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^ 355 2. This catching up with mail comes as SBA recovered from a serious collapse and partial paralysis suffered while in Auburn, New York, with Eliza Osborne on 1 July 1900. After giving her multiple “electric treatments,” a doctor there pronounced her ailment to be “a tired out body.” Anna Shaw and Lucy Anthony arrived on July 5 to escort her back to Rochester. She wrote nothing in her diary until July 22 and stayed home until September 1. (SBA diary, 1–5 July 1900, Film, 40:363ff.) Textual Notes¶2 ll. 6–7 England has had their full nand rightfulp share and right ••••••••• 161 • ECS to the Editor, NEW YORK TRIBUNE 1 No. 250 West Ninety-fourth-st., New-York September 3, 1900. To the Editor of The Tribune. Sir: In reply to Miss Walbridge’s 2 strictures on co-education I would say, first, that co-education accomplishes the best results for boys and girls alike for the development of character. As the lifework of many individuals of both sexes is essentially the same, there is no reason why their education should differ. Second—Thousands of men are at the head of hotels, where they must understand all departments of housekeeping; at the head of laundries, bakeries and restaurants; cooks and waiters in fashionable families and hotels, on yachts, railroads, in the army, the navy, on steamers, and in all engineering and exploring expeditions.Men are tailors,at the head of great mercantile establishments, making dresses and hats for women, as well as clothes for their own sex.Men are said to be more skilful than women in all these industries,and the devotees of fashion at the present time all demand tailor-made suits. Because thousands of men are thus engaged in what are called domestic employments, should all men in their college course be required to study cooking and sewing? Third—While a rapidly increasing number of women are crowding into all the trades and professions, as lawyers, doctors, preachers, presidents and professors in colleges, writers of history, novels, poetry, school books, articles for magazines and the daily press; artists, actors, typewriters, stenographers, clerks in courts, teachers in public schools, and in four States of the Union are the equals of men, crowned with all their civil and 25 july 1900 356 & political rights, members of the Legislature and jurors in the courts, is it necessary for all these classes of women to add to their collegiate course cooking, sewing, the care of children and nursing the sick? Fourth—Miss Walbridge asks if the masculine and feminine elements are the same.They are not the same,hence the importance that they should be always together and in perfect equilibrium. As Tennyson has well said: 3 Two heads in council, two beside the hearth, Two in the tangled business of the world, Two plummets dropped for one, to sound the abyss Of science and the mind. These great moral forces in humanity are as necessary to equilibrium as the positive and negative electricity, the centripetal and centrifugal forces in the material world. If we had the power to throw these forces out of equilibrium for five minutes,we would have material chaos,just as we have had moral chaos in all civilizations yet tried, because the feminine element has been unduly depressed and degraded, and until the equilibrium of these great moral forces is fully established, we shall never have perfect conditions. Fifth—In the main, woman’s work is identical with man’s; that is, looking at men and women as individuals,differing in tastes,capacities and destinies , and not as two distinct classes. They should have alike, the highest and broadest education, prepared to fill all positions. To circumscribe the sphere of all women to wifehood and motherhood, to home life, to cooking and sewing, is to take a very narrow view of their destiny. Hundreds of women never marry, keep house, take care of children, nor choose nursing as a profession, hence, why fit them only for four places when they already fill four thousand? A general and thorough collegiate education, for all women who have time and money, and a special course afterward for the lifework they choose, is the present custom for all students, and will no doubt continue. As a professor of mathematics or languages,a knowledge of logarithms and Latin idioms would prove of essential service to a professor of either sex, Miss Walbridge to the contrary notwithstanding. In social...

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