Consider the educational history of Massachusetts, for instance.  The wife of President John Adams was born in 1744; and she says of her youth that “female education, in the best families, went no farther than writing and arithmetic.”  Barry tells us in his “History of Massachusetts,” that the public education was first provided for boys only; “but light soon broke in, and girls were allowed to attend the public schools two hours a day."[1] It appears from President Quincy’s “Municipal History of Boston,"[2] that from 1790 girls were there admitted to such schools, but during the summer months only, when there were not boys enough to fill them,—­from April 20 to October 20 of each year.  This lasted until 1822, when Boston became a city.  Four years after, an attempt was made to establish a high school for girls, which was not, however, to teach Latin and Greek.  It had, in the words of the school committee of 1854, “an alarming success;” and the school was abolished after eighteen months’ trial, because the girls crowded into it; and as Mr. Quincy, with exquisite simplicity, records, “not one voluntarily quitted it, and there was no reason to suppose that any one admitted to the school would voluntarily quit for the whole three years, except in case of marriage!”

How amusing seems it now to read of such an “experiment” as this, abandoned only because of its overwhelming success!  How absurd now seem the discussions of a few years ago!—­the doubts whether young women really desired higher education, whether they were capable of it, whether their health would bear it, whether their parents would permit it.  An address I gave before the Social Science Association on this subject, at Boston, May 14, 1873, now seems to me such a collection of platitudes that I hardly see how I dared come before an intelligent audience with such needless reasonings.  It is as if I had soberly labored to prove that two and two make four, or that ginger is “hot i’ the mouth.”  Yet the subsequent discussion in that meeting showed that around even these harmless and commonplace propositions the battle of debate could rage hot; and it really seemed as if even to teach women the alphabet ought still to be mentioned as “a promising experiment.”  Now, with the successes before us of so many colleges; with the spectacle at Cambridge of young women actually reading Plato “at sight” with Professor Goodwin,—­it surely seems as if the higher education of women might be considered quite beyond the stage of experiment, and might henceforth be provided for in the same common-sense and matter-of-course way which we provide for the education of young men.

And, if this point is already reached in education, how long before it will also be reached in political life, and women’s voting be viewed as a matter of course, and a thing no longer experimental?

[Footnote 1:  Vol. iii. 323.]

[Footnote 2:  Page 21.]

INTELLECTUAL CINDERELLAS