most steady advance. The West has always led the East in opening
equal opportunity to women, even equal suffrage. The forest and the
frontier compel such action even in such commonwealths as Australia, New
Zealand and Canada, where there has been no political revolution to
hasten it. Labor is scarce; the invading people are intelligent and
ambitious for their children and desire them educated. The women must
teach them to read and write; the girls learn with their brothers; and
so the women master the mysteries of formal education.

Thus it is no accident that Oberlin, in the western forest, was the
first college to open its doors to women. Antioch, under Horace Mann's
direction, was, however, the first institution of higher learning to
give men and women equal opportunity. The new States of the Mississippi
Valley early established State universities. These institutions were
little more than seminaries, but the free spirit of the frontier was so
strong in them that in 1863 Wisconsin University admitted women to its
privileges, and Kansas and Indiana followed shortly after.

It is the year 1870, however, that marks the beginning of a new period
in the higher education of women as in so many other lines of advance.
In that year, Michigan University, California University and the
University of Evanston, adopted co-education. Michigan was just entering
on a great career and her influence was very important. There, for the
first time, women could follow a university curriculum under the same
conditions as men. Two years later, Andrew D. White introduced the
Michigan idea at Cornell.

In the forty years since Michigan opened her doors, the advance of women
under conditions of co-education has been steady and rapid. In Harvard
and Columbia opportunity takes the form of annexes where women can
secure almost any educational opportunities they desire. In other
universities, like Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins, women are admitted to
graduate study. Most of the institutions of higher education that do not
yet admit women are theological and technical schools, or small colleges
like Haverford, where there are equivalents in Swarthmore and Bryn Mawr,
for women who wish to attend a Friend's College. A woman can work in
almost any important university in America to-day if she cares to do so.
In 1910 there were conferred in the United States 12,590 A.B. degrees,
and women took 44.1 per cent. of them.

Meantime, there have been no imp