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The Woman Hater

C >> Charles Reade >> The Woman Hater




"When we had been here a year, attending all the lectures--clinical
medicine and surgery included--news came that one British school,
Edinburgh, had shown symptoms of yielding to Continental civilization and
relaxing monopoly. That turned me North directly. My mother is English: I
wanted to be a British doctress, not a French. Cornelia had misgivings,
and even condescended to cry over me. But I am a mule, and always was.
Then that dear friend made terms with me: I must not break off my
connection with the French school, she said. No; she had thought it well
over; I must ask leave of the French professors to study in the North,
and bring back notes about those distant Thulians. Says she, 'Your
studies in that savage island will be allowed to go for something here,
if you improve your time--and you will be sure to, sweetheart-- that I
may be always proud of you.' Dear Cornelia!"

"Am I to believe all this?" said Vizard. "Can women be such true
friends?"

"What cannot women be? What! are you one of those who take us for a
_clique?_ Don't you know more than half mankind are women?"

"Alas!"

"Alas for them!" said Rhoda, sharply.

"Well, well," said Vizard, putting on sudden humility, "don't let us
quarrel. I hate quarreling--where I'm sure to get the worst. Ay,
friendship is a fine thing, in men or women; a far nobler sentiment than
love. You will not admit that, of course, being a woman."

"Oh, yes, I will," said she. "Why, I have observed love attentively; and
I pronounce it a fever of the mind. It disturbs the judgment and perverts
the conscience. You side with the beloved, right or wrong. What personal
degradation! I observe, too, that a grand passion is a grand misfortune:
they are always in a storm of hope, fears, doubt, jealousy, rapture,
rage, and the end deceit, or else satiety. Friendship is steady and
peaceful; not much jealousy, no heart-burnings. It strengthens with time,
and survives the small-pox and a wooden leg. It doubles our joys, and
divides our grief, and lights and warms our lives with a steady flame.
_Solem e mundo tollunt, qui tollunt amicitiam."_

"Halloo!" cried Vizard. "What! you know Latin too?"

"Why, of course--a smattering; or how could I read Pliny, and Celsus, and
ever so much more rubbish that custom chucks down before the gates of
knowledge, and says, 'There-- before you go the right road, you ought to
go the wrong; _it is usual._ Study now, with the reverence they don't
deserve, the non-observers of antiquity.'"

"Spare me the ancients, Miss Gale," said Vizard, "and reveal me the girl
of the period. When I was so ill-bred as to interrupt you, you had left
France, crowned with laurels, and were just invading Britain.

Something in his words or his tone discouraged the subtle observer, and
she said, coldly, "Excuse me: I have hardly the courage. My British
history is a tale of injustice, suffering, insult, and, worst of all,
defeat. I cannot promise to relate it with that composure whoever
pretends to science ought: the wound still bleeds."

Then Vizard was vexed with himself, and looked grave and concerned. He
said, gently, "Miss Gale, I am sorry to give you pain; but what you have
told me is so new and interesting, I shall be disappointed if you
withhold the rest: besides, you know it gives no lasting pain to relate
our griefs. Come, come--be brave, and tell me."

"Well, I will," said she. "Indeed, some instinct moves me. Good may come
of my telling it you. I think--somehow-- you are--a--just--man."

In the act of saying this, she fixed her gray eyes steadily and
searchingly upon Vizard's face, so that he could scarcely meet them, they
were so powerful; then, suddenly, the observation seemed to die out of
them, and reflection to take its place: those darting eyes were turned
inward. It was a marked variety of power. There was something wizard-like
in the vividness with which two distinct mental processes were presented
by the varied action of a single organ; and Vizard then began to suspect
that a creature stood before him with a power of discerning and digesting
truth, such as he had not yet encountered either in man or woman. She
entered on her British adventures in her clear silvery voice. It was not,
like Ina Klosking's, rich, and deep, and tender; yet it had a certain
gentle beauty to those who love truth, because it was dispassionate, yet
expressive, and cool, yet not cold. One might call it truth's silver
trumpet.





