Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost AdvocatesJohnson, Helen Kendrick
History
Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates
Johnson, Helen Kendrick
Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
The struggle of the "new" school, which was really as old as Hippocrates,
who said four hundred years before Christ that some remedies acted by the
rule of "contraries," and some by the rule of "similarity," was long and
hard compared with that of the entrance of woman upon the practice of
medicine, although the latter involved sex questions and the former only
forms, and professional prejudice did not die with woman's adoption of it.
Dr. Jacobi says: "We are perfectly well aware that industrial and
professional competition are entirely different matters from popular
sovereignty. But when we find the same instincts aroused, the same
opposition excited, the same arguments advanced, and the same
determination manifested, by trades unions, to exclude women from trades,
by learned societies to exclude them from professions, by universities to
exclude them from learning, and by voters to exclude them from the polls,
we cannot avoid asking whether the difference in the cases is not balanced
by the identity in the mental attitude of the opponents." The best trades
unions have admitted women to their protective and wage associations, or,
better still, have helped them to form their own; the worst trades unions,
the socialistic and anarchistic, have claimed for them the right to vote.
The learned societies are admitting them professionally as fast as they
make themselves worthy. The men who hold out against their admission to
men's universities are precisely the class of men who have been most
active in assisting to found for them equal colleges of their own, and
they are also the men who are most strenuous against their admission to
the polls. In medicine, while co-education is deemed better than
ignorance, the tendency is to separate the sexes in study as fast as
facilities can be made equal. The opponents of woman's progress and those
of woman suffrage are of opposite classes, and their mental attitudes are
entirely different. How much harm the struggle for "popular sovereignty"
for women has done in hindering the progress of industrial and
professional competition, can be judged somewhat by the success of the
latter and the failure of the former in the highest fields. It is a
significant fact that women do not avail themselves of opportunities open
to them in the professions to the extent that it has been claimed they
would. The medical examination advertised in January, 1896, by the New
York State Civil Service Commission for woman candidates, failed for lack
of applicants, although the salaries of women in the State hospitals range
from $1,000 to $1,500 a year.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account