Women have many so-called champions of their “purity,” and “innocence;” champions that are shocked at opening so many new fields of “man’s work” to women; but they are strangely ignorant of the very real contamination to which they expose their _protegés_ by crowding them into the few already overcrowded channels, and refusing to let in fresh air and sunshine. Men and women both are born into the world helpless and unprotected; it may seem an ugly and bitter truth, but it is so, that in this struggle for existence daily going on about us, men and women do indeed stand “side by side,”—not, as with the poet, Full summed in all their powers, but each individually carrying on a struggle against suffering, starvation, crime, and death,—forces that remorselessly attack women, barren of the chivalrous regard of sex with which these sentimentalists seem to grace them. And if it is true that both sexes fight the same battle for existence, who can honestly deny to women (at present physically the weaker), the best possible equipment that education of all kinds can furnish? I shall not even touch upon the other, and more poetic, argument of the divine rights of genius, which is of no sex; but I am content to employ only the prosaic one of the practical needs of life, an argument which here in America is by far the most potent one. My own labors on this book have been purely editorial; and after selecting the chapters, and the authors, and laying down certain general principles and suggestions, my responsibility ceased. The principles laid down by me have been: Facts and history rather than eloquence; Truth before picturesqueness; A total absence of railing against the opposite sex.[2] The greatest care has been taken to assure accuracy; if mistakes do creep in, notwithstanding this, I must beg the reader not to judge too harshly, as the capacity for making mistakes in a book like this is illimitable. However, I trust the leniency of the reader will not be too severely taxed. While being an ardent believer in the future progress of woman, it would be impossible to subscribe myself to every theory that may be found in these pages. To say one agrees in every detail with the opinions of eighteen women, all of whom are well known to be “women with opinions,” is to boast of a breadth of mind, a roundness of judgment to which I am too modest to lay claim. But I can surely say that every one of the writers has cordially joined hands in the making of the book; the long hours spent in the writing of it, the many annoyances encountered in collecting historical data, all is forgotten in the hope that this book may serve: 1. To set certain plain facts, shorn of all sentiment, before the world in accessible form; 2. To preserve the record of a great, brave, and essentially American struggle; 3. To serve as a stimulus to many women who are working along a very weary road;