For fifty years what is known as the Higher Education of Women has been a policy, whose growth is sign enough of the approval it has earned. The higher education of the great group of women's colleges just established has been and still is purely cultural, avowedly and inevitably offering to women the precise cultural studies offered to men, keeping pace with implicit faithfulness with the development of cultural courses in the leading schools for the education of men. How and why these cultural courses have widened might well be the subject of a careful study. The changes are a conservative running index of what we like to believe is the growing democracy of our intellectual interests: but the point is that these courses are offered as cultural, part of the unspecialized training of an educated person, or part of the training preliminary to special training. Perhaps there is no one left to question the ability of women to take in and take on this culture. At any rate for our purpose let us consider closed the question of assimilation. On the basis of this cultural study, men's colleges have added professional schools in growing variety, serving the needs of a few thousands each in pursuits dignified and useful but not absolutely essential to the existence of the race. To certain of these schools women have been 1 This address was given on October 11, 1915 as a part of the celebration commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the opening of Vassar College. It is reprinted from the official record of the celebration. more or less painfully admitted; but they remain men's schools for men's pursuits, and the great foundations for original research are men's foundations. And the fatimations that women's powers are powers of assimilation only continue to be heard. The very words higher education challenge us to the superlative and push us to the subject I have ventured to state. What is the highest éducation of women and what are some of its immediate possibilities? No one would be bold enough to say that we can discern all these possibilities, and as for the ultimate development of the education of women, it is as far beyond our ken as the Vassar Campus is beyond the imagination of the cave-woman. May I venture to define crudely the highest education of our day as that which upon a cultural basis gives the mind an ardor for discovering facts and relating them to the truth, and which provides the technical equipment of training for independent research. Recognizing the scope of the graduate professional schools, the wide sweep of the great foundations for original research, it becomes increasingly apparent that there is one great interest not yet made a subject of that study for which the highest education prepares. The one great avocation constantly requiring the unsparing service of millions of women is the rearing of children and the conduct of a household. The most universal and essential of employments, it remains the most neglected by science-a neglect long hidden behind tradition and sentimentality. Can women of the higher education do less than undertake to put an end to this neglect, to begin to place investigation and research directly at the service of the cult of the family, and to start forward on paths by which the most important calling in the world shall gradually acquire professional status? The highest education of women, then, I wish to define in terms of the needs of our own time, as training in original research applied to the life and interests of the family. Women of the higher education have vindicated the value of freedom for individual development. The family type based upon equal individual culture of both parents gives a further vindication of women's higher education. Family democracy can only lead toward social democracy-slowly, indeed, but surely. **Undoubtedly the family has been gradually gaining in efficiency and in refinement since rivers ran to the sea. Yet as Ellen Richards laboriously analyzed those waters and showed us how to keep them pure for human use, so, we may be sure, the study of the family will reveal new material and moral standards and the practical means of securing them. As a few evidences of the need of study of the family, we need only remind ourselves that we do not understand life at the source, nor the reasons for its known wastage, nor how to economize the health and wellbeing of the race by minimizing this wastage. The subject has been regarded with such fatalistic indifference that we do not yet know how many children are born, nor how many die, nor why they die in our own country, while the more intensive knowledge of infant well-being which would enable us to establish convincingly its relationship to social well-being and to the rectitude and intelligence of parents is yet to be secured and analyzed. We know strangely little of the growth of the child's mind. Not long ago the advice of a distinguished alienist was sought as to the practical value of studies of the mental development of normal children in earliest infancy and during the years before the school and the outside world directly affect the child. He replied that such studies are of the highest value, that their primary usefulness as aids in working out the best home training of all children goes without saying; and that naturally enough he thought of them as especially needful because of the light they would throw on the baffling questions with which an alienist wrestles in dealing with the history of mental disaster. Such studies can be made only by the aid of the observations of individual mothers. Is it not a complete revelation of our unconscious relegation of the processes of human development to the limbo of instinct that, while there are perhaps thirteen million mothers in this country, there are at best about a half dozen such studies (made by fathers and mothers jointly), and in attempting a plan for such studies a great difficulty is present in finding a competent director? We do not know the constitution of the American family. I speak of thirteen million mothers, but that is only an estimate based on the enumeration of women who are heads of households. No one really knows. The government census has never been directed to state the number, though this and much other precious information as to the constitution of every family in the country lies unused upon the millions of untabulated schedules filed away for the last thirty years in the census archives. We do not know how extensive is the industrial employment of married women, nor its effect upon children and family life, nor when it is a result of a scale of wages for men too low decently to support a family, nor whether it is sometimes the cause of a low scale of wages for men, nor when it is fair to all concerned, including society at large, that mothers should work for hire. Worst ignorance of all, we do not know what is the decent support of a family, nor the factors that affect the question in a world where democratic efficiency is still only beginning the struggle up from feudal efficiency. All these are questions whose answers can never be complete nor right until they are expressed in terms of the family. If we cared to ask, these unregarded census figures could tell us various facts which are now seeming mysteries. They could tell the numbers of married women in industry, their ages, the ages and numbers of their children, how many children have lived and how many have perished, the occupation of the fathers and mothers and where the loss of child life is greatest. It would give an intimation of the numbers of families whose mothers are burdened and whose privacy is infringed by lodgers and boarders. Yet there has been no demand for this information, and the material gathered in 1890, in 1900 and in 1910 has remained untouched. Does the question of domestic service interest you in an academic or a practical way? The unpublished census figures hold the complete history of the shifts in the nationality and distribution of this service for thirty years. Would you know how many families have servants? Would you know how many women perform with their own hands every daily task for their husbands and children? The answers are in the unpublished sheets of the census. I have referred thus in detail to the vast resources of unused information which the government already possesses in regard to the family because I know of no other illustration which indicates so clearly our national neglect-the unconsidered neglect of students, the unconscious indifference of the public-in a field where it is complacently taken for granted that our emotions and personal interests guarantee our efficient attention. Again, if the structure of the family is unstudied, still less is its dissolution understood. The profounder causes for those disasters which only emerge in the divorce court among persons of appreciable income are not indicated by the oft-quoted census figures of 1910 which show that one in twelve of the marriages in the United States ends in divorce. May it not be that the efforts of law and religion to cope with family |