ty that the quickening of conscience, the
widening of sympathy, the influence of aggregations, the stimulus to
desire and ambitions, should be accompanied by corresponding growth in
knowledge and a love beyond the narrow confines of family and church.

The cry of the woman emerging from a darkened past was "light, more
light," and light was breaking. Gradually came the demand and the
opportunity for education; for intellectual freedom for women as well
as men; for cultivation of gifts and faculties. The early half of the
century was marked by a crusade for the cause of the better education
of women, as significant as that for the physical emancipation of the
slave, and as devoted on the part of its leaders.

Simultaneous with this were two other movements--the anti-slavery
agitation, inspired by the new enthusiasm for human rights and carried
on largely by the Quakers of both sexes. The woman's-rights movement
was the natural outgrowth of the individual-sovereignty idea which the
German philosophers had planted, and of which Mary Wollstonecraft was
the first great woman-exponent.

The keynote of the educational advance was struck by Emma Willard in
1821. She was followed by Mary Lyon, Mary Mortimer, and other brave
women who dared to ask for women the cultivation of such faculties as
they possessed, without let or hindrance. This demand has taken the
century to develop and enforce. The work was so gradual that it is not
yet, by any means, accomplished. Schools and colleges exist, but not
yet equally, except here and there. They are, however, giving us an
army of trained women who are bringing the force of knowledge to bear
upon questions which have heretofore only enlisted sympathies.

Simultaneously with this question of educational opportunity, has
arisen an eager seeking after knowledge on the part of women who have
been debarred from its enjoyment, or lacked opportunity for its
acquisition. The knowledge sought was not that of a limited, sectional
geography, or a mathematical quantity as taught in schools, but the
knowledge of the history and development of races and peoples, of the
laws and principles that underlie this development, and the place of
the woman in this grand march of the ages.

The woman has been the one isolated fact in the universe. The outlook
upon the world, the means of education, the opportunities for
advancement, had all been denied her; and that "community of feeling
and sense of distrib