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Reade, Charles, 1814-1884

"A Woman-Hater"

This chain, he
said, has never been really broken. There was scarcely a great foreign
university without some female student of high reputation. There were
such women at Vienna and Petersburg; many such at Zurich. At Montpellier
Mademoiselle Doumergue was carrying all before her, and Miss Garrett and
Miss Mary Putnam at Paris, though they were weighted in the race by a
foreign language. Let the male English physician pass a stiff examination
in scientific French before he brayed so loud. He had never done it yet.
This, he said, is not an age of chimeras; it is a wise and wary age,
which has established in all branches of learning a sure test of ability
in man or woman--public examination followed by a public report. These
public examinations are all conducted by males, and women are passing
them triumphantly all over Europe and America, and graduate as doctors in
every civilized country, and even in half-civilized Russia.
"He then went into our own little preliminary examination, and gave the
statistics: In Latin were examined 55 men and 3 women: 10 men were
rejected, but no women; 7 men were respectable, 7 _optimi,_ or
first-rate, 1 woman _bona,_ and 1 _optima.


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