Miss Mary Lyon begged the money from the common people with which she opened Mount Holyoke Seminary in 1837.  Those who feared the education of women were disarmed by the fact that in the new institution domestic service was emphasized to the extent of having the girls do all their own work.  Another group of possible critics was won over by the fact that religious instruction received constant care.  But notwithstanding the conserving influence of housework and religion, there went steadily out from Mount Holyoke during the following years a strong line of teachers demanding ever larger opportunity for themselves and for those they taught.

Miss Catherine Beecher added to her work in schools for girls a general propaganda for woman’s education, and she devised large plans for its development.  In 1852, she organized the American Woman’s Educational Association “to aid in securing to American women a liberal education, honorable position, and remunerative employment.”  She helped to start girls’ schools in half a dozen cities, and by writing and talking she sowed in the hearts of women, especially in the Middle West, a discontent with existing conditions and a deep desire to know.

From the time of this awakening in the thirties and forties, two lines of educational activity for the advancement of woman’s education steadily developed.  One was the effort of women to educate themselves in distinctly women’s schools; and the other was the movement by which existing institutions for boys and men were gradually opened to girls and women.  These two lines of activity still remain distinct, and not always sympathetic with each other’s aims.

The effort to establish distinctly women’s schools was continued after the Civil War by Matthew Vassar, who founded in 1861, and opened in 1865, the first adequately endowed and organized college for women in America.  Ten years later, Miss Sophie Smith founded and endowed Smith College to furnish women “with means and facilities for education equal to those that are offered in colleges for young men.”  The institution was opened in 1875; and in the same year Henry Durant established Wellesley College.

The last Report of the United States Commissioner of Education shows that there are now 108 institutions of higher learning to which men are not admitted; but most of them have modeled themselves so closely upon men’s colleges that they have not been able to work out lines of distinctive instruction specially fitted to women.  One cannot help feeling that since they do not open their doors to men they should do something more toward working out an ideal education for women than they have so far undertaken.  When the Association of Intercollegiate Alumnae met in New York, in the autumn of 1911, its discussions gathered around the possibility of adding to college courses subjects of special value to women.  Hygiene, biology and sociology were the subjects most favored; but the matter needs attention from women and men who stand outside the group dominated by our older college traditions.  This movement to provide distinctive schools for women had brought together, in 1910, 35,714 girl students in private secondary schools and 9,082 women students in higher institutions of learning.