Twelve hundred contributors from all over the world. Among whom only twenty-seven were women. Is it surprising that I was proud to be numbered among those lucky few, and to have been one of the four asked to speak at that great gathering?
The Morning Post, after giving the names of the guests present, added that the wide range of feminine activity, shown in the lives and work of those ladies present, proved that into the last four decades women had compressed the work of four centuries. That the interests, work, and present place in the social scheme of women were entirely on a level with that of men, this being the strongest testimony of the enormous advance in civilisation made by all the English-speaking peoples in the past forty years.
Hurrah! All honour to women! Admiring my sex as I do, here let me make my boast of them, and give a little list of the leading women contributors that was kindly furnished me by Miss Janet Hogarth[8] (head of the female staff of the Encyclopædia Britannica). If some are omitted, I am sorry; for we should make the most of our few chances of letting the blind, deaf outer world see and hear what women are doing and have lately done.
Education.—Mrs. Henry Sidgwick.
Scholarship.—Mrs. Wilde (Miss A. M. Clay), Mrs. Alison Phillips, Miss B. Philpotts.
Science.—Lady Huggins, Miss A. L. Smith, the late Miss Agnes Clarke, and the late Miss Mary Bateson.
Travel.—Lady Lugard, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, Miss Gertrude Bell.
Sociology.—Miss A. Anderson.
Literature.—Mrs. Meynell, Miss Jessie Weston, Miss Margaret Bryant, Miss A. Zimmern.
Church History.—Miss A. Panes, Mrs. O’Neill.