At the time in question, the medical profession took the ground that women might enjoy the benefit of a little medical education but they were denied the facilities for any thorough training or for any research work.  Mary Putnam secured her graduate degree from the great medical school of the University of Paris, being the first woman who had been admitted to the school since the fourteenth century.  Returning after six years of thorough training, she did much during the remaining years of her life to secure and to maintain for women physicians the highest possible standard of training and of practice.  It was natural that with this experience of the requirement of equal facilities for women in her own work, she should always have been a believer in the extension of equal facilities for any citizen’s work for which, after experience, women might be found qualified.  She was, therefore, an ardent advocate of equal suffrage.

One needs but recall the admirable intellectual work of women to-day to wonder at the imbecility of those who assert that women are intellectually the inferiors of men.  Madame Curie in science, Miss Tarbell in political and economic history, Miss Jane Addams in sociological writings and practice, the Rev. Anna Howard Shaw in the ministry, Mrs. Hetty Green in business, are a few examples of women whose mental ability ought to bring a blush to the Old Guard.  Mrs. Harriman and Mrs. Sage, who manage properties of many millions, are denied the privilege of voting in regard to the expenditure of their taxes; but every ignorant immigrant can cast a vote, thanks to the doctrine that the political acumen of a man, however degraded, is superior to that of a woman, however great her genius—­an admirable obedience to the saw in Ecclesiasticus that the badness of men is better than the goodness of women.  Let me quote again from Professor Thomas:  “The men have said that women are not intelligent enough to vote, but the women have replied that more of honesty than of intelligence is needed in politics at present, and that women certainly do not represent the most ignorant portion of the population.  They claim that voting is a relatively simple matter anyway, that political freedom ’is nothing but the control of those who do make politics their business by those who do not,’ and that they have enough intelligence ’to decide whether they are properly governed, and whom they will be governed by.’  They point out also that already, without the ballot, they are instructing men how to vote and teaching them how to run a city; that women have to journey to the legislature at every session to instruct members and committees at legislative hearings, and that it is absurd that women who are capable of instructing men how to vote should not be allowed to vote themselves.  To the suggestion that they would vote like their husbands and that so there would be no change in the political situation, women admit that they would sometimes vote