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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
Woman’s College of Brown have an organic connection with a university for men; some like Tufts College have after establishment opened their doors to women on the same terms as men, while many others, like Michigan University, Boston University, Cornell and nearly all the universities and colleges of the Western States, like the youngest of all, the great Chicago University, have been co-educational from their very foundation. Of our older universities, Brown in 1891, and Yale and the University of Pennsylvania in 1892, are the latest to open their post-graduate courses and degrees to women. Harvard, the oldest of all, seems to stand alone in its refusal to recognize officially the eligibility of women for the Harvard Annex, so-called, has no official connection with the university.
Nearly all the universities and colleges of Canada are open to women, and all those of Australia. In India the universities of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Opportunities are also increasing in Japan for the higher education of women.
Since Oberlin College in Ohio granted, in 1838, apparently the first collegiate diploma ever given to a woman in this country to this time, when in nearly every civilized country women may obtain degrees on the same terms as men, how great has been the advance! And nearly all this advance has been made within thirty years.
II. PROFESSIONS AND OCCUPATIONS OPEN TO WOMEN.
It naturally follows that the professions should be entered by women. Apparently the medical profession was the first sought by her. Sixty years ago the first woman medical student began her course of study, and now countless thousands of women practitioners of the healing art are scattered over the world, pursuing their profession with most signal success. In the East Indian zenanas , the homes of the helpless foot-bound Chinese, as in the homes and hospitals of Europe and America, they are'doing a work that no man could possibly accomplish.
The profession of theology has attracted fewer women, and it has been less easy for them to obtain recognition as pastors and preachers, but the theological schools of Switzerland, and some of those in the United States, notably those of the Unitarian and Methodist Episcopal churches, admit women as students. There are ordained women preachers in the Baptist, Congregational, Universalist, Unitarian, “ Christian,” Protestant, Methodist, and Primitive Methodist denominations, and over three hundred and fifty women preachers among the Society of Friends. There are perhaps seven hundred women preachers to-day in the United States.
The legal profession was the last of the three so-called learned professions to be opened to women; not because of reluctance on the part of the courts, but because women did not so early apply for admission. Although isolated instances may be cited from the Roman Calphurnia to our own time of women who have pleaded causes in court, it was not till 1869 that a woman was formally admitted as an attorney and counselor at law. To the United States belongs this honor. Mrs. Arabella A. Mansfield was admitted without objection to the bar of the Supreme Court of Iowa in that year (1869). About the same time women students were received into the law schools of Washington University, St. Louis, and the Union College of Law at Chicago. There are now not less than eleven law schools in the United States open to women. Twenty-five States and Territories admit women to the bar. As to the rest we cannot safely say that they exclude women, for as a mutter of fact no woman has as yet applied, except in Virginia, which has for three years steadfastly refused to grant admission to a lady lawyer. There are probably over two hundred women lawyers in the United States to-day, nine of whom are admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States.
The universities of Paris, Brussels and Zurich have within five or six years graduated women from their law departments. The three graduates at Paris have not applied for admission to the bar. At Zurich Dr. Emilie Kempin, although denied admission to the bar, is a lecturer upon law in the university. Dr. Marie Popelin, a graduate in law at Brussels, has been formally denied admission to the bar. Italy,