girls in 1825. New York opened a high school for girls three years
later.

It was in the West, however, that this movement took strongest root and
made most steady advance. The West has always led the East in opening
equal opportunity to women, even equal suffrage. The forest and the
frontier compel such action even in such commonwealths as Australia, New
Zealand and Canada, where there has been no political revolution to
hasten it. Labor is scarce; the invading people are intelligent and
ambitious for their children and desire them educated. The women must
teach them to read and write; the girls learn with their brothers; and
so the women master the mysteries of formal education.

Thus it is no accident that Oberlin, in the western forest, was the
first college to open its doors to women. Antioch, under Horace Mann's
direction, was, however, the first institution of higher learning to
give men and women equal opportunity. The new States of the Mississippi
Valley early established State universities. These institutions were
little more than seminaries, but the free spirit of the frontier was so
strong in them that in 1863 Wisconsin University admitted women to its
privileges, and Kansas and Indiana followed shortly after.

It is the year 1870, however, that marks the beginning of a new period
in the higher education of women as in so many other lines of advance.
In that year, Michigan University, California University and the
University of Evanston, adopted co-education. Michigan was just entering
on a great career and her influence was very important. There, for the
first time, women could follow a university curriculum under the same
conditions as men. Two years later, Andrew D. White introduced the
Michigan idea at Cornell.