WOMEN IN SCIENCE 335 



of the knowledge and arts of her time that cannot be sur- 

 passed. 



A non-Catholic writer, Mrs. Putnam, says of this period of 

 woman's culture : 



"No institution of Europe has ever won for woman the free- 

 dom and development that she enjoyed in the convent in early 

 days. The modern college for women only feebly reproduces 

 it, since the college for women has arisen at a time when col- 

 leges in general are under a cloud. The lady-abbess, on the 

 other hand, was part of the two great social forces, feudalism 

 and the Church. She was treated as an equal by men of her 

 class, as witnessed by the letters we have from Popes and em- 

 perors. She had the stimulus of competition with men in 

 executive capacity, in scholarship, and in artistic production, 

 since her work was freely set before the general public." 



And this continued down to the time of the religious up- 

 heaval which we know as the Reformation. Then convents 

 were closed and often destroyed, their revenue suppressed and 

 the nuns driven from the land. And so the education of 

 women came to an end. A writer, describing the effects of 

 the dissolution of the monasteries and convents, says : "The 

 destruction by Henry VIII of the conventual schools, where 

 the female population, the rich, as well as the poor, found 

 their only teachers, was the absolute extinction of any syste- 

 matic education of women for a long period." 



The strangest and saddest result of the suppression of the 

 convents was that men profited by the loss which women sus- 

 tained. Thus the nunnery of St. Radegunde, with its revenues 

 and possessions, went to found another college at Oxford, 

 while the convents of Bromhall and Lillechurch went to found 

 another at Cambridge. In a few short years the great work 

 of centuries for women was undone, and women were left 

 little better educational facilities than when the Anglo-Saxon 

 nuns first began their work. During the reign of Queen 

 Elizabeth not a school was founded for the education of 

 women. And the same spirit was shown throughout English 

 history. The public schools of Boston, founded by the Puri- 

 tans in 1642, were not open to girls until a century and a half 

 later, and then for merely the elementary branches and for but 

 a half year. Girls did not have the benefit of a high school 



