Page:Women Wanted.djvu/296

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WOMEN WANTED

Paris. In 1917 Germany had its first woman professor of music, Fraulein Marie Bender, at the Royal High School of Music in Charlottenburg. And in the same year England had appointed its first woman to an open university chair, when Dr. Caroline Spurgeon was made professor of English literature at Bedford College.

In each country like this, where the opposing professional lines begin to show a weakened resistance, surely, sometimes silently, but irresistibly and inevitably, the new woman movement is taking possession. Next to medicine the legal profession, one may say, is at present the scene of active operations. The woman movement in law, as in medicine, began for all the world in the United States. It was in 1872 that one Mrs. Myra Bradwell of Chicago knocked at the tight shut doors of the legal profession in the State of Illinois. Of course her request was refused. Public opinion blushed that a woman should be guilty of such effrontery, and the learned judges of the court rebuked the ambitious lady with their finding that: "The natural and proper timidity which belongs to the female sex unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. And the harmony of interests which belong to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband." Syracuse University, which gave to the world the first woman physician, also graduated Belva A. Lockwood, who in 1879 was the first woman to be permitted to practise law before the