C Gasquoine Hartley

The Truth About Woman C Gasquoine Hartley

Book Excerpt: ...be its end. Little more than fifty years have passed since Miss Jex-Blake undertook her memorable fight to obtain medical training for herself and her colleagues at the University of Edinburgh.[5] At about the same time arose women's demand for the right of higher education, and colleges for women were opened at Oxford and Cambridge. These were the practical results which followed the revolt of Mary Wollstonecraft, and later, the great revival due to the publication of John Stuart Mill's epoch-marking book, the Subjection of Women. During the first period of the woman's movement the centre of restlessness was amongst unmarried women, who rebelled at the old restrictions, eager for self-development and a more intellectually active life. These women undertook their own cause, insisting that their humanity came before their sex. They were picked women, much above the average woman, and to a certain extent abnormal in so far as they denied the important factor of sex. To them the average ma...