Only the women who have helped to promote and establish the higher
education of women can know how exciting and romantic it was to be
a professor in a woman's college during the last half-century.
To be a teacher was no new thing for a woman; the dame school
is an ancient institution; all down the centuries, in classic
villas, in the convents of the Middle Ages, in the salons of the
eighteenth century, learned ladies with a pedagogic instinct have
left their impress upon the intellectual life of their times. But
the possibility that women might be intellectually and physically
capable of sharing equally with men the burdens and the joys of
developing and directing the scholarship of the race had never been
seriously considered until the nineteenth century. The women who
came to teach in the women's colleges in the '70's and '80's and
'90's knew themselves on trial in the eyes of the world as never
women had been before. And they brought to that trial the heady
enthusiasm and radiant exhilaration and fiery persistence which
possess all those who rediscover learning and drink deep. They
knew the kind of selfless inspiration Wyclif knew when he was
translating the Bible into the language of England's common people.
They shared the elation and devotion of Erasmus and his fellows.

To plan a curriculum in which the humanities and the sciences
should every one be given a fair chance; to distinguish intelligently
between the advantages of the elective system and its disadvantages;
to decide, without prejudice, at what points the education of the
girl should differ or diverge from the education of the boy; to
try out the pedagogic methods of the men's colleges and discover
which were antiquated and should be abolished, which were susceptible
of reform, which were sound; to invent new methods,--these were
the romantic quests to which these enamored devotees were vowed, and