CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDER AND HIS IDEALS


I.

As the nineteenth century recedes into history and the essentially
romantic quality of its great adventures is confirmed by the
"beauty touched with strangeness" which illumines their true
perspective, we are discovering, what the adventurers themselves
always knew, that the movement for the higher education of women
was not the least romantic of those Victorian quests and stirrings,
and that its relation to the greatest adventure of all, Democracy,
was peculiarly vital and close.

We know that the "man in the street", in the sixties and seventies,
watching with perplexity and scornful amusement the endeavor of
his sisters and his daughters--or more probably other men's
daughters--to prove that the intellectual heritage must be a common
heritage if Democracy was to be a working theory, missed the beauty
of the picture. He saw the slim beginning of a procession of
young women, whose obstinate, dreaming eyes beheld the visions
hitherto relegated by scriptural prerogative and masculine commentary
to their brothers; inevitably his outraged conservatism missed
the beauty; and the strangeness he called queer. That he should
have missed the democratic significance of the movement is less
to his credit. But he did miss it, fifty years ago and for several
years thereafter, even as he is still missing the democratic