Woman student

“ And thirdly, there was the strong apprehension felt by many excellent people, lest in the process of the higher education young women would be denatured. They admitted that young men were not denatured in any way by the higher education at college, but they thought that there was a serious chance that young women would be altered in their feminine nature by the process of education. It has turned out that a young woman who studies in college, from the age of eighteen to twenty-two, is no more altered in her nature than a young man is who goes through a similar process. ”

“ The number of young women in that course, instead of increasing with the prosperity of the institution, has diminished, so that it now averages only two or three to a class. The rest pursue a different curriculum, live in a separate dormitory, and study by themselves in a course of their own, reciting, indeed, with the young men, and by way of reciprocity and in true womanly compassion, allowing some of them to sit at their table in the dining-hall, but yet constituting substantially a female seminary, or, if you please, a woman's college in the university.—Scribner, February, page 457. ”

“ When women begin at eighteen or twenty the earnest business of a collegiate course, for which they have slowly and thoroughly prepared while their physical organization was maturing in happy freedom, and when they give to this higher intellectual labor the strength and enthusiasm that are at that age of all the life preëminent and most perfectly balanced, then we shall know what educated woman is, and learn her possible capacities in all that makes for the noblest humanity.
I do not undervalue what Oberlin, Antioch, Mt. Holyoke, and other schools have accomplished for woman's higher education. ”

“ We do not wish the girls in a school to be alike in everything. One day last October I sat on the platform of a woman's college during the opening exercises, and in the bright morning watched the long lines of girls march into the chapel to the sound of the piano. Two by two they came, dark girls and fair girls, plump girls and thin girls, tall girls and short girls, as sweet a band as I ever saw, all alert and alive and eager, and looking as if they never had an ache or a pain, as girls ought to look who have learned that health and vigor help to make successful students. ”

“ It has always been feared that women would lower the standard of scholarship; and there is much in the quality of the present generation of women students that may strengthen this belief. In the seventies and eighties, the fear of being thought peculiar still kept many ordinary women away from colleges. Now it has become fashionable, and a woman who has been to college stands better in a community than one who has not. ”

“ The refinement both of college life and of subsequent social life would be enhanced by the multiplication of these homes for moderate numbers of college women—if each were put under the charge of a woman whose intellectual culture, stability, and nobleness of character, and experience of life and the world, made her the evident and acknowledged peer of every member of the college faculty. ”

“ At school, we merely acquire the means to be used in that true and higher order of education which every one must gain for himself. It matters not how many studies a young lady may have pursued at school, nor how thoroughly she may have mastered all she attempted to learn: if, after leaving school, she do not read, observe, and think, she will never make an intelligent woman.
In every company a young lady will find two classes of persons, distinctly separated from each other. ”

“ When we have in our vision serious thought as the working force and end of education, the woman makes the same claim with the man, and her claim rests, at its deepest foundation, upon the same grand idea." The history of the movement in favor of the collegiate education of women is interesting and instructive. ”

“ That this great work should at least be well begun during the period allotted to secondary instruction, is especially necessary in the case of women, because with this first stage their education ends. I do not mean, of course, that a girl necessarily lays aside all study on leaving school, any more than a man does on taking his degree, but that the end of the school course is the same kind of educational terminus to a woman that graduation is to a man. When a girl leaves school, her strictly professional studies assume a greater prominence. ”

“ But, if these college homes for women students are placed under the charge of matrons who are expected to combine motherly kindness and housewifely skill with devout piety, but in whom no other qualities or attainments are demanded, and if the matrons are the only women, besides the students, connected with the institution, the influence of the college home will tend to lower the ideal of woman’s function in society; to rob the ideal of domestic life of all intellectual quality; and in general to diminish for young women the incentives to study. ”

“ While she is still a student a girl's service to her school lies largely in her daily work, the mental muscle she puts into all that she does in the classroom and studies out of it. If because of her and a multiple of many girls like her, the college does not possess that sine qua non of all the higher mental life, an intellectual atmosphere, it is the student's and her multiple's fault. ”

“ But as we have not time to pursue to any considerable extent more than one of these departments, I would give a rudimentary training in the classics, and devote the best energies of the young to those studies which have for their objects, life and its pursuits, man and his destiny, God and His works.
The sphere of woman differs widely from that of man; but this is neither the time nor the place to unfold our views upon the question in what way, and to what extent, this fact should modify the course of study in a college for women ”

“ All hail the widespread movement for the higher education of woman, for in intellectual development is the future of posterity, in study is happiness, through the open door of the college is the key of a truer womanhood, a broader humanity, and a brighter hope. ”

“ She was the foremost instigator and influence for the higher education of womanhood. In that first fifty years of her Seminary, it was estimated that more than fifteen thousand young women were enrolled, a large majority of whom became teachers and directors, who carried the influence of the school far and wide, in Europe as well as in America. ”

“ At that date the Council of University College had refused to entertain the application of ladies to be admitted to the lectures of University College, and that such an adventure with its denouement did not become a fact is only to be credited to the wisdom that, on further consideration, withdrew the objection, for history affords many instances of woman's use of a disguise in order to attain her wishes, and the annals of co-education furnish numerous proofs of her equality with, and not unfrequently her superiority to, her rivals of the other sex in competitive examinations. ”

