hing she did was to fight Prussian
officialdom and win. In 1889 she opened _Real-Kurse fuer Maedchen und
Frauen_, classes where women could work at subjects not taught in
girls' schools, Latin for instance, and advanced mathematics; for the
State in Germany has always decided how much as well as how little
women may learn. It would not allow people as ignorant as Squeers to
keep a school because it offered an easy livelihood. It organised
women's education carefully and thoroughly in the admirable German
way; but it laid down the law from A to Z, which is also the German
way. When, therefore, Helene Lange opened her classes for women, the
officials came to her and said that she was doing an illegal thing.
She replied that her students were not schoolgirls under the German
school laws, but grown-up women free to learn what they needed and
desired. The officials said that an old law of 1837 would empower them
to close the classes by force if Helene Lange did not do so of her own
accord. After some reflection and in some anxiety she decided to go on
with them. By this time public opinion was on her side and came to her
assistance; for public opinion does count in Germany even with the
officials. The classes went on, and were changed in 1893 to
_Gymnasialkurse_. In 1896 the first German women passed the
Abiturienten examination, the difficult examination young men of
eighteen pass at the end of a nine years' course in one of the
classical schools. Even to-day you may hear German men argue that
women should not be admitted to universities because they have had no
classical training. Helene Lange was the first to prove that even
without early training women can prepare themselves for an academic
career. Her experiment led to the establishment of _Gymnasialkurse_ in
many German cities; and even to the admission of girls in some few
cases to boys' Gymnasium schools.

To-day Helene Lange and her associates are contending with the
schoolmasters, who desire to keep the management of girls' schools in
their own hands. She calls the _Hoehere Toechterschule_ the failure of
German school organisation, and she says that the difference of view
taken by men and women teachers as to the proper work of girls'
schools makes it most difficult to come to an understanding.
Consciously or not, men form an ideal of what they want and expect of
women, and try to educate them up to it; while women think of the
claims life may make on a girl, and