Abstract
THE adequate provision of secondary and higher education for English girls and women is to be regarded as one of the accomplishments of the latter half of the nineteenth century. In 1850, for instance, the popular idea here and elsewhere was that women were intellectually incapable of benefiting by higher instruction. To quote Dr. Leslie Waggener, of the University of Texas, “it was seriously questioned whether the ‘female’ mind could untangle the intricacies of pure mathematics, could appreciate the abstruse speculations of metaphysics, or could follow, step by step, the inductions of a scientific investigation.” Fifty years' experience has, however, demonstrated the complete fallacy of this preconception. Speaking at the Cambridge University Extension summer meeting in 1900, Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, principal of Newnham College, said of higher education for women, “I do not think its desirability is any longer seriously doubted by anyone who has looked into the facts, and whose opinion on the question is worth considering.” Similarly, President Eliot, of Harvard College, in an address in 1896, referring to the university over which he presides, remarked, “it is a quarter of a century since the college doors were opened to women. Since that time, where girls and boys have been educated together, it has become an historical fact that women have made rapid strides, and captured a greater number of honours in proportion to their number than men.”
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SIMMONS, A. The Higher Education of Women . Nature 69, 186–189 (1903). https://doi.org/10.1038/069186a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/069186a0