Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/1008

Rh "Concerning Norway, I have said almost nothing," writes Camilla Collett, the distinguished Norwegian author, in some notes which she sent me recently on the situation of women in Scandinavia, "for the very simple reason that there is little to say." The long and oppressive domination of Denmark prostrated Norway, but her close union with Sweden since the fall of Napoleon, has begun to have a good effect, and the liberal influence of the latter country in favor of woman is already beginning to be felt in the other half of the Scandinavian peninsula. One step in advance has been the opening of the university to women—" The best thing that can be said of Norway," says Camilla Collett. Miss Cecilie Thoresen, the first female student to matriculate at Christiania University, writing to me from Eidsvold, Norway, in December, 1882, says it was in 1880 that she decided to try and take an academic degree. Her father, therefore, applied to the minister of public instruction for the necessary authorization; the latter referred the application to the university authorities, who, in their turn, submitted the portentous question to the faculty of the law-school. In due season Miss Thoresen received this rather unsatisfactory response:

Thereupon Mr. H. E. Berner, the prominent liberal member of the Storthing, or Norwegian parliament, introduced a bill permitting women to pursue university studies leading to the degrees in arts and philosophy (examen artium and examen philosophicum). The committee reported unanimously in favor of the bill; on March 30, 1882, it passed without debate the Odelsthing, one of the two chambers of the Storthing, with but one dissenting voice—that of a clergyman; on April 21, 1882, it received the unanimous vote of the other house, the Lagthing; and it finally became a law on June 15, 1882. But Mr. Berner did not stop here. He once wrote me:

In 1884, Mr. Berner succeeded in making it possible for women to take all university degrees, the law of 1882 having opened to them only the degrees in arts and philosophy. He is now press-