In point of fact, as we need often to be reminded, the fine talk about an educated common people referred for the most part to boys alone until near the middle of the nineteenth century.

All that women needed to know it was believed "came by nature." Much of it did come by imitation and unconscious absorption, aided by the occasional better training of exceptionally able and fortunate women; but the general illiteracy of women was both a personal handicap and a social poverty.

It is not true, however, as some have said, that women have been "left out of the human race" and have had to "break in" to man's more highly organized life in order to taste civilization.

Men and women have stood too close in affection, girls too often "took after their fathers," the family, even under the despotic rule of men, bound all other social institutions to itself too vitally for the sexes to be wholly separated in thought and activity.

Even when most women had to make a cross instead of signing their names on official documents and could not have passed the fourth-grade examinations of a modern school, they often became truly cultured and by reason of the very demands of family and group life upon them.