Female Suffrage: a Letter to the Christian Women of America by Susan Fenimore Cooper
page 32 of 49 (65%)
page 32 of 49 (65%)
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offered to both sexes; in the public schools brother and sister have,
as a rule, the same books and the same teachers. And we may go much further and say that every woman in the country may already-- IF SHE IS DETERMINED TO DO SO--obtain very much the same intellectual instruction which her own brother receives. If that education is a highly advanced one she will, no doubt, have some special difficulties to contend against; but those difficulties are not insurmountable. The doors of most colleges and universities are closed, it is true, against women, and we can not doubt that this course is taken for sound reasons, pointed out by good sense and true sagacity. It is impossible not to believe that between the ages of fifteen and five-and-twenty young men and young women will carry on their intellectual training far more thoroughly and successfully apart than thrown into the same classes. At that age of vivid impressions and awakening passions, the two sexes are sufficiently thrown together in family life and in general society for all purposes of mutual influence and improvement. Let them chat, walk, sing, dance together, at that period of their lives; but if you wish to make them good scholars, let them study apart. Let their loves and jealousies be carried on elsewhere than in the college halls. But already female colleges, exclusively adapted to young women, are talked of--nay, here and there one or two such colleges now exist. There is nothing in which American men more delight, nothing more congenial to their usual modes of thought and action, than to advance the intellectual instruction of the whole nation, daughters as well as sons. We may rest assured that they will not fail to grant all needful development in this direction. One female college, of the very highest intellectual standard, would probably be found sufficient for a population of some millions. The number of women desiring a full college education will always, for many |
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