Anna Dickinson, working for a pittance in the Philadelphia mint, and making speeches, on occasion, in behalf of the enslaved black man, was regarded as a nuisance. But Anna Dickinson on the platform, with impassioned speech and fervid moral earnestness pleading the cause of the slave before large audiences, and receiving one and two hundred dollars a night for the service—Anna Dickinson in the Connecticut and New Hampshire Republican campaigns, thrilling both States with her eloquence, and capturing both for Abraham Lincoln and Republicanism, became the heroine of the hour, and was hailed as the Joan of Arc of the century. The development of those years, and the impetus they gave to women, which has not yet spent itself, has been wonderfully manifested since that time. At the close of the war there was but one college open to women, and that was grand old Oberlin in Ohio. Vassar received its first class of students in September, 1865, and now the colleges and universities which admit women are more in number than those which reject them. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell graduated from a medical college in Geneva, N. Y., in 1849, and afterward had access to the highest instruction and the best _cliniques_ in Paris. She became the pioneer of the great host of women physicians and surgeons, who, since the war, have entered the ranks as medical practitioners, and have been thoroughly trained and duly qualified for their profession. Reverend Antoinette L. Brown was graduated from the theological school at Oberlin, Ohio, in 1850, and ordained in 1853. But not until after the war were theological schools opened to women in the Methodist, Unitarian, Universalist, Christian, and Free Baptist denominations. The United States Census of 1880 gave the number of women ministers as one hundred and sixty-five, resident in thirty-four States. During the last twenty-five years law schools have admitted women, and the National Census of 1880 states the number of women lawyers as seventy-five. The next Census will reveal a great increase in the numbers of women physicians, lawyers, and ministers.[165]