Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Before Vassar Opened: A Contribution to the History of the Higher, Education of Women in America
The movement for the higher education of wo men was so slow in enlisting the interest of the country that it is perhaps not surprising that no full history of it exists. For it was not only slow, but obscure, and came to large recogni tion only after the war, when a great gift con stituted a college that could attract the atten tion of a people absorbed in other and more pressing interests. Since that time our interest has been focused on progress and results, rather than on origins, and history has been subordinated to prophecy. The details of the earlier record, moreover, must be sought in a scattered literature of small interest to any but special students, in catalogues, in government reports, in old newspapers, and in occasional histories of individual institutions and in bio graphies of leaders of more or less distinction.
But we cannot continue content with the pres ent or with our hopes, and must ask what early steps preceded what has seemed to most the sudden bursting of a new idea in the his tory of man. That Vassar's opening marked an epoch there can be no question, and the so cial and economic conditions that followed the Civil War responded immediately to the new opportunity; but the results could not have been so immediate and. So encouraging had it not been for the efforts of many pioneers in the North and in the South.
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