Should American Colleges Be Open to Women as Well as to Men?

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Excerpt from Should American Colleges Be Open to Women as Well as to Men?: A Paper Presented to the Twentieth Annual Convocation of the University of the State of New York, at Albany, July 12, 1882Supposing, however, tor the sake of argument, that women are naturally the intellectual interiors of men. It cannot, nevertheless, be denied that women have intellects, nor that such intellects as they have should be properly cultivated. If the experience of some centuries is worth any thing our colleges present the instrumen talities best adapted for developing the capacities ot growing minds. These instrurnentalities must be presumed to be adapted to the needs of the masculine mind in very tender years, for I find thaf until quite recently, it was not unusual in American colleges to-re ceive boys at ages as low as from nine to thirteen. Now whatever we may assume to be the mental inequality between the sexes, no one can maintain that a young woman of seventeen or eighteen is likely to be inferior 111 mental capacity to a boy of ten or eleven. If such a boy can be improved therefore by the instruction which the college affords, so p1obably can a girl a few years older, and there rs no just reason for denying her the opportunitv for such improvement. The argument therefore, for the exclusion of women from colleges, derived from their presumed intellectual inferiority, is without foundation, and if it were not so, it is simply a piece of sophistry designed to conceal the deeper lying reason in the mind of the objector, which perhaps he is ashamed or unwilling to avow.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.