The progress of society depends upon getting out of men and women an increasing amount of the powers with which they are born and which bad surroundings at the start blunt or stupefy.  This is what all systems of education try to do, but the result of all systems of education depends upon the material that comes to the educator.  Opening the mind of the child, that is the delicate task the state asks of the mother, and the quality of the future state depends upon the way she discharges this part of her business.

I think it is historically correct to say that the reason of the sudden and revolutionary change in the education of American women, which began with the nineteenth century and continued through it, was the realization that if we were to make real democrats, we must begin with the child, and if we began with the child, we must begin with the mother!

Everybody saw that unless the child learned by example and precept the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he was going to remain what by nature we all are,—­imperious, demanding, and self-seeking.  The whole scheme must fail if his education failed.  It is not too much to say that the success of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution depended, in the minds of certain early Democrats, upon the woman.  The doctrines of these great instruments would be worked out according to the way she played her part.  Her serious responsibility came in the fact that her work was one that nobody could take off her hands.  This responsibility required a preparation entirely different from that which had been hers.  She must be given education and liberty.  The woman saw this, and the story of her efforts to secure both, that she might meet the requirements, is one of the noblest in history.  There was no doubt, then, as to the value of the tasks, no question as to their being worthy national obligations.  It was a question of fitting herself for them.

But what has happened?  In the process of preparing herself to discharge more adequately her task as a woman in a republic, her respect for the task has been weakened.  In this process, which we call emancipation, she has in a sense lost sight of the purposes of emancipation.  Interested in acquiring new tools, she has come to believe the tools more important than the thing for which she was to use them.  She has found out that with education and freedom, pursuits of all sorts are open to her, and by following these pursuits she can preserve her personal liberty, avoid the grave responsibility, the almost inevitable sorrows and anxieties, which belong to family life.  She can choose her friends and change them.  She can travel, and gratify her tastes, satisfy her personal ambitions.  The snare has been too great; the beauty and joy of free individual life have dulled the sober sense of national obligation.  The result is that she is frequently failing to discharge satisfactorily some of the most imperative demands the nation makes upon her.