“The personal facts are these: On June 16th I delivered a Commencement address at a girls’ college in Boston, taking for my subject the common objections to the higher education of women, objections generally rather felt than formulated by hesitating mothers. Five were mentioned: the danger to health, to manners, to marriage, to religion, and to companionship with parents in the home. These I described from the parents’ point of view, and then pointed out the misconceptions on which I believed them to rest. In speaking of manners, I said that a mother often fears that attention to study may make her daughter awkward, keep her unfamiliar with the general world, and leave her unfit for mixed society. To which I replied that in the rare cases where intellectual interests do for a time overshadow the social, we may well bear in mind the relative difficulties of subsequent repair. A girl who has had only social interests before twenty-one does not usually gain intellectual ones afterwards; while the ways of the world are rapidly acquired by any young woman of brains. To illustrate, I told of a strong student of Radcliffe who had lived much withdrawn during her course there, alarming her uncollegiate parents by her slender interest in social functions. At graduation they pressed her to devote a year to balls and dinners and to what they regarded as the occult art of manners. She came to me for counsel, and I advised her to accede to their wishes. ‘Flirt hard, M.,’ said I, ‘and show that a college girl is equal to whatever is required of her.’ This was the only allusion to the naughty topic which my speech, an hour in length, contained. “That evening one of the ‘yellowest’ of the Boston papers printed a report of my ‘Address on Flirtation,’ and the next day a reporter came from the same paper requesting an interview. The interview I refused, saying that I had given no such address and I wished my name kept altogether out of print. The following Sunday, however, the bubble was fully blown, the paper printing a column of pretended interview, generously adorned with headlines and quotation marks, setting forth in gay colors my ‘advocacy of flirtation.’