The Intellectual Promise of Women in the Frontier

It is a fact that cannot be denied, that in this land of boasted freedom, women are denied privileges that are freely granted them in other countries. In France, Germany, Austria, Russia and England, institutions of learning are being opened to women on the same terms as the opposite sex. Particularly is this the case in medical schools. Grave professors and learned savants see no impropriety in this. On the contrary, they approve it. Any course of intellectual study will improve them as well as men. Knowledge of sciences unsexes nobody. Why should law, custom or fashion deter her from cultivating her intellect that she may be the better fitted to fulfill her earthly mission? Those who fear that women will unsex themselves by entering the learned professions are the very ones that drive them to it, by forcing them to become servants for less wages than men. We drive them to the factory, to the sewing room, to the shop and the kitchen—they must perform this drudgery or starve. There is no escape from it but in matrimony, and nine times out of ten, marriage is only exchanging a hard contractor to become the bond servant of a still harder taskmaster. A vast majority of men when they marry do it for a selfish motive; for economy's sake; to have their trifling wants attended to; they want a nurse, a servant; they want ownership in somebody; 'tis not a wife, a companion, an equal they are looking for. Now there is a remedy for all this false, heartless life. There is no reason, nothing but prejudice, to prevent them from succeeding in all the professions, all the sciences, the fine arts, in fact all the higher callings of life, if they will take the same course of study that men take to fit themselves for it.