Previous to the enactment of this law, however, women assistants had served for a year at the Willard Asylum for the chronic insane,[135] and in 1888, two other women, Dr. Steadman and Dr. Wakefield, were appointed in the New York City Asylum on Blackwell’s Island. Similar appointments have been voluntarily made in ten other States, and more than twenty women are now serving as physicians in insane asylums.[136] The latest appointment was the greatest innovation, for it was in a Southern State, Virginia, at Staunton, and a Southern candidate, Miss Dr. Haynes, was appointed.[137] The _Springfield Republican_ concludes its notice of this event (see note), with the remark: “This reform is steadily advancing, and it will not be long before the opposition to it will be as obsolete as it is now indecent.”[138] Thus the last word, (so far) like the first in this long controversy, is indecency. And it is characteristic of the world-old social position of women that it should be so; since women have in the mass, never been publicly and officially regarded as individuals, with individual rights, tastes, liberties, privileges, duties, and capacities, but rather as symbols, with collective class functions, of which not the least was to embody the ideals of decorum of the existing generation, whatever these might happen to be. These ideals once consigned to women, as to crystal vases, it became easier for men to indulge their vagrant liberty, while yet leaving undisturbed the general framework of order and society. But all the more imperative was it, that the standard of behavior, thought, and life for women should be maintained fixed and immovable. Any symptom of change in the status of women seems, therefore, always to have excited a certain terror. This is analogous to the fierce conservatism of savage communities, ready to punish by death the slightest deviation from established custom, because, as Mr. Bagehot observes, without such strenuous care their entire social structure is liable to fall to pieces. It is perfectly evident from the records, that the opposition to women physicians has rarely been based upon any sincere conviction that women could not be instructed in medicine, but upon an intense dislike to the idea that they should be so capable. Failure could be pardoned them, but—at least so it was felt in anticipation—success could not. Apart from the absurd fear of pecuniary injury, which was only conceivable so long as women were treated, not as so many more individuals in the community, but as a separate class, and a class alien to men of their own race and blood and even family,—apart from this consideration, the arguments advanced have always been purely sentimental. There has always been a sentimental and powerful opposition to every social change that tended to increase the development and complexity of the social organism, by increasing the capacities and multiplying the relations of its members. The opposition to women