The Southern colleges which attain the rank of a semi-college I shall speak of with more detail farther on. The real colleges for women in the South consist of the Woman’s College of Baltimore and the co-educational colleges (including in that term those in which the management and the degrees are the same for the men and the women, though the recitations may be conducted separately). Of these, the University of Texas, the Tulane University (which is the State university of Louisiana), the University of Mississippi, and the Columbian University in Washington are the important ones. The admission of women into all of these universities is of very recent date, and may be taken as an indication of a general movement in favor of a greater degree of generosity toward women, which may, in time, sweep over the entire South. The geographical distribution of these entering wedges is worthy of note. Baltimore and Washington on the north, the University of Missouri on the west, the State Universities of the three States of the extreme southwest,—add to this the fact that the State of Florida has every one of its four colleges for men open to women, and that it has not a single girls’ seminary of the old-fashioned type, and it may well be believed that the modern idea of what a woman requires in the way of education is destined to close in upon the entire Southern country, and that the contentment which Southern women have hitherto shown with the unsubstantial parts of learning will eventually be replaced by more far-reaching claims. The University of Virginia is the very mold and glass of form for all the other schools and colleges of the South, and if that were to throw down the barriers which it now keeps up against the unobtrusive sex, it might be considered that the battle was already won. But the University of Virginia is far from being unimpregnable; the chairman of its faculty writes me: “In reply to your interesting[25] letter of November 25, ’89, I would say that opinion is much divided both in our faculty and in our board of visitors on the question of opening this university to women.” There is at this moment no way in which any one who wished to benefit women could do so more effectively than by offering this university a handsome endowment on condition of its terminating this state of indecision in the right way. The Johns Hopkins University has lately accepted a gift of a hundred thousand dollars from a woman; it remains to be seen whether it will show its appreciation of this act of generosity on the part of the self-forgetful sex by opening its doors to women. Whatever the result of the next few years may be upon the history of the education of women in the South, there can be no doubt that the situation at the present moment is far more hopeful than it was ten or even five years ago, and far more hopeful than any one would have believed who has not recently looked into the matter.