BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 
4i 
tion made as to rank, all classes must meet upon a common 
footing. Many are the daughters of very wealthy men, mer¬ 
chants, landed proprietors, and others; one of the teachers was 
the daughter of a landed proprietor. Even some of the teachers 
now in the school were former pupils, well-to-do, and would 
have no need to work but do so from preference. Even now 
in Germany it is quite common for girls of good families to 
secure positions as governesses or to help in the domestic work. 
“The girls’ schools of Hamburg give an ordinary good school 
education, but there is no ‘higher education’ of the women 
here, no colleges, and the universities are closed to them. Frau 
Ree considered that it was purely for a monetary reason, as it 
is scarcely possible for a man of education to get a living since 
there are so many educated men and few openings. They fear 
if the intellectual avenues are open to women that they will 
have even fewer opportunities than at present. Frau Ree said 
Germany was a century or so behind in this respect. She de¬ 
scribed the North German, the Prussian, as the representative 
of centuries of culture, very able and conscious of his thorough¬ 
ness in education, a little overbearing, but really of good stock. 
“She described the people of South Germany as lazy and 
of less active temperament. She thought that Wiebel would 
have helped me very little, and that there was nothing of spe¬ 
cial interest to me chemically at Hamburg. She described 
Ladenburg and his wife (she is a daughter of the botanist 
Pringsheim) as being extremely delightful and advanced peo¬ 
ple. 
“In speaking of the woman’s suffrage movement in Amer¬ 
ica, she said it had done harm, and that those women who were 
advanced could afford to wait, but that women were not as a 
rule prepared for it, nor fitted generally for the positions they 
claimed by suffrage. 
“The new building where the school is now was entered in 
1874. One feature I noticed about the school is the fact that 
very capable students are frequently paid to do the very finest 
art work. They were engaged in embroidering samples of the 
kind of work that can be done in the school. These samples 
are sent to museums, etc. They are at present preparing a set 
