Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost AdvocatesJohnson, Helen Kendrick
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Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates
Johnson, Helen Kendrick
Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
I may claim to have been beside the cradle of Vassar College; for when Dr.
Jewett resigned the presidency in 1864, my father named the successor who
was appointed, Dr. John H. Raymond, his life-long friend. Dr. Raymond came
to Rochester to discuss a plan of work, and, knowing my father's interest,
I was on tiptoe to hear about the new college. At my earnest solicitation,
he and Dr. Raymond and Prest. Anderson permitted me to be present at their
discussions. I learned to comprehend the value of womanliness to the world
by the estimate that those noble educators put upon it. It was evident
that they were arranging for those for whose minds they felt respect. They
made no foolish remarks about the superiority, inferiority, or equality of
the sexes, and had no contempt to throw upon the old education of tutor,
and library, and young ladies' seminary. They did not sneer at the "female
mind," but they did talk of the feminine mind as of something as distinct
in its essence from the masculine mind as the feminine form is distinct in
its outlines. To "preserve womanliness" was a task they felt they must
fulfil, or the women for whose good they labored would one day call them
to account. The dictum so frequently in the mouths of Suffrage leaders,
"There is no sex in brain," would have been abhorrent to them. In their
view, there was as much sex in brain as in hand; and the education that
did not, through cultivation, emphasize that fact, would be a lower and
not a higher product. They laid that intellectual corner-stone in love,
and in the faith that the same womanly spirit which, when there was not
college education enough to go round, had said, "Give it to the boys,
because their work must be public," would find, through the glad return
the boys were making, a way to teach the world still higher lessons of
womanly character and influence. Since that time, college after college
has arisen without a dream on the part of the founders, faculties, or
students that "every effort to educate woman, until you accord to her the
right to vote, is futile and a waste of labor," and it may well be that
the women educated in these colleges will decide that, because political
rights do acknowledge sex, therefore the word "male" should not be
stricken from any State constitution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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