experiential apprenticeship of the family, since they were not counted
as citizens. Even the ancient education of boys was in comparison
formal and definite, having at its core the group loyalties which
united them in patriotic devotion to "the collectivity that owned them
all." When, again, the peaceful industries which women had started in
their primitive Jack-at-all-trades economic service to the family and
clan life needed organization into separate callings of agriculture
manufacture and commerce, and primitive means of transportation had to
be perfected for interchange of products between nation and nation,
women were again left out of control of the processes which man's
organizing genius set in motion. Hence, neither political nor
industrial changes in the social order gave to popular thought any
conception of the need for sending girls to school. In point of fact,
as we need often to be reminded, the fine talk about an educated
common people referred for the most part to boys alone until near the
middle of the nineteenth century. All that women needed to know it was
believed "came by nature." Much of it did come by imitation and
unconscious absorption, aided by the occasional better training of
exceptionally able and fortunate women; but the general illiteracy of
women was both a personal handicap and a social poverty. It is not
true, however, as some have said, that women have been "left out of
the human race" and have had to "break in" to man's more highly
organized life in order to taste civilization. Men and women have
stood too close in affection, girls too often "took after their
fathers," the family, even under the despotic rule of men, bound all
other social institutions to itself too vitally for the sexes to be
wholly separated in thought and activity. Even when most women had to
make a cross instead of signing their names on official documents and
could not have passed the fourth-grade examinations of a modern
school, they often became truly cultured and by reason of the very
demands of family and group life upon them. The reason most women were
denied formal school training so long after such denial became
actively injurious to the family and group life was because the
popular conviction still held that the most useful service which women
could render the state did not require, would even find inimical to
its best exercise, the kind of schooling which had been developed to
fit boys for "a man's part