An honest woman
keeps indoors."
Probably quite sensible. When she went indoors, she went in to a
job. The "middle class" daughter of to-day, if her mother is
living and housekeeping, goes indoors into a vacuum.
Out of that vacuum came the explosion which created the first
woman's colleges.
There was plenty of sentiment in the explosion. That was the
splendid, blinding part of it. That was the part of it which even
to-day makes us veil our eves before the nobility of such women
as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon. They made Troy Female Seminary in
the twenties and Mount Holyoke in the thirties in the image of
the aspirations, as well as in the image of the needs, of the
women of the times.
But the needs were there, the need to be something, the need to
do something, self-respecting, self supporting. The existence of
these needs was clearly revealed in the fact that from the early
women's colleges and from the early coeducational universities
there at once issued a large supply of teachers.
This goes back to the fountainhead of the higher education of
women in this country. Emma Willard, even before she founded Troy
Female Seminary, back in the days when she was running her school
in Middlebury, Connecticut, was training young women to TEACH,
and was acquiring her claim (which she herself subsequently
urged) to being regarded as the organizer of the first normal
school in the United States.
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