My interest and work are thus divided; justice to the school demands that I consider the good of the whole; that I assign lessons not for one side nor for the other; that I chide or commend without special reference to sex—in short, that I consider all as members of a common society, and plan for them as having common rights and responsibilities. When, therefore, I bring this subject to you, it is that you may look at it from the teacher’s standpoint, that you may consider the colored woman of the future—the colored girl of to-day—in her relations as a part of the social organization of the new South. That the South is new no one who even passes through her great centres can doubt. New railroads are opening up her resources and carrying her trade; the flames of her furnace light up the darkness of many a mountain valley; even her fields are blooming with new abundance under the improved husbandry and greater diligence of her sons. As the morning sunlight strikes the brick walls of factories in view from my window, and nearly all of which have grown up within a few months, I can almost imagine myself in a New England town. Woman’s place in Southern society (I use the term _society_ in its wider sense) has always been quite different from that which she holds in the North. Accustomed to be protected, and taught to consider a limited social life as her only sphere of activity, she was often beautifully womanly, but lacking in self-reliance; having no confidence in her own mental powers, and not considered as being able to plan or execute any important measures. This feeling is, I think, gradually giving way before a more just appreciation of her own power, and as that power is developed, to a change in public sentiment as to her capacity and her duty. It was my privilege to count among my friends a young Southern girl, who not content with the average boarding-school of the South, has already partly finished a thorough course of study in a Northern school with the expressed intention of becoming a teacher at her own home. In an Eastern city during the past summer I found several young ladies who were spending the three hot months at the North, and while there were hard at work on music and other branches of study. They were taking care of themselves, and with eyes aglow with enthusiasm were apparently enjoying their new experience. Such cases, multiplied as they will be, show that a new leaven is working out an ambition on the part of the Southern lady to win her way by an intelligent and self-reliant womanhood, not simply to charm by her helplessness and amiability.