The most notorious controversy in the history of woman's education began modestly, virtually in private, on a December afternoon in 1872. The occasion was the regular monthly meeting of the New England Woman's Club, a group that numbered Julia Ward Howe and Lucy Stone among its members and that, like them, was inclined toward literate discourse, genteel reform, and the moderate wing of the woman's rights movement. The precipitatingincident was a guest lecture given by Edward Hammond Clarke, a prominent Boston physician. The ultimate result was debate so bitter that years later G. Stanley Hall referred to it as a “holy war.”