398 WOMAN IN SCIENCE 



logical discussion. But it is quite certain that a woman 

 can be a Queen Elizabeth or a Deborah or a Joan of Arc, 

 since this is not inference but a fact. ' ' * 



In like manner it is quite certain that, in spite of all 

 kinds of disabilities and prejudices and adverse legisla- 

 tion, there have been a large number of women who, in 

 every department of intellectual activity, have achieved 

 marked distinction and won imperishable renown for their 

 proscribed sex. It is a fact, which admits of no question, 

 that, notwithstanding their being debarred from all the 

 educational advantages so generously lavished upon the 

 dominant sex, women have since the days of Sappho and 

 Hypatia shown themselves the equals and often the su- 

 periors of men in the highest and noblest spheres of mental 

 achievement. 



Such being the case, what, we may ask, would have been 

 the result had women, from that splendid Heroic Period 

 of which Homer sings until the present, enjoyed all the 

 opportunities of mental development of which men have 

 systematically claimed the exclusive privilege ? 2 What 

 would now be their condition if, from the days of the 

 Muses who were but learned women apotheosized 

 women had never been deprived of their intellectual birth- 

 right and had been permitted to continue in the path so 

 auspiciously blazed by Corinna the victor over Pindar 

 and Arete, the splendor of Greece and the possessor of the 

 mind of Socrates and the tongue of Homer ? What would 



1 The Subjection of Women, p. 81, London, 1909. 



2 The late Mr. Gladstone asserts that ' ' It would be hard to dis- 

 cover any period of history or country of the world, not being Chris- 

 tian, in which they" women " stood so high as with the Greeks 

 of the Heroic Age" when the position of the Greek woman was so 

 remarkable and "*o elevated, both absolutely and in comparison with 

 what it became in the Historic Ages of Greece and Eome amidst 

 their elaborate civilization." Studies on Homer and the Homeric 

 Age, Vol. II, p. 479 et seq., Oxford, 1858. Cf. also the same au- 

 thor's Juventus Mundi, p. 405 et seq., London, 1869. 



