I hope your life is getting easier and happier every year, dear child. Tell me all about yourself some day....
Yours affectionately,
S. J.-B.”
She was planning a new edition of her book, Medical Women, at this time, and she wrote to Mr. Osler to ask for statistics as to the percentage of women, as compared with men, who had so far passed the examinations of the University of London. In reply to his information she writes:
“Feb. 3rd. 1884.
Dear Mr. Osler,
I can hardly express strongly enough how grateful I am both to you and to Mr. Milman, for the very valuable tables of numbers sent me....
Please do not doubt for a moment that I quite agree with you that it is unfair to compare ‘picked women’ (i.e. really in earnest) and ‘unpicked men’. I have said so repeatedly. But you must remember that a very few years ago I had a very hard fight to get it admitted as a possibility that some women might do as good work as men. In ‘Visits to American Schools’ (published 1867) I wrote with at least sufficient diffidence,—‘Whether most women would be capable of the amount of study required, for instance, for one of our University degrees, I really do not know,’ etc. My one contention has been all along,—‘Give a fair field and try’—and no one can exaggerate the gratitude that all women ought to feel to the University of London for giving that field.
At the same time, while quite conceding that ‘percentages’ need correction by certain considerations on the men’s side,—youth, want of choice, etc.,—you must not forget that women are quite as much weighted in other ways,—e.g. by the greater reluctance of parents to spend money on their education, and the more inconsiderate claims made on their time, etc., at home, inferior early teaching, etc., so that after all one set of difficulties go far to balance another.
From a medical point of view my chief anxiety now is how women are going to stand the strain; I am very much afraid of seeing the movement discredited by the breakdown in health of girls who begin too young, or with inadequate physical stamina, or who try to ‘burn the candle at both ends’ by combining society or home duties with serious study.