, it has always been the man whose livelihood, whose education and whose training have been first considered, and whose claims have been first satisfied.  For this there are several reasons.  Man’s possession of material wealth, and his consequent monopoly of social and political power have naturally resulted in his attending to his own interests first.  The argument, too, that man was the breadwinner and the protector of the home against all outside antagonistic influences, which in the past he has generally been, furnished another reason why, when any class attained to fresh social privileges, it was the boy and the man of that class, rather than the woman and the girl, who benefited by them first.  The woman and the girl would come in a poor second, if indeed they were in at the dividing of the spoils at all.

There is, however, another reason, and one of profound significance, which I believe has hardly been touched upon at all, why woman has been thus constantly relegated to the inferior position.  Her problems are, as I said above, far more difficult of settlement.  Because of her double function as a member of her own generation and as the potential mother of the next generation, it is impossible to regard her life as something simple and single, and think out plans for its arrangement, as we do with man’s.  So in large measure we have only been following the line of least resistance, in taking up men’s difficulties first.  We have done so quite naturally, because they are not so overwhelmingly hard to deal with, and have attacked woman’s problems, and striven to satisfy her needs, only when we could find time to get round to them.  This is most strikingly exemplified in the realm of education.  Take the United States alone.  It was ever to the boy that increasing educational advantages were first offered.

In the year 1639 the authorities of the town of Dorchester, Massachusetts, hesitated as to whether girls should be admitted to the apparently just established school.  The decision was left “to the discretion of the elders and seven men.”  The girls lost.  In “Child Life in Colonial Days” Mrs. Annie Grant is quoted.  She spent her girlhood in Albany, N.Y., sometime during the first half of the eighteenth century.  She says it was very difficult at that time to procure the means of instruction in those districts.  The girls learned needlework from their mothers and aunts; they learnt to read the Bible and religious tracts in Dutch; few were taught writing.  Similar accounts come from Virginia.

Was it university education that was in question, how many university-trained men had not American colleges turned out before Lucy Stone was able to obtain admission to Oberlin?