study in the universities has never been withheld from women.
From the beginning, women could take the _Abiturientenexamen_ (the
university entrance examinations) with the young men before an examination
commission. All departments are open to women. The number of women
university students in France is 3609; the male students number 38,288.
Women school teachers control the whole public school system for girls. In
the French schools for girls most of the teachers are women; the
superintendents are also women. The ecclesiastical educational
system,--which still exists in secular guise,--is naturally, so far as the
education of girls is concerned, entirely in the hands of women. The
salaries of the secular women teachers in the first three classes of the
elementary schools are equal to those of the men. The women teachers in
the _lycees_ (_agregees_) are trained in the Seminary of Sevres and in the
universities. Their salaries are lower than those of the men. In 1907 the
first woman teacher in the French higher institutions of learning was
appointed,--Madame Curie, who holds the chair of physics in the Sorbonne,
in Paris. In the provincial universities women are lecturers on modern
languages. There are no women preachers in France. _Dr. jur._ Jeanne
Chauvin was the first woman lawyer, being admitted to the bar in 1899.
To-day women lawyers are practicing in Paris and in Toulouse.

In the government service there are women postal clerks, telegraph clerks,
and telephone clerks,--with an average daily wage of 3 francs (60 cents).
Only the subordinate positions are open to women. The same is true of the
women employed in the railroad offices. Women have been admitted as clerks
in some of the administrative departments of the government and in the
public poor-law administration. Women are employed as inspectors of
schools, as factory inspectors, and as poor-law administrators. There is a
woman member of each of the following councils: the Superior Council of
Education, the Superior Council of Labor, and the Superior Council of
Public Assistance (_Conseil Superior d'Education_, _Conseil Superior du
Travail_, _Conseil Superior de l'Assistance Publique_). The first woman
court interpreter was appointed in the Parisian Court of Appeals in 1909.

The French woman is an excellent business woman. However, the women
employed in commercial establishments, being organized as yet to a small
extent, earn no more than women laborers,--70 to