Harvard was opened in 1636.  Two hundred years elapsed before there was any institution offering corresponding advantages to girls.  Oberlin granted its first degree to a woman in 1838.  Mount Holyoke was founded in 1837, Elmira in 1855 and Vassar in 1865.

That a perfectly honest element of confusion and puzzle did enter into the thought of parents and the views of the community, it would be vain to deny.  These young women were incomprehensible.  Why were they not content with the education their mothers had had, and with the lives their mothers had led before them?  Why did they want to leave comfortable homes, and face the unknown, the hard, perhaps the dangerous?  How inexplicable, how undutiful!  Ah!  It was the young people who were seeing furthest into the future; it was the fathers and mothers who were not recognizing the change that was coming over the world of their day.

If then, for the combination of reasons outlined, women have always lagged in the rear as increasing educational advantages of a literary or professional character have been provided or procured for boys, it is not strange, when, in reading over the records of work on the new lines of industrial education, trade-training and apprenticeship we detect the very same influences at work, sigh before the same difficulties, and recognize the old weary, threadbare arguments, too, which one would surely think had been sufficiently disproved before to be at least distrusted in this connection.  This, however, must surely be the very last stand of the non-progressivists in education as regards the worker.  The ideals of today aim at education on lines that will enable every child, boy and girl alike, born in or brought into any civilized country, to develop all faculties, and that will simultaneously enable the community to benefit from this complete, all-round development of every one of its members.

There is one consideration to which I must call attention, because, when recognized, it cannot but serve as the utmost stimulus to our efforts to arrange for vocational education for girls on the broadest lines.  It is this.  Whatever general, national or state plans prove the most complete and satisfactory for girls, will, speaking generally, at the same time be found to have solved the problem for the boy as well.  The double aim, of equipping the girl to be a mother as well as human being, is so all-inclusive and is therefore so much more difficult of accomplishment, that the simpler training necessary for a boy’s career will be automatically provided for at the same time.  Therefore the boy is not likely to be at a disadvantage under such a coeducational system as is here implied.  For it is to nothing short of coeducation that the organized women of the United States are looking forward, coeducation on lines adapted to present-day wants.  What further contributions the far-off future may hold for us in the never wholly to be explored realm of human education in its largest acceptance, we know not.  Until we have learned the lesson of today, and have set about putting it in practice, such glimpses of the future are not vouchsafed to us.