The close of that century also saw women entering into rivalry with the men in learned professions. Female practitioners of medicine, such as Dr. Mary Walker, had been known for some time, and the last few years have seen, even in the most conservative States, women admitted to the bar, following in the footsteps of Mrs. Belva Lockwood, to contend with their male rivals in forensic eloquence and subtleties. The professorial chairs of such institutions of learning as Vassar College, the forerunner of the many splendid educational centres for female training that have sprung up throughout our land, were filled for the most part by women, themselves the product of those educational institutions; and even some of the universities hitherto confined to the education of the male youth of our land opened their doors to women, while coeducation already had its notable strongholds. Everywhere there was granted, and gladly granted, to womanhood all that it asked in concerted demand; "Woman's Rights," as far as claimed by the consensus of womanly thought, had won all that its advocates could desire in the matter of recognition. The change came with wonderful suddenness; yet it was so natural in its workings, and the national mind had so long been prepared for it, that it bore with it no sense of strangeness. Such a personality as that of Mrs. Hetty Green, for example, the richest woman in America, financier and woman of affairs, holding directing interests in many large corporations, fostering and guiding some of the greatest enterprises in the world of finance, and doing all of her own responsibility and unaided by advice--such a personality as this would have seemed incredible fifty years ago, but to-day is hardly worthy of more than passing note. The entrance of women into the sphere of business, competing with men upon their own ground, matching their wits against those of their masculine competitors and remaining unworsted in the struggle, excites no remark but is accepted as a thing entirely natural to the conditions of modern life. Yet in its youth the century whose age beheld these things would have maintained, even with acrimony, that they were undesirable impossibilities.