home received but scant culture from the village pedagogue, or none at all, spending their time, instead, bending over the wash-tub or the sewing-machine, striving by their industry to add to the comforts or to the advantages of the idolized brother in school. Gray-haired mothers, from whose youth every ray of learning was rigorously excluded, have suffered untold toil and privation in the effort to give to their children the blessings of an education. All honor to them, and to the patient, self-sacrificing wives who have struggled under the burden of the family maintenance, while the husband pursued the course in school from which he was debarred in earlier life, and which was essential to his usefulness and success in his chosen calling.
Everywhere the Afro-American woman is educated and is unopposed by any prejudice against the exercise of her talents, by reason of lack of leisure and freedom from household cares, in most cases she is hindered in mental effort and in the production of any work which might take definite shape before the world.
In view of all these facts it is surprising that we have as many women among us who have, to so considerable an extent, worked out their own salvation and that of the race. Let us not use extravagant words of commendation, lest we have left no fit terms of praise for the woman of our future who is so hopefully prophesied by the achievements of her progenitors, toiling to-day amid varied disavantages; but let us chronicle their deeds in fitting phrase that those who come after may 1)0 inspired by the record of what has been wrought to
