70 State Papers and Addresses

CELEBRATION OF ONE HUNDRED YEARS FOUNDATION
AND COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES

St. Mary's Seminary
Leonardtown
June 12, 1939

IT is a sincere personal pleasure for me to be here with you today, at
Maryland's oldest institution for the education of young women. And as
Governor of the State, it is a gratifying thought that Maryland was in the
first rank of the States to recognize the desirability of just such an institution
as yours, devoted to the educational needs of young women exclusively.

One might expect to find, somewhere, evidences of "gray hair" in and around
an institution that is celebrating the one hundredth anniversary of its founding.
Instead, one is met here only with evidences of a spirit of youth and progress,
a spirit that apparently looks to the past with due reverence and a desire to
learn from what has gone before, but that is equally concerned with the years
that lie ahead.

Women have come to play such an important part in the public life of
today that we -accept such participation as natural and expected. Young women
like yourselves, graduating this year from colleges all over the country, will
step forth into a world where woman's activities are a constituent part of the
everyday life of any community, where women are expected to contribute their
share towards the proper functioning of everything that concerns the public
good.

Such was not the case, however, to any great extent, even as late as the
days of the World War. Prior to that time, instances of participation in
public affairs by women were so rare as to evoke public comment. Going back,
therefore, one hundred years, to the time when St. Mary's Female Seminary
was first established, by an act of the Maryland Legislature, one can only
conjecture as to the local conditions of public thought here in old St. Mary's
County, that could prompt such a forward-looking move as the creation of an
institution of learning for women exclusively.

When such a forward-looking step was to be taken, however, it seems to
me that there could be no more fitting place for it than right here in St. Mary's
County, home of the historic Colony whose members were to set a precedent
for all the world in the independence of their thinking, and in their attitude
towards their fellow-man.

I have no doubt that many Marylanders were deeply surprised when they
read about St. Mary's Female Seminary in a newspaper article a week ago.
As the article said, your Institution is "still strangely little known to Mary-
landers at large, " but, although there will be thousands of young women
graduated this year from colleges perhaps much better known than St. Mary's,
none of these graduates from other institutions will go forth better equipped
to become useful citizens of their country than you young ladies of St. Mary's.

It is interesting to note the extremely brief, but thoroughly descriptive
memorandum concerning this Institution that appears in the Maryland Manual,
the official compendium of Legal, Historical and Statistical Information re-