If any difference is to be made in the education of boys and girls, it must be with the purpose of giving to future women more that is “unvocational,” “unapplied,” “unpractical.”  As it happens, such studies as these are the ones which the mother of a family, as well as a teacher or writer, is most sure to apply practically in her vocation.  The last word on this aspect of the subject was said by a woman in a small Maine town.  Her father had been a day laborer, her husband was a mechanic.  She had five children, and, of course, did all the house-work.  She also belonged to a club which studied French history.  To a foolish expression of surprise that with all her little children she could find time to write a paper on Louis XVI she retorted angrily:  “With all my children!  It is for my children that I do it.  I do not mean that they shall have to go out of their home, as I have had to, for everything interesting.”  But the larger truth is that the value of a woman as a mother depends precisely upon her value as a human being.  And it is for that reason that in her youth we must lead one who is truly thirsty only to fountains pouring from the heaven’s brink.  It might seem cruel if it did not merely illustrate the law of risk involved in any creative process, that the more generously women fulfil the “function of their sex” the more they are in danger of losing their souls to furnish a mess of pottage.  The risk of life for life at a child’s birth is more dramatic but no truer than the risk of soul for body as the child grows.  In the midst of petty household cares the nervous system may become a master instead of a servant, a breeder of distempers rather than a feeder of the imagination.  The unhappiness of homes, the failure of marriage, are due as often to the poverty-stricken minds, the narrowed vision of women as to the vice of men.

  Their sense is with their senses all mix’d in,
  Destroyed by subtleties these women are.

George Meredith’s prayer for us, “more brain, O Lord, more brain!” we shall still need when “votes for women” has become an outworn slogan.

No one claims that character is produced only by college training or any other form of education.  There are illiterate women whose wills are so steady, whose hearts are so generous, and whose spirits seem to be so continuously refreshed that we look up to them with reverence.  They have their own fountains.  It would be a mistake to suppose that because they are “open at the outlet” they are “closed at the reservoir.”  But there is a class of women who are impelled toward knowledge (as still others are impelled toward music or art) and whose success in anything they do will depend upon their state of mind.  We ought to assume that the girls who go to college belong to this class, however far from the springs of Helicon they mean to march in the future.  It is a terrible thing that we should think of taking one hour of their time while they are