The women of the United States lead in this rush for education and for
labor, but in other countries the same advance is being made, if more
slowly.
Great Britain has thirty-five hundred university graduates. Fifteen
hundred of these are from Girton, Newnham, and the Oxford Halls for Women,
annexes of the historic universities, but with examinations just as stiff.
It is a dozen years since Miss Fawcett carried off the highest
mathematical honors an English university can bestow.
Germany looks askance at any education for woman that gives to her
interests outside of the home. The Kaiser's four K's, which become C's in
translation--Clothes, Cooking, Church, and Children--are popularly
supposed to define the world of the German hausfrau. The American's joke
about "woman's sphere" has long been obsolete; but that sphere is very
real and very limited in most of the European countries.
Yet even in the more conservative lands women are progressing. The older
dentists in Germany and Austria had to come to America for their diplomas.
To-day professional schools, universities, and colleges can be found where
a woman can follow any line of study and fit herself for the professions.
In Russia, although the struggle for democracy is barely begun, and
representative government is as yet only a demand, the higher education of
women has been an accomplished fact for a number of years. Russian women
doctors, lawyers, and professors are not uncommon.
Norway and Sweden have experienced a feminine revolution in the last
quarter-century. The laws have been overhauled and revised; the schools
and colleges thrown open; the trades and professions have flung down their
barriers; and work, once a disgrace, has become an honor to women. Sweden
led in this movement, but Norway was quick to follow, and it is now a
question as to which will first reach the goal of full equality between
women and men.
In political rights English and Scandinavian women stand about on a level.
Neither can vote for members of Parliament, but both have municipal and
local suffrage, which gives them power to exercise their gifts for
housekeeping and economical management in civic as well as home affairs.