was greatest.
While their future husbands were going through the long process of
education in school and college and university and then through the
long process of commercial and professional apprenticeship, these
girls were passing through the grammar-school age, through the
high-school age, and then on into what in those days looked like
old-maidhood. Their social environment did not lead them into factory
work. Yet their families were not rich. How were they to be occupied?

The father of Frederick the Great used to go about his realm with a
stick, and when he saw a woman in the street he would shake the stick
at her and say: "Go back into the house. An honest woman keeps
indoors."

Probably quite sensible. When she went indoors, she went into a job.
The "middle class" daughter of to-day, if her mother is living and
housekeeping, goes indoors into a vacuum.

Out of that vacuum came the explosion which created the first woman's
college.

There was plenty of sentiment in the explosion. That was the splendid,
blinding part of it. That was the part of it which even to-day dazzles
us with the nobility of such women as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon. They
made Troy Female Seminary in the twenties and Mount Holyoke in the
thirties in the image of the aspirations, as well as in the image of
the needs, of the women of the times.

But the needs were there, the need to _be_ something, the need to do
something, self-respecting, self-supporting. The existence of those
needs was clearly revealed in the fact that from the early women's
colleges and from the early coeducational universities there at once
issued a large supply of teachers.

This flow of teachers goes back to the very fountain-head of the
higher education of women in this country. Emma Willard, even before
she founded Troy Female Seminary, back in the days when she was
running her school in Middlebury, Conn., was training young women to
_teach_, and was acquiring her claim (which she herself subsequently
urged) to being regarded as the organizer of the first normal school
in the United States.

From that time to this most college women have taught school before
getting married. _The higher education of women has been, in economic
effect, a trade school for training women for the trade of teacher._

But isn't it the purpose of the colleges to avoid training their
pupils for specific occupations? Isn't it their purpose to give their
pupils discipline and culture