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inevitable as was that first movement, which will bear the college woman, as it bears the college man, out of the fostering shelter of the college hall into the great welter of life, of full citizenship.... Since the colleges of America opened to women, nothing so vital to the nourishment of this spirit has happened as the formation of the College Equal Suffrage League.... There are certain definite things for which a college woman registers herself in joining this league. First, a direct return to the country of the energy which it has trained. A woman's whole education to-day is toward direct results. She has been educated away from the old indirect ideal of the boarding-school. There she was taught to be a persuasive ornament, now she is taught to be an individual mind, will and conscience and to use these in acting herself. I hold that there is no more graphic illustration of inconsistent waste than the spectacle of a college-trained woman falsifying her entire education by shying away from suffrage.... The time has gone by when a college woman can be allowed to be noncommittal on this subject. If she has not thought about equal suffrage she must do so now, exactly as persons of intelligence were compelled to think about slavery in the time of Garrison, or about the reformation in the time of Martin Luther. To those who try to get out of it it is not unfitting to quote Thomas Huxley's famous sentence: "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who dare not reason is a coward; he who can not reason is a fool."....

It devolves upon the college woman more than upon any other one type to face and conquer a retarding tendency which is becoming marked in this country. I refer to the anti-feminization movement. Dr. Stanley Hall has given voice to it in education; Dr. Lyman Abbott quavers about it in religion; the committee on tariff revision is an example of it in politics. When women sent a petition to the committee against raising the duties on certain necessities of life of which they were the chief consumers, the chairman said: "It doesn't make any difference whether these women send in a petition signed by 500 or 5,000 names, they will receive no consideration. Let them talk things over in their clubs and other organizations; this will occupy them and do no one any harm; but it will not affect the tariff." On the same day the committee accorded a deferential hearing to a deputation of lumbermen.... This discrimination against woman, the vague feeling that she has been allowed to get on too fast, to get out of control, that she has slipped into too large activities while the good man slept, has come upon us at the very time when Scandinavia and Germany and England are getting rid of their simian chivalry. It is notorious that America, which once was the progressive nation, has been for a generation in a comatose state in the matter of social ideas. It is high time that our college women should stand solid against the blind superstition, whose mother is fear and whose father is egoism, that women can not be trusted in public affairs....