The Iowa plain dealer. [volume] (New Oregon, Howard County, Iowa) 1867-1895, 1891-12-03

YOUNG WOMEN IN THE SOUTH.
They Arc Securing An Education for Self
support and Not for Social Culture
Only.
The fact that so large proportion of
the young women now attending south
ern colleges are securing an education
not for ornament but for use, not for
social culture merely but in prepare
ton for self-support, has had the very
natural effect of making them more
earnest and diligent in the prosecution
of their studies. A much larger pro-
portion of college girls comes now from
the middle and poorer classes than for
merly. Many of the poor girls of the
south to-day are the daughters of cdu-
Gated parents whose property was
swept away during the war, their cul-
ture surviving the loss of home and
property. And what will an educated
and refined mother not do, what sacri-
fees will she not make, in order that
her daughter may have the benefits of
an education? If poor she will prac-
tice the most rigid economy and sub
init to the severest personal self-de-
NAL If thereby her daughter is enabled
to enjoy the advantages of an educa-
ton; and many are the southern moth
ers who since the war have done this
and more, to give their children an ed
ucation. And there are many noble in
stances in which an elder daughter,
having been thus educated through the
labor and economy of her parents, has
generously requited their loving self
denial in her chalf by going to work
herself and helping each of her young
er sisters to obtain the education which
their parents were anxious but unable
to give them. 1t is Victor Hugo who has
called this 1.-The century of woman" It
is certainly an age that has witnessed
great changes in the life, education and
labor of women everywhere; and these
changes have all been in the direction
of charging the sphere of woman's &C.
tivities increasing her liberties and
opening up possibilities to her life
hitherto restricted to man. 1t is
movement limited to no land and to no
race. So far as this movement may
have any tendency to take woman out
of her true place in the home. to give
her mans work to do and to develop
masculine qualities in her, it finds no
sympathy in the south. The southern
woman loves the retirement of home.
and shrinks from everything that would
tend to bring her into the public gaze.
The higher education of woman, which
has been SO widely discussed of late
years, and to encourage and promote
which such noble schools for women as
Wellesley, Vassar. Smith and Bryn
Mawr have been founded, and SO many
great male universities in the north
and in England thrown open to them,
is duly recognized and felt among the
young women of the south. This wide
spread aspiration of southern young
women for broader culture finds express
sion in the eagerness with which they
are seeking admission into the best
of the higher institutions provided
for males, and this not because
co-education finds favor in the
south-for it is, perhaps, less encour-
aged here than in any other part of the
United States-but only because there
is no higher institution of learning for
women which provides for them the
extensive facilities and broad culture
furnished bv at least few institutions
for young men. Many feel that the
greatest educational needs of the south
to-day is an institution that will pro-
vide for young women as thorough an
education and as broad a culture as is
provided for young men at the Univer-
sit. If Virginia, the Vanderbilt, or
Johns Hopkins-an institution that will
not be in competition with any existing
female college in the south, but will
hold itself above them all by establish
ing and rigidly maintaining high condi-
ton of entrance as well as graduation,
and whose pride will be the high quail
ity of the work it does, not the number
of pupils it enrolls, though numbers
would also come in due course of time.
The active, earnest, vigorous young
womanhood of the south is demanding
such an institution. Surely a demand
SO just and need SO widely and
seriously felt can not go long unmet.
Where is the philanthropist who will
bless his own and succeeding genera
tons, and make himself immortal in
the good he will do, by giving the
young women of the south Smith
college. or a Wellesley. or Vassar?
Is it possible that million dollars
could be spent in any way where it
would accomplish more good than in
founding such an institution for the
daughters of those noble women of
whom we have written.-W. Il. Fillett,