a way to satisfy their thirst.

To come down to the period which concerns us chiefly, that of our own
Republic, it is an utter misrepresentation of the women of the
Revolution to claim that they were uneducated. All things considered,
they were quite as well educated as the men. The actual achievements
of the eminent women produced by the system of training then in vogue
is proof enough of the statement. Far and away the best letters by a
woman, which have found their way into print in this country, are
those of Mrs. John Adams, written late in the eighteenth century and
early in the nineteenth. They deserve the permanent place in our
literature which they have. But it was a period of good letter writing
by women--if weak spelling and feminine spelling was, on the whole,
quite as strong as masculine!

Out of that early system of education came the woman who was to write
the book which did more to stir the country against slavery than all
that ever had been written, Harriet Beecher Stowe. That system
produced the scientist, who still represents American women in the
mind of the world, Maria Mitchell, the only American woman whose name
appears among the names of the world's great scholars inscribed on the
Boston Public Library. It produced Dorothea Dix, who for twenty years
before the Civil War carried on perhaps the most remarkable
investigation of conditions that has ever been made in this country by
man or woman,--the one which required the most courage, endurance, and
persistency,--her investigation of the then barbaric system for
caring--or not caring--for the insane. State after state enacted new
laws and instituted new methods solely on the showing of this one
woman. If there were no other case to offer to the frequent cry that
women have never had an influence on legislation, this would be
enough. Moreover, this is but the most brilliant example of the kind
of work women had been doing from the beginning of the Republic.

To my mind there is no phase of their activities which reveals better
the genuineness of their training than the initiative they took in
founding schools of advanced grades for girls, and in organizing
primary and secondary schools on something like a national scale. Mary
Lyon's work for Mt. Holyoke College and Catherine Beecher's for the
American Woman's Education Association are the most substantial
individual achievements, though they are but types of what many women
were doing and what wom