“Women are gradually coming to the fore as bicycle riders. Miss
Dudley, a well-known rider, has just accomplished a feat which would
have seemed wonderful for any rider not long ago. She has ridden from
a spot near Hitchin to Lincoln, a distance of 100 miles, in little
more than seven hours, or at the average speed of about fourteen miles
an hour. Mr. and Mrs. Smith are well-known as tandem riders, and they
have won many races together; but this is, perhaps, the first recorded
instance of a woman cyclist holding her own so well, unaided, in a
long road ride.”
See also “The Lancashire pit-brow women,” Note XVIII., 8.
7.—“_Of differing sex no thought inept intrudes_,”
“I have conversed, as man with man, with medical men on anatomical
subjects, and compared the proportions of the human body with
artists—yet such modesty did I meet with that I was never reminded by
word or look of my sex, and the absurd rules which make modesty a
pharisaical cloak of weakness.”—Mary Wollstonecraft (“The Rights of
Woman,” p. 278).
“As a careful observer remarks, true modesty lies in the entire absence
of thought upon the subject. Among medical students and artists the nude
causes no extraordinary emotion; indeed, Flaxman asserted that the
students in entering the Academy seemed to hang up their passions along
with their hats.”—Westermarck (“History of Human Marriage,” p. 194).
_Id._... “This is strikingly exemplified in the curious conversation
recorded in Lylie’s ‘Euphues’ and his ‘England,’ edit. 1605, 4to,
signature X—Z 2, where young unmarried people of both sexes meet
together and discuss without reserve the ticklish metaphysics of love.
But though treading on such slippery ground, it is remarkable that they
never, even by allusion, fall into grossness. Their delicate propriety
is not improbably the effect of their liberty.”—Buckle (“Common-place
Book,” No. 856).
8.—“_Their purpose calmly sure all errant aim excludes_.”
“We point to a present remedy for undergraduate excesses, which, resting
on the soundest theory, has also the demonstration of unquestioned fact.
It is co-education. Cease to separate human beings because of sex. They
are conjoined in the family, in the primary and grammar schools, in
society, and, after the degree rewards four years of monastic student
existence, in the whole career of life.
“Throw open the doors of Harvard to women on equal terms, absorb the
annexe into the college proper, and as the night follows the day,
scholarship will rise, and dissipation fall by the law of gravitation.
The moral atmosphere will find immediate purification, and the daily
association of brothers and sisters in intellectual pursuits impart a
breadth of view which is an education in itself. The professors may then
be left safely to their themes, John Harvard’s statue may cease to dread
defilement, the regent will find his censorial duties fully as
perfunctory as he seems to have made them in the past, and character
will crowd out profligacy.”—William Lloyd Garrison (in _Woman’s
Journal_, Boston, U.S., 6th February, 1892).
“Whatsoever is ultimately decided by the wisdom of ages to be the best
possible form of culture for one human nature, must be so for another,
for one common humanity lies deeper in all and is more essential in each
than any difference.”—Sophia Jex-Blake, M.D.