On the brink of an extraordinary passage, I pause to make no fewer than
three remarks in my own person: 1st. Let no reader of mine allow himself
to fancy Rhoda Gale and her antecedents are a mere excrescence of my
story. She was rooted to it even before the first scene of it--the
meeting of Ashmead and the Klosking-- and this will soon appear. 2d. She
is now going into a controverted matter; and, though she is sincere and
truthful, she is of necessity a _partisan._ Do not take her for a judge.
You be the judge. 3d. But, as a judge never shuts his mind to either
side, do not refuse her a fair hearing. Above all, do not underrate the
question. Let not the balance of your understanding be so upset by
ephemeral childishness as to fancy that it matters much whether you break
an egg top or bottom, because Gulliver's two nations went to war about
it; or that it matters much whether your queen is called queen of India
or empress, because two parties made a noise about it, and the country
has wasted ten thousand square miles of good paper on the subject,
trivial as the dust on a butterfly's wing. Fight against these illusions
of petty and ephemeral minds. It does not matter the millionth of a straw
to _mankind_ whether any one woman is called queen, or empress, of India;
and it matters greatly to mankind whether the whole race of women are to
be allowed to study medicine and practice it, if they can rival the male,
or are to be debarred from testing their scientific ability, and so
outlawed, _though taxed_ in defiance of British liberty, and all justice,
human and divine, by eleven hundred lawgivers--most of 'em fools.



CHAPTER XIII.

"WHEN I reached Great Britain, the right of women to medicine was in this
condition--a learned lawyer explained it carefully to me. I will give you
his words: The unwritten law of every nation admits all mankind, and not
the male half only, to the study and practice of medicine and the sale of
drugs. In Great Britain this law is called the common law and is deeply
respected. Whatever liberty it allows to men or women is held sacred in
our courts until _directly_ and _explicitly_ withdrawn by some act of the
Legislature. Under this ancient liberty, women have occasionally
practiced general medicine and surgery up to the year 1858. But for
centuries they _monopolized,_ by custom, one branch of practice, the
obstetric; and that, together with the occasional treatment of children,
and the nursing of both sexes, which is semi-medical, and is their
_monopoly,_ seems, on the whole, to have contented them, till late years,
when their views were enlarged by wider education and other causes. But
their abstinence from general practice, like their monopoly of
obstetrics, lay with women themselves, and not with the law of England.
That law is the same in this respect as the common law of Italy and
France; and the constitution of Bologna, where so many doctresses have
filled the chairs of medicine and other sciences, makes no more direct
provision for female students than does the constitution of any Scotch or
English university. --The whole thing lay with the women themselves, and
with local civilization. Years ago, Italy was far more civilized than
England; so Italian women took a large sphere. Of late the Anglo-Saxon
has gone in for civilization with his usual energy, and is eclipsing
Italy; therefore his women aspire to larger spheres of intellect and
action, beginning in the States, because American women are better
educated than English. The advance of _women_ in useful attainments is
the most infallible sign in any country of advancing civilization. All
this about civilization is my observation, sir, and not the lawyer's. Now
for the lawyer again: Such being the law of England, the British
Legislature passed an act in 1858, the real object of which was to
protect the public against incapable doctors, not against capable
doctresses or doctors. The act excludes from medical practice all persons
whatever, male or female, unless registered in a certain register; and to
get upon that register the person, male or female, must produce a license
or diploma, granted by one of the British examining boards specified in a
schedule attached to the act.

"Now, these examining boards were all members of the leading medical
schools. If the Legislature had taken the usual precaution, and had added
a clause _compelling_ those boards to examine worthy applicants, the act
would have been a sound public measure; but for want of that
foresight--and without foresight a lawgiver is an impostor and a public
pest--the State robbed women of their old common-law rights with one
hand, and with the other enabled a respectable trades-union to thrust
them out of their new statutory rights. Unfortunately, the respectable
union, to whom the Legislature delegated an unconstitutional power they
did not claim themselves, of excluding qualified persons from
examination, and so robbing them of their license and their bread, had an
overpowering interest to exclude qualified women from medicine. They had
the same interest as the watchmakers' union, the printers', the painters'
on china, the calico-engravers', and others have to exclude qualified
women from those branches, though peculiarly fitted for them; but not
more so than they are for the practice of medicine, God having made
_them,_ and not _men,_ the medical, and unmusical, sex.

"Wherever there's a trades-union, the weakest go to the wall. Those
vulgar unions I have mentioned exclude women from skilled labor they
excel in, by violence and conspiracy, though the law threatens them with
imprisonment for it. Was it in nature, then, that the medical union would
be infinitely forbearing, when the Legislature went and patted it on the
back, and said, you can conspire with safety against your female rivals.
Of course the clique were tempted more than any clique could bear by the
unwariness of the Legislature, and closed the doors of the medical
schools to female applicants. Against unqualified female practitioners
they never acted with such zeal and consent; and why? The female quack is
a public pest, and a good foil to the union; the qualified doctress is a
public good, and a blow to the union.

