The movement for the education of women of this time would have been quite incomplete, however, if the women themselves had not taken part in the organization of feminine education. In treating of "The Women of the Century" I have already suggested that this important element of feminine education was not lacking. There is abundant evidence of the presence and enduring work of at least one great woman educator, in the sense of an organizer of educational methods, whose influence has been continuously felt in many parts of the world ever since and whose work is not only alive in our time but has shown its power to adapt itself even to the needs and demands of the twentieth-century woman. This is, after all, only what might be expected of an educator of this time, since the other accomplishments of her contemporaries have proved so lasting in their effects. This very interesting woman of Columbus' Century, whose life is comparatively little known, though her work occupies a very important place in the history of education ever since, was Angela Merici, the foundress of the Ursulines. When twenty years of age this daughter of the lesser Italian nobility became convinced that the great need of that time was the better instruction of young girls in Christian doctrine and their training in a thoroughly Christian life. She converted her home into a school, where at certain hours of the day she gathered all the little girls of her native town of Desenzano, a small municipality on the southwestern shore of Lake Garda in Lombardy, and gave them lessons in the elements of Christianity. The work, thus humbly begun, proved to have so many factors of worth in it that it very soon attracted attention. Before long she was invited to the neighboring city of Brescia to establish a similar school, but on a much larger scale and more ambitious scope. She did so all the more willingly because one day during her earlier life in the small town of Desenzano she had had a vision in which it was revealed to her that she was to found an association of young women {329} who would take vows of chastity and devote their lives to the religious training of young girls.