Willard, in setting forth her ideal of woman's education, said: "Education should be adapted to female character and duties. To do this would raise the character of man. . . . Why may not housewifery be reduced to a system as well as the other arts? If women were properly fitted for instruction, they would be likely to teach children better than the other sex; they could afford to do it cheaper; and men might be at liberty to add to the wealth of the nation by any of the thousand occupations from which women are necessarily debarred." Old-fashioned wisdom, but choicely good.
In a woman's club, last winter, a New York teacher. Miss Helen Dawes Brown, a graduate of Vassar College, founder of the Woman's University Club and also one of the founders of Barnard College, in a speech said in part: "The young girl who doesn't dance, who doesn't play games, who can't skate and can't row, is a girl to be pitied. She is losing a large part of what Chesterfield calls the 'joy and titivation of youth.' If our young girl has learned to be good, teach her not to disregard the externals of goodness. Let our girls, in college and out, learn to be agreeable. A girl's education should, first of all, be directed to fitting her for the things of home. We talk of woman as if the only domestic relations were those of wife and mother. Let us not forget that she is also a granddaughter, a daughter, a sister, an aunt. I should like to see her made her best in all these characters, before she undertakes public duties. The best organization in the world is the home. Whatever in the education of girls draws them away from that, is an injury to civilization."
At the close of an article in The Outlook, written by Elizabeth Fisher Read, of Smith College, she said, speaking of their last adaptation of athletics: "From the beginning, the policy of Smith College has been, not to duplicate the means of development offered in men's colleges, but to provide courses and methods of study that should do for women what the men's courses did for them. Emphasis has been put, not on the resemblances between men and women, but rather on the differences. The effort has not been to turn out new women, capable of doing anything man can do, from walking thirty miles to solving the problems of higher mathematics. Instead of this, the college has tried to develop its students along natural womanly lines, not along the lines that would naturally be followed in training men."
This sounds strangely like Mrs. Willard, who would be the first to rejoice in the new education and in the old spirit that it can develop. Of course, suffrage claims to have the same end in view. Every college woman must decide for herself where she will stand on the question. So far, there never has been any open affiliation between the colleges and the suffrage movement.