"The British medical union was now in a fine attitude by act of
Parliament. It could talk its contempt of medical women, and act its
terror of them, and keep both its feigned contempt and its real alarm
safe from the test of a public examination--that crucible in which cant,
surmise, and mendacity are soon evaporated or precipitated, and only the
truth stands firm.

"For all that, two female practitioners got upon the register, and stand
out, living landmarks of experience and the truth, in the dead wilderness
of surmise and prejudice.

"I will tell you how they got in. The act of Parliament makes two
exceptions: first, it lets in, _without examination_-- and that is very
unwise--any foreign doctor who shall be practicing in England at the date
of the act, although, with equal incapacity, it omits to provide that any
future foreign doctor shall be able to _demand examination_ (in with the
old foreign fogies, blindfold, right or wrong; out with the rising
foreign luminaries of an ever-advancing science, right or wrong); and,
secondly, it lets in, without examination, to experiment on the vile body
of the public, any person, qualified or unqualified, who may have been
made a doctor by a very venerable and equally irrelevant functionary.
Guess, now, who it is that a British Parliament sets above the law, as a
doctor-maker for that public it professes to love and protect!"

"The Regius Professor of Medicine?"

"No."

"Tyndall?"

"No."

"Huxley?"

"No."

"Then I give it up."

"The Archbishop of Canterbury."

"Oh, come! a joke is a joke."

"This is no joke. Bright monument of British funkyism and imbecility,
there stands the clause setting that reverend and irrelevant doctor-maker
above the law, which sets his grace's female relations below the law,
and, in practice, outlaws the whole female population, starving those who
desire to practice medicine learnedly, and oppressing those who, out of
modesty, not yet quite smothered by custom and monopoly, desire to
consult a learned female physician, instead of being driven, like sheep,
by iron tyranny--in a country that babbles Liberty--to a male physician
or a female quack.

"Well, sir, in 1849 Miss Elizabeth Blackwell fought the good fight in the
United States, and had her troubles; because the States were not so
civilized then as now. She graduated doctor at Geneva, in the State of
New York.

"She was practicing in England in 1858, and demanded her place on the
register. She is an Englishwoman by birth; but she is an English M.D.
only through America having more brains than Britain. This one islander
sings, 'Hail, Columbia!' as often as 'God save the Queen!' I reckon.

"Miss Garrett, an enthusiastic student, traveled north, south, east, and
west, and knocked in vain at the doors of every great school and
university in Britain, but at last found a chink in the iron shutters of
the London Apothecaries'. It seems Parliament was wiser in 1815 than in
1858, for it inserted a clause in the Apothecaries Act of 1815
_compelling_ them to examine all persons who should apply to them for
examination after proper courses of study. Their charter contained no
loop-hole to evade the act, and substitute 'him' for 'person;' so they
let Miss Garrett in as a student. Like all the students, she had to
attend lectures on chemistry botany, materia medica, zoology, natural
philosophy, and clinical surgery. In the collateral subjects they let her
sit with the male students; but in anatomy and surgery she had to attend
the same lectures privately, and pay for lectures all to herself. This
cost her enormous fees. However, it is only fair to say that, if she had
been one of a dozen female students, the fees would have been diffused;
as it was, she had to gild the pill out of her private purse.

"In the hospital teaching she met difficulties and discouragement, though
she asked for no more opportunities than are granted readily to
professional nurses and female amateurs. But the whole thing is a mere
money question; that is the key to every lock in it.

"She was freely admitted at last to one great hospital, and all went
smoothly till some surgeon examined the students _viva voce;_ then Miss
Garrett was off her guard, and displayed too marked a superiority;
thereupon the male students played the woman, and begged she might be
excluded; and, I am sorry to say, for the credit of your sex, this
unmanly request was complied with by the womanish males in power.

"However, at her next hospital, Miss Garrett was more discreet, and took
pains to conceal her galling superiority.

"All her trouble ended--where her competitors' began--at the public
examination. She passed brilliantly, and is an English apothecary. In
civilized France she is a learned physician.

"She had not been an apothecary a week, before the Apothecaries' Society
received six hundred letters from the medical small-fry in town and
country; they threatened to send no more boys to the Apothecaries', but
to the College of Surgeons, if ever another woman received an
apothecary's license. Now, you know, all men tremble in England at the
threats of a trades-union; so the apothecaries instantly cudgeled their
brains to find a way to disobey the law, and obey the union. The medical
press gave them a hint, and they passed a by-law, forbidding their
students to receive any part of their education _privately,_ and made it
known, at the same time, that their female students would not be allowed
to study the leading subjects _publicly._ And so they baffled the
Legislature, and outlawed half the nation, by a juggle which the press
and the public would have risen against, if a single grown-up man had
been its victim, instead of four million adult women. Now, you are a
straightforward man; what do you think of that?"

