grudgingly yielded, and dubiously watched,--
while, if the same thing is done for men, its desirableness is assumed as a
matter of course, and the thing is done? Thus, when Harvard College was
founded, it was not regarded as an experiment, but as an institution. The
"General Court," in 1636, "agreed to give 400 _l_. towards a schoale or
colledge," and the affair was settled. Every subsequent step in the
expanding of educational opportunities for young men has gone in the same
way. But when there seems a chance of extending, however irregularly, some
of the same collegiate advantages to women, I observe that respectable
newspapers, in all good faith, are apt to speak of the measure as an
"experiment."

It seems to me no more of an "experiment" than when a boy who has usually
eaten up his whole apple becomes a little touched with a sense of justice,
and finally decides to offer his sister the smaller half. If he has ever
regarded that offer as an experiment, the first actual trial will put the
result into the list of certainties; and it will become an axiom in his
mind that girls like apples. Whatever may be said about the position of
women in law and society, it is clear that their educational disadvantages
have been a prolonged disgrace to the other sex, and one for which women
themselves are in no way accountable. When Francoise de Saintonges, in the
sixteenth century, wished to establish girls' schools in France, she was
hooted in the streets, and her father called together four doctors of law
to decide whether she was possessed of a devil in planning to teach
women,--"_pour s'assurer qu'instruire des femmes n'etait pas un oeuvre du
demon_." From that day to this we have seen women almost always more ready
to be taught than was any one else to teach them. Talk as you please about
their wishing or not wishing to vote: they have certainly wished for
instruction, and have had it doled out to them almost as grudgingly as if
it were the ballot itself.

Consider the educational history of Massachusetts, for instance. The wife
of President John Adams was born in 1744; and she says of her youth that
"female education, in the best families, went no farther than writing and
arithmetic." Barry tells us in his "History of Massachusetts," that the
public education was first provided for boys only; "but light soon broke
in, and girls were allowed to attend the public schools two hours a
day."[1] It appears from President Quincy's "