"It has seemed desirable, moreover, that the endowment of the two institutions already established should be completed before attempting to found others."
The questions most frequently proposed to the conductors of this enterprise, and the answers to them, will now be introduced.
How can the business of domestic economy be taught as a part of school training?
Not in great boarding-schools, where it never was or can be done. The "Mount Holyoke" plan, now so popular, is widely supposed to embrace this in its design. But the teaching of this science is not the aim of their domestic department. It is a measure for reducing expenses by saving hired labor, while certain social advantages are supposed to be combined with it. But no pupil is to be taught any thing in this department. Meantime, introducing cooking, washing, ironing, and house-cleaning as a regular part of school duty, makes a system of such detail and complication, demanding so many rules and such strict obedience as adds enormously to the already excessive pressure that is put on the female brain. This is probably an insuperable difficulty attendant on this system, that will forever forbid its introduction wherever the healthful development of woman has its proper regard.
How, then, is the object aimed at to be accomplished?
In reply we say, that, with institutions established for the express purpose of training women to be healthy themselves, and to perform properly all their duties as educator, nurse, and regulator of the domestic state; with teachers supported by endowments for this express object; with a board of managers embracing some of the most influential ladies in the land, who are or have been both practical teachers and housekeepers; with committees of influential ladies in each place where such institutions are located to co-operate, the thing attempted can not fail to be done, and in the best manner. Whatever ought to be done, can be; and whatever can be done, will be, when energetic American women fairly undertake it.
But will endowments for such institutions be furnished?
In reply, we point to the multitudes of needless colleges for the other sex all over the land, for which the people are pouring forth such abundant endowments, while women are even more liberal, according to their relative means, than men.
Since this effort commenced, one lady has endowed a professorship in Brunswick College, Maine. Another lady has added $20,000 to the nearly one million endowments of Cambridge. These two are the first cases of endowments for the physical, social, and moral departments of education. Woman, then, has first done for man what is now sought for her sex.
In this same short period, sufficient for the endowment of a theological professorship in Connecticut has been furnished by female benefactors. In New Jersey a lady has given some $30,000 for a college. In New York City another lady has endowed a theological professorship. In Albany, New York, a lady has given $50,000 for a scientific institution for man. In Massachusetts a lady has given more than enough to endow a professorship for a college in Wisconsin. Many more cases can be given of large benefactions, amounting in all to hundreds of thousands, given by woman within a few years for the richly-provided professional institutions of man, while as yet not one complete endowment for her sex has been raised.