Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr,--with all the bright visions, the fullness
of life that they connote to American women, middle-aged and
young,--blotted out; coeducational institutions harassed by numbers
and inventing drastic legislation to keep out the women; man still
the almoner of education, and woman his dependent. From all these
hampering probabilities the women's colleges save us to-day. This
is what constitutes their negative value to education.

Their positive contribution cannot be summarized so briefly; its
scattered chronicle must be sought in the minutes of trustees'
meetings, where it modestly evades the public eye, in the academic
formalities of presidents' reports and the journalistic naivete of
college periodicals; in the diaries of early graduates; in newspaper
clippings and magazine "write-ups"; in historical sketches to
commemorate the decennial or the quarter-century; and from the
lips of the pioneers,--teacher and student. For, in the words of
the graduate thesis, "we are still in the period of the sources."
The would-be historian of a woman's college to-day is in much
the same relation to her material as the Venerable Bede was to
his when he set out to write his Ecclesiastical History. The thought
brings us its own inspiration. If we sift our miracles with as
much discrimination as he sifted his, we shall be doing well. We
shall discover, among other things, that in addition to the composite
influence which these colleges all together exert, each one also
brings to bear upon our educational problems her individual
experience and ideals. Wellesley, for example, with her
women-presidents, and the heads of her departments all women
but three,--the professors of Music, Education, and French,--has
her peculiar testimony to offer concerning the administrative and
executive powers of women as educators, their capacity for initiative