The helplessness, the misery, the degradation of womanhood, laboring and starving on beggarly wages in rich and prosperous cities, arrested the attention of the thinking class to woman’s needs as it has never been arrested before. How to help woman to better her condition became, in 1868, one of the burning questions of the day. Gail Hamilton, Mrs. Stephens, Miss Penny, and others, attributed the distress of the factory and needle-women to the lack of educational training which obliged women to crowd into occupations requiring little, if any, skill. To remedy this, the establishment of industrial schools was advocated. Men, it was reasoned, had their trades’ apprenticeship system, schools, and universities, by which they were educated into a knowledge of many things; and by applying the same method to women, giving some thousands of them a professional training in each of the various trades, arts, and sciences useful to mankind, the ranks of the factory-seekers and needle-women in search of employment would be thinned sufficiently to cause the anomaly to vanish of millions of adult human beings laboring as men for the pay of children, and yet paying as men for whatever they got. Other remedies agitated were those of woman suffrage and the organization of women into societies for mutual protection and benefit. Small private attempts at industrial schools for the advancement of women, such as the “Wilson Industrial School” in New York, had been started by the benevolence of individuals as early as 1856; but the first serious attempt to give practical shape to the question of higher education for women was undertaken when Peter Cooper made the advantages of the institute founded by him and bearing his name, free in all its departments, to women as to men. The Cooper Institute, opened to the public in 1859, had its free art classes for women, where art was taught in its application to the industries. The Cooper Art School is said to be, even now, “the largest in the world for women.” From its inception a few women were found ready to avail themselves of the opportunity given them to study art in its various income-producing forms. But not until after the close of the war, when conditions made it urgent upon women to work on new lines, did the classes increase to any extent. (Then hundreds more than could be accommodated applied for admission.) Names were placed in the roll-book a year ahead, and the classes, through their increased size, overflowed into rooms not intended for their use. The number of students in the free art classes, for the season of 1889–90, was 310. For this season there were 693 applicants for admission to the free art classes. The accommodations do not admit of but few over 300.