In 1886, the
American School of Classical Studies at Athens invited Wellesley
to become one of the cooperating colleges to sustain this school
and to enjoy its advantages. The invitation came quite unsolicited,
and was the first extended to a woman's college.
The schoolmen developing and expanding their Trivium and Quadrivium
at Oxford, Paris, Bologna, experienced no keener intellectual delights
than did their belated sisters of Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley.
But in order to understand the passion of their point of view,
we must remember that the higher education for which the women
of the nineteenth century were enthusiastic was distinctly an
education along scholarly and intellectual lines; this early and
original meaning of the term "higher education", this original and
distinguishing function of the woman's college, are in danger of
being blurred and lost sight of to-day by a generation that knew
not Joseph. The zeal with which the advocates of educational
and domestic training are trying to force into the curricula of
women's colleges courses on housekeeping, home-making, dressmaking,
dairy farming, to say nothing of stenography, typewriting, double
entry, and the musical glasses minus Shakespeare, is for the most
part unintelligible to the women who have given their lives to the
upbuilding of such colleges as Bryn Mawr, Smith, Mt.
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