WOMAN'S LONG STRUGGLE 63 



age of women. Never in history had they greater freedom 

 of action in things of the mind; never were they, except 

 probably in the case of the English and German abbesses 

 of the Middle Ages, treated with more marked deference 

 and consideration or fairness ; never were their efforts more 

 highly appreciated or more generously rewarded, and never 

 was their success more highly and enthusiastically ap- 

 plauded. Temporal and spiritual rulers, princes and car- 

 dinals, Popes and emperors vied with one another in paying 

 just tribute to woman's genius as well as to woman's vir- 

 tue. The nun in the cloister as well as the lady in the 

 palace shared in the general enthusiasm for learning, and 

 they enjoyed throughout the peninsula the same opportuni- 

 ties as men and received the same recognition for their 

 work. Everywhere the intellectual arena was open to them 

 on the same terms as to men. Incapacity and not sex was 

 the only bar to entrance. 



But the men of those days, especially scholars of the 

 type of Bembo, Politian and Ariosto, were liberal and 

 broad-minded men, who never for a moment imagined that 

 a woman was out of her sphere or unsexed because she wore 

 a doctor's cap or occupied a university chair. And far 

 from stigmatizing her as a singular or strong-minded 

 woman, they recognized her as one who had but enhanced 

 the graces and virtues of her sex by the added attractions 

 of a cultivated mind and a developed intellect. Not only 

 did she escape the shafts of satire and ridicule, which are 

 so frequently aimed at the educated woman of to-day, but 

 she was called into the councils of temporal and spiritual 

 rulers as well. 



Woe betide the ill-advised misogynist who should venture 

 to declaim against the inferiority of the female sex, or to 

 protest against the honors which an appreciative and a 

 chivalrous age bestowed upon it with so lavish a hand. The 

 women of Italy, unlike those of other nations, knew how 

 to defend themselves, and were not afraid to take, when 



