an who sees it knows she has need of all the
education the college can give, all the experience and culture she can
gather. She knows that the fuller her individual life, the broader her
interests, the better for the child. She should be a person in his
eyes. The real service of the "higher education," the freedom to take
a part in whatever interests or stimulates her--lies in the fact that
it fits her intellectually to be a companion worthy of a child. She
should know that unless she does this thing for him he goes forth with
his mind still in swaddling clothes, with the chances that it will not
be released until relentless life tears off the bands.

The progress of society depends upon getting out of men and women an
increasing amount of the powers with which they are born and which bad
surroundings at the start blunt or stupefy. This is what all systems
of education try to do, but the result of all systems of education
depends upon the material that comes to the educator. Opening the mind
of the child, that is the delicate task the state asks of the mother,
and the quality of the future state depends upon the way she
discharges this part of her business.

I think it is historically correct to say that the reason of the
sudden and revolutionary change in the education of American women,
which began with the nineteenth century and continued through it, was
the realization that if we were to make real democrats, we must begin
with the child, and if we began with the child, we must begin with the
mother!

Everybody saw that unless the child learned by example and precept the
great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, he was going to
remain what by nature we all are,--imperious, demanding, and
self-seeking. The whole scheme must fail if his education failed. It
is not too much to say that the success of the Declaration of
Independence and the Constitution depended, in the minds of certain
early Democrats, upon the woman. The doctrines of these great
instruments would be worked out according to the way she played her
part. Her serious responsibility came in the fact that her work was
one that nobody could take off her hands. This responsibility required
a preparation entirely different from that which had been hers. She
must be given education and liberty. The woman saw this, and the story
of her efforts to secure both, that she might meet the requirements,
is one of the noblest in history. There was no doub