[Sidenote:  Women in the professions.]

Since then women’s right to any higher education which they may wish to embrace has been permanently assured.  As early as 1868 Edinburgh opened its courses in pharmacy to women.  In 1895 there were already 264 duly qualified female physicians in Great Britain.  In many schools they are allowed to study with men, as at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Edinburgh; there are four medical schools for women only.  We find women now actively engaged in agriculture, apiculture, poultry-keeping, horticulture; in library work and indexing; in stenography; in all trades and professions.  The year 1893 witnessed the first appointment of women as factory inspectors, two being chosen that year in London and in Glasgow.  Nottingham had chosen women as sanitary inspectors in 1892.  Thus in about two decades woman has advanced farther than in the combined ages which preceded.  Before these very modern movements we may say that the stage was the only profession which had offered them any opportunity of earning their living in a dignified way.  It seems that a Mrs. Coleman, in 1656, was the first female to act on the stage in England; before that, all female parts had been taken by boys or young men.  A Mrs. Sanderson played Desdemona in 1660 at the Clare Market Theatre.  In 1661, as we may see from Pepys’ Diary (Feb. 12, 1661), an actress was still a novelty; but within a few decades there were already many famous ones.

[Sidenote:  Woman suffrage in England]

We have seen that now woman has obtained practically all rights on a par with men.  There are still grave injustices, as in divorce; but the battle is substantially won.  One right still remains for her to win, the right, namely, to vote, not merely on issues such as education—­this privilege she has had for some time—­but on all political questions; and connected with this is the right to hold political office.  We may fittingly close this chapter by a review of the history of the agitation for woman suffrage.

In the year 1797 Charles Fox remarked:  “It has never been suggested in all the theories and projects of the most absurd speculation, that it would be advisable to extend the elective suffrage to the female sex.”  Yet five years before Mary Wollstonecraft had published her Vindication of the Rights of Women.  Presently the writings of Harriet Martineau upon political economy proved that women could really think on politics.

We may say that the general public first began to think seriously on the matter after the epoch-making Reform Act of 1832.  This celebrated measure admitted L10 householders to the right to vote and carefully excluded females; yet it marked a new era in the awakening of civic consciousness:  women had taken active part in the attendant campaigns; and the very fact that “male persons” needed now to be so specifically designated in the bill, whereas hitherto “persons” and “freeholders” had been deemed sufficient, attests the recognition of a new factor in political life.