ew York, invited her to that State
and procured her a government subsidy. Her school was established first
at Watervliet, but soon moved to Troy. This seminary was the first
girls' school in which the higher mathematics formed a part of the
course; and the first public examination of a girl in geometry, in 1829,
raised a storm of ridicule and indignation--the clergy, as usual,
prophesying the speedy dissolution of all family bonds and therefore, as
they continued with remorseless logic, of the state itself. But Mrs.
Willard continued her ways in spite of clerical disapproval and
by-and-by projected a system of normal schools for the higher education
of teachers, and even suggested women as superintendents of public
schools. New York survived and does not even remember the names of the
patriots who fought a lonely woman so valiantly.

The first female seminary to approach college rank was Mt. Holyoke,
which was opened by Mary Lyon at South Hadley, Mass., in 1836. Vassar,
the next, dates from 1865; and Radcliffe, the much-abused "Harvard
Annex," was instituted in 1879. These were the first colleges
exclusively for women. Oberlin College had from its foundation, in 1833,
admitted men and women on equal terms; although it took pains to express
its hearty disapproval of those women who, after graduation, had the
temerity to advocate political rights for women--rights which that same
Oberlin insisted should be given the negro at once. In 1858, when Sarah
Burger and other women applied for admission to the University of
Michigan, their request was refused.

[Sidenote: First women in medicine.]

It was hard enough for women to assert their rights to a higher
education; to enter a profession was almost impossible. Nevertheless,
it was done. The pioneer in medicine was Harriet K. Hunt who practised
in Boston from 1822 to 1872 without a diploma; but in 1853 the Woman's
Medical College of Pennsylvania conferred upon her the degree of Doctor
of Medicine. The first woman to receive a diploma from a college after
completing the regular course was Elizabeth Blackwell, who attained that
distinction at Geneva, New York, in 1848. The first adequate woman's
medical institution was Miss Blackwell's New York Infirmary, chartered
in 1854. In 1863, Dr. Zakrzewska, in co-operation with Lucy Goddard and
Ednah D. Cheney, established the New England Hospital for Women and
Children, which aimed to provide women the medical aid of competent
physi