2 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



to secure what we now consider her inalienable rights to 

 things of the mind, it is not necessary to review the history 

 of female education, or to enter into the details of her 

 gradual progress forward and upward in the New and 

 Old Worlds. But it is necessary that we should know 

 what was the attitude of mankind toward woman's educa- 

 tion during the leading epochs of the world's history and 

 what were, until almost our own day, the opinions of men 

 scholars and rulers included respecting the nature and 

 the duties of woman and what was considered, almost by 

 all, her proper sphere of action. Understanding the nu- 

 merous and cruel handicaps which she had so long to en- 

 dure, the opposition to her aspirations which she had to 

 encounter, even during the most enlightened periods of the 

 world's history, and that, too, from those who should have 

 been the first to extend to her a helping hand, we can the 

 better appreciate the extent of her recent intellectual en- 

 franchisement and of the value of the work she has accom- 

 plished since she has been free to exercise those God-given 

 faculties which were so long held in restraint. 



The first great bar to the mental development of woman 

 was the assumed superiority of the male sex, the opinion, 

 so generally accepted, that, in the scheme of creation, 

 woman was but "an accident, an imperfection, an error of 

 nature"; that she was either a slave conducing to man's 

 comfort, or, at best, a companion ministering to his amuse- 

 ment and pleasure. 



From the earliest times she was regarded as man's in- 

 ferior and relegated to a subordinate position in society. 

 She was, so it was averred, but a diminutive man a kind 

 of mean between the lord of creation and the rest of the 

 animal kingdom. By some she was considered a kind of 

 half man; by others, as was cynically asserted, she was 

 looked upon as a mas occasionatus a man marred in the 

 making. She was, both mentally and physically, what 

 Spencer would call a man whose evolution had been ar- 



