women that they should fix their eyes on their husbands and never look
forward or backward, lest they lose their Eden and drag those whom they
loved after them to destruction.

Of course, if women could not learn they could not teach; at least, they
could not teach where it was necessary to impart knowledge; and so their
share in formal education has been slight, until our own time. Young
children have been considered their special charge, and the care and
culture of infancy and young childhood have always rested in the hands
of mothers, grandmothers, aunts and female servants. Beyond these early
years, however, woman's part has been restricted to emphasizing, mainly
with girls, the dogmas and practices of caste, kitchen and church.

These were the conditions which prevailed through early Oriental and
Classical times. Christianity brought women some degree of intellectual
freedom, but it also imposed new forms of restraint. Its fundamental
teachings, based as they were on a belief in individual values, were
favorable to the extension of knowledge and to the opening of
opportunity for all. The Church, however, shaped under the
half-civilized conditions of the Middle Ages, quickly took knowledge
into her own keeping, forbade its extension, and increasingly held
before woman, as her highest ideal, the negative virtues of the
cloister.

The humanistic and theological changes which came with the awakening of
the European mind at the close of the Middle Ages, did much to set free
the accumulated treasures of knowledge. Protestantism, by exalting
individual judgment and insisting on the necessity of each one reading
and judging the sacred records for himself, made it possible for even
women to enter into the heritage of the ages. At least, the key to