"Humph!" said Vizard. "I do not altogether approve it. The strong should
not use the arts of the weak in fighting the weak. But, in spite of your
eloquence, I mean to forgive them anything. Shakespeare has provided
there with an excuse that fits all time:

"'Our poverty, but not our will, consents.'"

"Poverty! the poverty of a company in the city of London! _Allons donc._
Well, sir, for years after this all Europe, even Russia, advanced in
civilization, and opened their medical schools to women; so did the
United States: only the pig-headed Briton stood stock-still, and gloried
in his minority of one; as if one small island is likely to be right in
its monomania, and all civilized nations wrong.

"But while I was studying in France, one lion-hearted Englishwoman was
moving our native isle. First she tried the University of London; and
that sets up for a liberal foundation. Answer--'Our charter is expressly
framed to exclude women from medical instruction.'

"Then she sat down to besiege Edinburgh. Now, Edinburgh is a very
remarkable place. It has only half the houses, but ten times the
intellect, of Liverpool or Manchester. And the university has two
advantages as a home of _science_ over the English universities: it is
far behind them in Greek, which is the language of error and nescience,
and before them in English, and that is a tongue a good deal of knowledge
is printed in. Edinburgh is the only center of British literature, except
London.

"One medical professor received the pioneer with a concise severity, and
declined to hear her plead her cause, and one received her almost
brutally. He said, 'No respectable woman would apply to him to study
medicine.' Now, respectable women were studying it all over Europe."

"Well, but perhaps his soul lived in an island."

"That is so. However, personal applicants must expect a rub or two; and
most of the professors, in and out of medicine, treated her with kindness
and courtesy.

"Still, she found even the friendly professors alarmed at the idea of a
woman matriculating, and becoming _Civis Edinensis;_ so she made a
moderate application to the Senate, viz., for leave to attend medical
lectures. This request was indorsed by a majority of the medical
professors, and granted. But on the appeal of a few medical professors
against it, the Senate suspended its resolution, on the ground that there
was only one applicant.

"This got wind, and other ladies came into the field directly, your
humble servant among them. Then the Senate felt bound to recommend the
University Court to admit such female students to matriculate as could
pass the preliminary examination; this is in history, logic, languages,
and other branches; and we prepared for it in good faith. It was a happy
time: after a good day's work, I used to go up the Calton Hill, or
Arthur's Seat, and view the sea, and the Piraens, and the violet hills,
and the romantic undulations of the city itself, and my heart glowed with
love of knowledge, and with honorable ambition. I ran over the names of
worthy women who had adorned medicine at sundry times and in divers
places, and resolved to deserve as great a name as any in history.
Refreshed by my walk--I generally walked eight miles, and practiced
gymnastics to keep my muscles hard--I used to return to my little
lodgings; and they too were sweet to me, for I was learning a new
science--logic."

"That was a nut to crack."

"I have met few easier or sweeter. One non-observer had told me it was a
sham science, and mere pedantry; another, that it pretended to show men a
way to truth without observing. I found, on the contrary, that it was a
very pretty little science, which does not affect to discover phenomena,
but simply to guard men against rash generalization, and false deductions
from true data; it taught me the untrained world is brimful of fallacies
and verbal equivoques that ought not to puzzle a child, but, whenever
they creep into an argument, do actually confound the learned and the
simple alike, and all for want of a month's logic.

"Yes, I was happy on the hill, and happy by the hearth; and so things
went on till the preliminary examination came. It was not severe; we
ladies all passed with credit, though many of the male aspirants failed."

"How do you account for that?" asked Vizard.

"With my eyes. I _observe_ that the average male is very superior in
intellect to the average female; and I _observe_ that the picked female
is immeasurably more superior to the average male, than the average male
is to the average female."

"Is it so simple as that?"

"Ay; why not? What! are you one of those who believe that Truth is
obscure-- hides herself--and lies in a well? I tell you, _sir,_ Truth
lies in no well. The place Truth lies in is--_the middle of the turnpike
road._ But one old fogy puts on his green spectacles to look for her, and
another his red, and another his blue; and so they all miss her, because
she is a colorless diamond. Those spectacles are preconceived notions,
_'a priori_ reasoning, cant, prejudice, the depth of Mr. Shallow's inner
consciousness, etc., etc. Then comes the observer, opens the eyes that
God has given him, tramples on all colored spectacles, and finds Truth as
surely as the spectacled theorists miss her. Say that the intellect of
the average male is to the average female as ten to six, it is to the
intellect of the picked female as ten to a hundred and fifty, or even
less. Now, the intellect of the male Edinburgh student was much above
that of the average male, but still it fell far below that of the picked
female. All the examinations at Edinburgh showed this to all God's
unspectacled creatures that used their eyes."

