There are those who consider -- and I agree with them -- that the education of boys under the age of twelve years ought to be entrusted, as much as possible, to women. Let me ask -- of what period of youth and manhood does it not hold true? I pity the ignorance and conceit of the man who fancies that he has nothing left to learn from cultivated women. I should have thought that the very mission of woman was to be, in the highest sense, the educator of man, from infancy to old age; that that was the work towards which all the God-given capacities of women pointed.

Lecture on Thrift. 1869.