All
these conditions, so far, have been of androcentric character; but
what we call education as a special social process is what the child is
deliberately taught and subjected to; and it is here we may see the same
dominant influence so clearly.

This conscious education was, for long, given to boys alone, the girls
being left to maternal influence, each to learn what her mother knew,
and no more. This very clear instance of the masculine theory is glaring
enough by itself to rest a case on. It shows how absolute was the
assumption that the world was composed of men, and men alone were to be
fitted for it. Women were no part of the world, and needed no training
for its uses. As females they were born and not made; as human beings
they were only servants, trained as such by their servant mothers.

This system of education we are outgrowing more swiftly with each year.
The growing humanness of women, and its recognition, is forcing an equal
education for boy and girl. When this demand was first made, by women
of unusual calibre, and by men sufficiently human to overlook
sex-prejudice, how was it met? What was the attitude of woman's "natural
protector" when she began to ask some share in human life?

Under the universal assumption that men alone were humanity, that the
world was masculine and for men only, the efforts of the women were met
as a deliberate attempt to "unsex" themselves and become men. To be a
woman was to be ignorant, uneducated; to be wise, educated, was to be a
man. Women were not men, visibly; therefore they could not be educated,
and ought not to want to be.

Under this androcentric prejudice, the equal extension of education to
women was opposed at every step, and is still opposed by many. Seeing in
women only sex, and not humanness, they would confine her exclusively
to feminine interests. This is the masculine view, _par excellence_.
In spite of it, the human development of women, which so splendidly
characterizes our age, has gone on; and now both woman's colleges and
those for both sexes offer "the higher education" to our girls, as well
as the lower grades in school and kindergarten.

In the special professional training, the same opposition was
experienced, even more rancorous and cruel. One would think that on the
entrance of a few straggling and necessarily inferior feminine beginners
into a trade or profession, those in possession would extend to them the
right hand of fellowship, as c