These remarks hit Vizard hard. They accorded with his own good sense and
method of arguing; but perhaps my more careful readers may have already
observed this. He nodded hearty approval for once, and she went on:

"We had now a right to matriculate and enter on our medical course. But,
to our dismay, the right was suspended. The proofs of our general
proficiency, which we hoped would reconcile the professors to us as
students of medicine, alarmed people, and raised us unscrupulous enemies
in some who were justly respected, and others who had influence, though
they hardly deserved it.

"A general council of the university was called to reconsider the pledge
the Senate had given us, and overawe the university court by the weight
of academic opinion. The court itself was fluctuating, and ready to turn
either way. A large number of male students co-operated against us with a
petition. They, too, were a little vexed at our respectable figure in the
preliminary examination.

"The assembly met and the union orator got up; he was a preacher of the
Gospel, and carried the weight of that office. Christianity, as well as
science, seemed to rise against us in his person. He made a long and
eloquent speech, based on the intelligent surmises and popular prejudices
that were diffused in a hundred leading articles, and in letters to the
editor by men and women, to whom history was a dead letter in modern
controversies; for the Press battled this matter for two years, and
furnished each party with an artillery of reasons, _pro_ and _con._

"He said, 'Woman's sphere is the hearth and the home: to impair her
delicacy is to take the bloom from the peach: she could not qualify for
medicine without mastering anatomy and surgery--branches that must unsex
her. Providence, intending her to be man's helpmate, not his rival, had
given her a body unfit for war or hard labor, and a brain four ounces
lighter than a man's, and unable to cope with long study and practical
science. In short, she was too good, and too stupid, for medicine.'

"It was eloquent, but it was _'a priori_ reasoning, and conjecture
_versus_ evidence: yet the applause it met with showed one how happy is
the orator 'qui hurle avec les loups.' Taking the scientific preacher's
whole theory in theology and science, woman was high enough in creation
to be the mother of God, but not high enough to be a sawbones.

"Well, a professor of _belles-lettres_ rose on our side, not with a rival
theory, but with facts. He was a pupil of Lord Bacon, and a man of the
nineteenth century; so he objected to _'a priori_ reasoning on a matter
of experience. To settle the question of capacity he gave a long list of
women who had been famous in science. Such as Bettesia Gozzadini, Novella
Andrea, Novella Calderini, Maddelena Buonsignori, and many more, who were
doctors of law and university professors: Dorotea Bocohi, who was
professor both of philosophy and medicine; Laura Bassi, who was elected
professor of philosophy in 1732 by acclamation, and afterward professor
of experimental physics; Anna Manzolini, professor of anatomy in 1760;
Gaetaua Agnesi, professor of mathematics; Christina Roccati, doctor of
philosophy in 1750; Clotilde Tambroni, professor of Greek in 1793; Maria
Dalle Donne, doctor of medicine in 1799; Zaffira Ferretti, doctor of
medicine in 1800; Maria Sega, doctor of medicine in 1799; Madalena Noe,
graduate of civil law in 1807. Ladies innumerable, who graduated in law
and medicine at Pavia, Ferrara, and Padua, including Elena Lucrezia
Cornaro of Padua, a very famous woman. Also in Salamanca, Alcala',
Cordova, he named more than one famous doctress. Also in Heidelberg,
Gottingen, Giessen, Wurzburg, etc., and even at Utrect, with numberless
graduates in the arts and faculties at Montpellier and Paris in all ages.
Also outside reputations, as of Doctor Bouvin and her mother,
acknowledged celebrities in their branch of medicine. This chain, he
said, has never been really broken. There was scarcely a great foreign
university without some female student of high reputation. There were
such women at Vienna and Petersburg; many such at Zurich. At Montpellier
Mademoiselle Doumergue was carrying all before her, and Miss Garrett and
Miss Mary Putnam at Paris, though they were weighted in the race by a
foreign language. Let the male English physician pass a stiff examination
in scientific French before he brayed so loud. He had never done it yet.
This, he said, is not an age of chimeras; it is a wise and wary age,
which has established in all branches of learning a sure test of ability
in man or woman--public examination followed by a public report. These
public examinations are all conducted by males, and women are passing
them triumphantly all over Europe and America, and graduate as doctors in
every civilized country, and even in half-civilized Russia.

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