Why man, you see you can’t do that sort of thing any more! Yesterday, it is true, a woman physician was only a woman. To-day her title to her place in her profession is as secure as yours is. Seven great London hospitals that never before permitted so much as a woman on their staff, now have women resident physicians in charge. Five of them are entirely staffed by women. The British Medical Research Commission is employing over a score of women for the highly scientific work of pathology. When one of those Scottish Women’s Hospitals on its way to Serbia was requisitioned for six weeks to assist the British army at Malta where the wounded were coming in from Gallipoli, the authorities there, at length reluctantly obliged to let them go, decided that the Malta military hospitals in the future could not do without the woman doctor. They sent to London for sixty of her. And the War Office reading their report asked for eighty more for other military hospitals. By January, 1915, professional posts for women doctors were being offered at the rate of four and five a day to the London School of Medicine for Women, and they hadn’t graduates enough to meet the demand!
Like that the nations have capitulated. The woman physician’s place in Europe to-day is any place she may desire. Russia, which before the war, would not permit a woman physician on the Petrograd Board of Health because its duties were too onerous and too high salaried for a woman, had by 1915 mobilised for war service even all of her women medical students of the third and fourth years. France has Dr. Marthe Francillon-Lobre, eminent gynecologist, commanding the military hospital, Ambulance Maurice de Rothschild in the Rue de Monceau, Paris. In Lyons the medecin-en-chef of the military hospital is Dr. Thyss-Monod who was nursing a new baby when she assumed her military responsibilities. Everywhere the woman doctor rejected of the War Office of yesterday is now counted one of her country’s most valuable assets. And so precious is she become to her own land, that she may not be permitted to leave for any other. “Over there” the governments of Europe have ceased to issue passports to their women doctors.
You of the class of 1921, you go up and occupy. Medical associations will no longer bar you as in America until the seventies and in England until the nineties. Salaried positions will not be denied you. Clinical and hospital opportunities will not be closed to you. You of to-day will no more be elbowed and jostled aside. You will not even be crowded out from anywhere. For there is room everywhere. Oh, the horror and the anguish of it, room everywhere. And every day of the frightful world conflict they are making more of it. Great Britain alone has sent 10,000 medical men to the front. America, they say, is sending 35,000.
Hurry, hurry, urges this the first profession in which the women’s battalions have actually arrived as it hastily clears the way for you. The New York Medical College and Hospital for Women, not to be outdone by any institution now bidding for women’s favour, has rushed up an “emergency” plant, a new $200,000 building. The London School of Medicine has erected a thirty thousand pound addition and the public appeal for the funds was signed by Premier Asquith himself. The nations to-day are waiting for the women who shall come out from the colleges equipped for medical service.
A PLACE IN EVERY PROFESSION
And after the most arduous profession of all, how about the others? If a woman can be a doctor at a battle front, how long before she can be a doctor of divinity? At the City Temple in London on a Sunday in March, 1917, a slender black robed figure preceded an aged clergyman up the pulpit steps. With one hand resting on the cushioned Bible she stood silhouetted against the black hanging at the back of the pulpit, her face shining, illumined. By the time that the white surpliced choir had ceased chanting “We have done those things that we ought not to have done,” the ushers were hanging in the entrance corridor the great red lettered signs “Full.”
The house was packed to the last seat in the gallery to hear Miss Maude Royden, one of England’s leading suffragists, “preach.” This church is nearly 300 years old and only once before, when Mrs. Booth of the Salvation Army was granted the privilege, has a woman ever spoken from its pulpit. Some six months since, Maude Royden has now been appointed pulpit assistant at the City Temple, the first woman in England to hold such a position. Dr. Fort Newton, the pastor, in announcing the innovation, declared: “We want the woman point of view, the woman insight and the woman counsel.” The City Temple is not an Episcopalian Church. But even the established church has recently heard an archbishop cautiously pronounce the opinion that “we may invite our church women to a much larger share in the Christian service than has been usual.” You see there are 2000 English clergymen enrolled as chaplains at the front. Laywomen were last year permitted to make public addresses in the National Mission of Repentance. They thus ascended the chancel steps. A committee of bishops and scholars—and one woman—has now been appointed to see how much farther women may be permitted to go on the way to the pulpit itself. A few of the smaller churches in America have a woman minister in charge. But from the arduous duties of the highest ecclesiastical positions women in all lands are still “protected.” High established places are of course the last to yield. Theology continues to be the most closed profession. But Maude Royden in the pulpit of the London City Temple, the highest ecclesiastical place to which a woman anywhere in the world has yet attained, has, we may say, captured an important trench.
In the field of science the opposing forces are even more steadily falling back before the advancing woman movement. One of the most conservative bodies, the Royal Astronomical Society of England, has added a clause to its charter permitting women to become fellows. The Royal Institute of British Architects has also decided to accept women as fellows and in 1917 the Architectural Association for the first time opened its doors to women students. Germany even has several women architects employed in military service, among them Princess Victoria of Bentheim. Russia, in 1916, admitted women to architecture and engineering.
Chemistry is distinctly calling women in all lands. Sheffield University, England, in 1916 announced for the first time courses in the metallurgical department for training girls as steel chemists to replace young men who have been “combed out” of Sheffield’s large industrial works. Firms in Leeds, Bradford and South Wales are filling similar vacancies with women. Bedford College of London University had last year started a propaganda to induce young women to study chemistry. In 1916 there were some twelve graduates in the chemical department and the college received applications from the industrial world for no less than 100 women chemists. So insistent was the demand that even Woolwich Arsenal was willing to take a graduate without waiting for her to get her degree. Women are wanted too in physics and bacteriology. A London University woman has been appointed to a position at the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington and there were last year, at this one university, offers of twenty positions for women physicists that could not be filled. All over the world now, in trade journals are beginning to appear advertisements for women chemists and physicists.
Even in the teaching profession there is the record of new ground won. Women have of course been longest admitted to this the poorest paid profession, and in it they have been relegated to the poorest paid places. But now over in Europe, note that one-third of all the masters in the German upper high schools are enlisted in the army and with the consent of the Department of Education women are for the first time being appointed to these places, in some instances even at the same salaries as were received by the men whom they replace. Russia had in the first year of the war opened the highest teaching positions in that country to women, by a special act of the Duma providing that “their salaries shall equal those of men in the same position.” Russia also in 1915 had her first woman college professor, Mme. Ostrovskaia, occupying the chair of Russian history at the University of Petrograd. In 1916 Mlle. Josephine Ioteyko, a celebrated Polish scientist, had been invited to lecture at the College de France in 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.