Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake Quotes
While women in Britain are prevented from studying for medical degrees… other European nations have taken a very different position. We have already seen the Italian Universities were in fact never closed to women, and that at Bologna no less than three women held Professors’ chairs in the Medical faculty. We have several instances of degrees granted to women in the Middle Ages by the Universities of Bologna, Padua, Milan, Pavia and others…
She was one of the first female physicians in England. However, she could not study there or sit for her examinations. She trained in the Scotland, Ireland and Swizerland where she earned her medical degree.
Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake, 1840–1912, English Physician & Feminist, Medicine as a Profession
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This was one of the first higher educational opportunities for women in England. Note how they felt they had to justify higher education for women.
This was her last public speech.
He gave a litany of ills that have occurred when women had been educated. He did not provide any of the counter examples.
The concept of taxpayers being entitled to vote to avoid taxation without representation was fundamental to the Founding Fathers. However, the only people who paid taxes were those who owned property as there was no income tax at the time. Since the male controlled the family property, not allowing women to vote did no injury to the basic principle. However, the sexist attitude of the times ran up against this basic principles in the case of widows and unmarried women who owned property. Faced with this contradiction, some of the Founding Fathers like Lee actually favored the voting franchise for women who were widows and property owners or even unmarried female property owners. There were not enough people who saw this contradiction so that all women were originally prohibited from voting, but this quotation shows that it was a political issue at the time.
This quotation is an example of how even sophisticated institutions and leaders were plagued by various stereotypes. Dean Sperry as well as many other members of the clergy actually believed that women would not go to divinity school because they were interested in the theology but because they were looking to marry a minister. When the dean told the trustees that he had “no wisdom on this matter” is was one of the great understatements in the history of quotations. What is more ironic is that the Dean was considered very liberal having admitted Catholics, Nazarenes, and Adventists.
The editorial was in support of women’s suffrage—the right to vote which at the time women did not have in Britain. Women were very active in protests and demonstrations. Tactics sometimes involved civil disobedience and chaining themselves to public buildings. It was the civil disobedience and disruptions that the newspaper referred to as the “follies and excesses.” In retrospect today, it is amazing how threatened the society felt and how they reacted to the “threat” of females voting. It does however give us a perspective on those contemporary societies which restrict women’s voting rights.
Although she was living proof of a woman’s ability to accomplish what most men could not, she was always publicly differential to men and their sexism. Although she opposed women voting in Parliamentary elections, she did believe that women should vote in local elections where the understood the issues much better.
The number of women who studied Physics and sophisticated sciences in Germany at the time were few and far between. Ironically, Einstein married one of the few. However, the marriage failed for many reasons and his subsequent marriage was not to a scientist. Other conversations with him in later years revealed that his belief was that women were constitutionally unsuited to creative, theoretical science—Einstein’s type of science was almost purely abstract and mathematical. See {588596}.
the legal power automatically then given to a husband over his wife’s body and property
Although born and educated in the United States, she lived mostly in England and was politically active there.
Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake was an English physician, teacher and feminist. She led the campaign to secure women access to a University education when she and six other women, collectively known as the Edinburgh Seven, began studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in 1869. She was the first practising female doctor in Scotland, and one of the first in the wider United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; a leading campaigner for medical education for women and was involved in founding two medical schools for women, in London and Edinburgh at a time when no other medical schools were training women.
