Our social system improves in proportion as the men in it are influenced by its good women.
As for the education of women, it would seem unnecessary to urge its value upon even the stupidest of creatures. Yet it is a fact that the importance of thorough education of girls is still doubted—usually, of course, by men with deficient education of their own and an elaborate sense of their own importance and superiority.
Mary Lyon, whose noble efforts established Mount Holyoke College, and spread the idea of higher education for women throughout the world, put the case of women's education in a nutshell. She said:
"I think it less essential that the farmers and mechanics should be educated than that their wives, the mothers of their children, should be."
The education of a girl is important chiefly because it means the educating of a future mother.
Whose brain but the mother's inspires and directs the son in the early years, when knowledge is most easily absorbed and permanently retained?
If you find in history a man whose success is based on intellectual equipment, you find almost invariably that his mother was exceptionally fortunate in her opportunities for education.
Well educated women are essential to humanity. They insure abler men in the future, and incidentally they make the ignorant man feel ashamed of himself in the present.
ASTRONOMY WOMAN'S FUTURE WORK
In the centuries to come, perhaps a thousand centuries from now, perhaps a little sooner, woman will get her chance on earth. Population will have reached its normal limit, and nature's wise law, dealing with a really civilized race, will automatically limit children to two in each family.