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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

will refund any overcharges made. These magnanimous reductions in the cost of travel are due to the personal efforts of A. Yermolow, Minister of Agriculture, to the proprietors and administrations of the districts having works, and to the officers of municipalities along the routes of the excursions.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND EDUCATION.[1]

By HELEN KENDRICK JOHNSON.

IN 1848 a Woman-Suffrage Convention, called by Mrs. Stanton. Mrs. Mott, and others, issued a "Declaration of Sentiments," which was an imitation of the famous Declaration of Independence. It constituted an elaborate indictment of man as the oppressor of woman, and the suffrage leaders of to-day still hold to it as their broad exposition of principles. The seventh count in the indictment was, "He has denied her facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her."

Among the resolutions passed in an early suffrage convention was one demanding "equal rights in the universities," and the first petition presented by suffrage advocates contained a clause asking that entrance to men's colleges be obtained for women by legal enactment. We note that this is far from being a demand for education for women equal to that given to men in the universities. Men have founded colleges for women, men and women have worked together in securing for woman every facility and opportunity for education of the highest grade; but the "barrier of sex" is not broken down in education. Bat few of the older colleges for men admit women, and those few, so far as I have learned from conversation with members of their faculties, speak of the arrangement as an experiment, and give the need for economy, combined with a desire to assist women, as a reason for making that experiment. Meantime the knocking at men's literary portals by suffrage advocates has gone on as vigorously as if women could obtain education in no other way.

In the first suffrage convention ever held in Massachusetts these two resolutions were adopted: "That political rights acknowledge no sex, and therefore the word 'male' should be stricken from every State Constitution"; and "that every effort to educate woman, until you accord to her her rights, and arouse her conscience by the weight of her responsibilities, is futile, and a waste of labor."


  1. From Woman and the Republic. By Helen Kendrick Johnson. In press of D. Appleton & Co.