'Shall they be admitted
into the professions?' have been as hotly contested as has
been the question of their humanity."
--Gamble.

*** "There existed at the same time in this celebrated city a
class of women, the glory of whose intellectual brilliancy
still survives; and when Alcibiades drew around him the
first philosophers and statesmen of Greece, 'it was a virtue
to applaud Aspasia;' of whom it has been said that she
lectured publicly on rhetoric and philosophy with such
ability that Socrates and Alcibiades gathered wisdom from
her lips, and so marked was her genius for statesmanship
that Pericles afterward married her and allowed her to
govern Athens, then at the height of its glory and power.
Numerous examples might be cited in which Athenian women
rendered material aid to the state."
--Gamble.

It was maintained that her "sphere" was clearly defined, and that it
was purely and solely an animal one; and worst of all it was stoutly
asserted that her greatest crime had always been a desire for wisdom,
and that it was this desire which brought the penalty of labor and death
into this world.*

With such a belief it is hardly strange that the education of girls was
looked upon as a crime; and with such a record it is almost incredible
effrontery that enables the Church to-day to claim credit for the
education of women,** If she were to educate every woman living, free
of charge, in every branch of known knowledge, she could not repay woman
for what she has deprived her of in the past, or efface the indignity
she has already offered.***

* See Morley's "Diderot," p. 76; Lea's "Sacerdotal
Celibacy;" Lecky's "European Morals."

** See Appendix H, 1 to 4.

*** Lecky, "European Morals," p. 310.

A prominent clergyman of the Church of England, who was recently much
honored in this country, lately said, in a sermon to women: "There are
those who think a woman can be taught logic. This is a mistake. Men are
logical, women are not." He was too modest to give his proofs. It seemed
to me strange that he did not mention the doctrines of the trinity and
vicarious atonement, or a few of the miracles, as the result of logic in
the masculine mind. And I could not help thinking at the time that a man
whose mental furniture was chiefly composed of the thirty-nine articles
and the Westminster Catechism would naturally be a prof