Now, however, the movement for women had widened and reached Philadelphia, where two schools were started. One of these, the Penn Medical School, ran a permanently unenviable career of unfitness, and was finally extinguished. The other, the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, was founded in 1850, and after a long and precarious period of struggle, finally touched upon a solid basis of medical realities, and thence began its prosperous modern career. In the mean time, and fortunately for the cause, a new departure had been taken in several other directions. The Gregory School had been founded with the avowed intention of educating women for midwives; and it did not succeed even in this limited aim, because it was either ignorant of or indifferent to the rigid system of education imposed, wherever, as in Europe, midwives are recognized and educated. In America, where hostility to class distinctions is so profound as to interfere with the recognition of even the intellectual distinctions which are alone just,—it was probably a foregone conclusion that the various ranks in medicine which exist in European countries would never here become officially established.[43] But a startlingly long step was taken at a stride, when, thirty years after the pæan of victory had been sounded over the complete suppression of female midwifes, so that not even this corner of possible medicine might remain in possession of women,—that then, half a dozen women, unknown to each other, and widely separated in this immense country, should appear almost simultaneously upon the scene, and demand the opportunity to be educated as full physicians. Their history marks a fifth period in the movement. The first of this remarkable group of women was Harriet K. Hunt of Boston.