IV. Another argument that is made much of is the intellectual inferiority of woman. For ages women were allowed nor higher education than reading, writing, and simple arithmetic, often not even these; yet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Sand, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Jane Austen, and some scores of others did work which showed them to be the peers of any minds of their day. And if no woman can justly claim to have attained an eminence such as that of Shakespeare in letters or of Darwin in science, we may question whether Shakespeare would have been Shakespeare or Darwin Darwin if the society which surrounded them had insisted that it was a sin for them to use their minds and that they should not presume to meddle with knowledge. When a girl for the first time in America took a public examination in geometry, in 1829, men wagged their heads gravely and prophesied the speedy dissolution of family and state. To the list of women whose service for their fellows would have been lost if the old-time barriers had been maintained, may be added the name of the late Dr. Mary Putnam Jacobi. Mary Putnam secured her preliminary medical education in the early '60's, and found herself keenly troubled and dissatisfied at the inadequacy of the facilities extended to women for the study of medicine. She insisted that if women practitioners were to be, as she expressed it, "turned loose" upon the community with license to practise, they should, not only as a matter of justice to themselves but of protection for the women and children whose lives they would have in their hands, be properly qualified. At the time in question, the medical profession took the ground that women might enjoy the benefit of a little medical education but they were denied the facilities for any thorough training or for any research work. Mary Putnam secured her graduate degree from the great medical school of the University of Paris, being the first woman who had been admitted to the school since the fourteenth century. Returning after six years of thorough training, she did much during the remaining years of her life to secure and to maintain for women physicians the highest possible standard of training and of practice. It was natural that with this experience of the requirement of equal facilities for women in her own work, she should always have been a believer in the extension of equal facilities for any citizen's work for which, after experience, women might be found qualified. She was, therefore, an ardent advocate of equal suffrage.