Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/164

 knowledge." One has seldom read a more splendid tribute to the courage and candour of women,—a tribute all the more splendid because so entirely involuntary,—for women know how scientific men of the type of Sir Almroth Wright have made the path of scientific knowledge a very Calvary for modest women. It is nothing to men of this type that the modesties of our civilisation should in the past have led to our women being handled and examined in hospital by youths of the sort common among medical students; that the reticences of this same civilisation should have led to many men and nearly all women being ignorant of all that goes to the building of a healthy and moral nation. Sir Almroth declares that man "cannot and does not wish to work side by side with women." Some men may not, but Sir Almroth is slandering his own sex when he makes the assertion for all mankind. The pioneer work of women of science was made possible by the existence of large numbers of scientific men willing to teach women. We may make a pretty shrewd guess at the reasons why some scientific men do not wish women to study science, for have not the medical and scientific women already, by their work, exploded many of the old fictions about women, and so put heart and hope into millions of women who felt their powers, but hardly dared believe in them, because of the dead weight of what they were told was science? They have now learned that all that is put forth by a scientific man is not science, and that when