s in the
schools. I can think of nothing else that would conduce so much to the
thorough and satisfactory study of music as to give it an optional place
in our school curriculums.

Doubtless the best plan would be to give girls a moderate amount of home
work along with their school-work--that is, to develop a united domestic
and intellectual taste. With the habit once formed of making this
combination of pursuits, we should be much surer of their continuing
their intellectual cultivation through life. If this could be done, they
ought, as a rule, to be able to do more than men do in the last fifteen
or twenty years of their lives.

The results of our experiments in co-education have so far indicated
that there is no difference between the intellectual tastes of men and
women. This I do not accept as final. The prevailing sentiment in
society, that girls cannot do all that boys do, and that they are a
little in discredit because they cannot, has given them an undue
stimulus to prove their power by experiment; and it is well that they
have done it, to silence the doubts. Moreover, the women who were
looking forward to the higher places of intellectual industry occupied
by men, had to test themselves by the standards established for their
rivals. And the same may be said of all the money-getting pursuits for
women, outside of the lines of domestic service and sewing; in order to
get any ground, they have had to fall into men's ways, so that their
work could be tested by men's standards. To prove that they were the
equals of men, they have had to prove that they were the equals of both
women and men; they have had to learn and to be all that other women
know and are, and, in addition, to equal men in the points where men
surpass women; while their masculine rivals are exempt from all the
demands for time and thought bestowed upon the specialties of women.

When women can gain authority for their own standards--the right to work
in a woman's way, tested only by the quantity and quality of their
results, that is, by the value of their work to society--money-earning
women will not break down in health any more than money-earning men do,
nor will the total of their work appear smaller than the total of men's
work. There is no intrinsic reason why women's work, done in women's
way, should have less commercial value and creditable recognition than
men's work, done in men's way. Poems are in as good repute and sell as
well as b