“ Here is the “real thing” in a girl’s college story. Older authors can invent situations and supply excellently written general delineations of character, but all lack the vital touch of this work of a bright young recent graduate of a well-known college for women, who has lost none of the enthusiasm felt as a student. Every activity of a popular girl’s first year is woven into a narrative, photographic in its description of a life that calls into play most attractive qualities, while at the same time severely testing both character and ability. ”

“ The instinct of the teacher, her interest in the child, her tact and sympathy, in short the personal element, are what is here most important. And since all this, even in the superficially educated woman, springs purely from her feminity, and since the energetic women are extraordinarily eager and self-sacrificing, so it happens that almost everywhere the elementary schools are better conducted by their women teachers than are the high schools. ”

“ There are lectures in private parlors for those who are too delicate to go to a public hall—elementary lectures, and advanced lectures and readings. But no one ever became cultivated by going to lectures. If a girl would choose a single course and study the subject between times by herself, then she would really be the better for the instruction. I think the difficulty of choice among many good things in the city is the reason that so many earnest girls have dissipated minds. A woman in the city must be constantly on her guard against this peculiar temptation. ”

“ This detailed explanation of the peculiarities of the girls’ college renders unnecessary any long discussion of its strengths and weaknesses. According to the point of view of the critic these peculiarities themselves will be counted means of invigoration or of enfeeblement. Living so close to one another as girls here do, the sympathetic and altruistic virtues acquire great prominence. Petty selfishness retreats or becomes extinct. An earnest, high-minded spirit is easily cultivated, and the break between college life and the life from which the student comes is reduced to a minimum. ”

“ The present work is intended to unfold the natural objects of female education. This is accomplished in a series of lectures written in a perspicuous, pleasing style, and treating of the various studies pursued in a well regulated school for young ladies. It is really and truly what it proposes to be, a guide in the intellectual education of woman, and will, we have no doubt, become a standard work in our schools and families.—Ladies' Magazine.
We think this plan is generally executed in a manner calculated to instruct pupils and to furnish useful hints and maxims for teachers. ”

“ Even with the disadvantages under which they labor in our ordinary and even higher schools, girls have surmounted the difficulties of their position, and without favor—indeed, in spite of ridicule, partiality, and opposition—have come out first in their examinations. Send such a class of young women as this to a university that will honestly admit them to all its advantages, and allow them to compete with the most studious young men admitted to the same university ”

“ Can woman's distinctive profession be made a large portion of her school education?
To aid in deciding these questions, the following is given as the ideal at which I have been aiming in efforts to establish a Woman's University; by which I mean, not a large boarding-establishment of pupils removed from parental care, but an institution embracing the whole course of a woman's training from infancy to a self-supporting profession, in which both parents and teachers have a united influence and agency. ”

“ She has no doubt her civic duties, and again her education puts the edge 19 on her abilities: she is a more valuable helper in the world’s work. She may be a bread-winner, for herself and for others; and herein, perhaps, is the most simple and popular argument for a woman’s pursuit of Studies, one so self-evident that I need not dwell upon it.
I have been speaking of an ideal education and of an ideal woman, but where should we consider them both if not in this very place? A college like yours aims at nothing less! ”

“ My objection to higher education for women, which you once heard me express, is founded on the fact that I have met many college women who were anaemic and utterly devoid of emotion. One beautiful young girl I recall who at fourteen years of age seemed to embody all the physical and temperamental charms possible for womankind. ”

“ Women like that sort of thing. Any woman who's been to a good eventful girls' school lives on the memory of it for the rest of her life. It's one of the pathetic things about women,—the superiority of school and college to anything they get afterwards. And this city-garden of women will have beautiful places for music, places for beautiful dresses, places for beautiful work. Everything a woman can want. ”

“ I need hardly say, certainly not to the more intelligent, who would naturally gather information of this kind, how varied and important a woman’s work in life has grown to be. You are all more or less familiar with the fact that we have now entrance into the best colleges, both here and abroad. ”

“ Thus we have seen a lady Senior Wrangler and a lady Senior Classic, and I myself have the honour of knowing a sweet girl-graduate with golden hair, who got two Firsts at Oxford.
The face of the earth is covered with Girls' High Schools, and Women's Colleges standing where they ought not. I am told, but do not know, that girl-undergraduates are permitted to witness physiological experiments in the torture-dens of science; and a complete emancipation in the matter of reading has introduced women to regions of thought and feeling which in old days were the peculiar domain of men. ”

“ There are numberless sweet and patient women who never studied beyond the curriculum of the district school, women who help every one near them by their own unselfish loveliness; but the intelligently patient, the women who can put themselves into the places of all sorts of people, who can sympathize not merely with great and manifest griefs, but with every delicate jarring of the human soul—hardest of all, with the ambitions of the dull—these women, who must command a respect intellectual as well as moral, reach their highest efficiency through experience based on college training. ”