To select the chosen young women of the country, even though it be at first only a very few of them, and to tide them over the years that must elapse between their becoming mature enough and distinguished enough to be full professors; to prevent them from sinking into plain school teachers, and losing, in the treadmill of ceaseless duties, all their fresh interest in their work -- this is to do them an inestimable benefit. But, by far the most important of all, to create a few first-class women college professors who would not otherwise exist would be to make a distinct contribution toward the furthering of the rights and privileges of the sex in general.

But the important feature of the plan lies in the manner of selecting the college at which this brilliant young woman is to hold her professorship.

If we should simply found a few professorships, of such a nature as to attract attention on account of a special degree of distinction attached to them, it would go far to remove the prejudice which now exists against the idea of college professorships held by women. The plan that I have in mind is this: Instead of waiting for the colleges to offer professorships to our young doctors of philosophy, I would suggest that we offer our young doctors of philosophy as professors to the colleges -- and not in the way of founding fixed professorships in any given college, but rather of establishing what may be called peripatetic professorships, to be held, in any particular case, by our most available young woman and at the college or the university which shall best fulfil certain requirements of ours which I shall state in a moment.

We can not hope to get money enough to create professorships for women on any large scale, but measures need not be brilliant in order to be efficient.

The discovery of radium is not only changing our views of nature, but, if it is given its full significance, it should deal a final blow to the belief that women can not do great things in science; from this one case it might be inferred, with far better logic than has been traditionally employed against our sex, that women are quite as likely as men to make great discoveries -- indeed, that they are vastly more likely; for, out of the small number of women who have physical laboratories of their own, that one should make the great discovery of the time shows a far greater proportion of genius to opportunity than has ever been exhibited by men.

That is the case with our clever girls -- they go to Germany and get the parchments, beautifully signed and sealed, that proclaim them to be doctors of philosophy, but no further consequences follow. They have nothing but the empty satisfaction of exhibiting their "tickets"; the pleasurable work and the adequate emoluments that ought to follow are not forthcoming. That they are not, is not due to any fundamental principle of nature which makes women incapable of filling such positions. The battle or, this point has already been fought out in most branches of activity, and settled on the side of fairness and of justice.

For the young man who returns from Europe with his doctor's degree, and with the abstruse thesis which every one, clever or stupid, who studies at a German university is supposed to be able to turn out, the case is very different. Occasionally, it is true, by ill luck, he fails to find at once the opening that he is adapted to fitting into, but for the most part the colleges stand ready to seize upon these gifted beings the moment that they become full fledged (provided only they are of the right sex) and to put them into the first stage of that career which is to end, in course of time, in the full professorship. But for the women, the teaching positions that are at all worthy of their powers are few in number. The proportion of those who, after their brilliant preparation for the highest work, find that there is nothing in the world for them to do [p. 57] save the drudgery of teaching in the public schools is large, and is constantly becoming larger. Some, of course, find openings in the women's colleges, but the women's colleges are few in number, and it is not even desirable that all of the teachers in them should be women. For most, as far as consequences are concerned, the certificate of their doctorate is but an empty honor.

For at present these clever women find no proper field for the exercise of their powers. A certain number of them, of course, end by marrying. I should not say that they end by marrying, for their marriage is very frequently of such a kind as to bring them into university circles, and to give them admirable opportunities for carrying on their studies. And where it is not of this kind, we may be well content that they are handing on their good qualities in the way of intellectual endowment to a new generation of still more admirably developed human beings. But not all of them marry and for those who do not, the natural sequel to their long years of hard labor should be to enter at once upon the assistant professorships in the colleges and universities. But here their troubles begin; it is only a very small number of the college positions that are open to them.

Since that time, half a dozen other universities have added vastly to their equipment for doing admirable work in the way of instruction in learning and in research, and there has been, correspondingly, a large addition to the number of students, both young men and young women, who are content to take their doctorate in this country.

There are already many colleges at which European fellowships are obtainable by clever girls. And in addition to the endowed study at foreign universities, there are now, of course, many young women who have the courage to use their own fortunes, or such sums as they can extract from parents who are no longer so obdurate as they were twenty years ago, in going to Europe for the three years' work necessary to the attaining of the doctorate.

You are all familiar with the statistics of what has been accomplished by these two organizations; our devoted chairman of the Fellowship Committee gives you each year a report on this subject which is of absorbing interest. I do not need to remind you at this time of its details. Our means have been painfully limited, and our results have not been anything startling as regards the number of women doctors of philosophy that we have produced, but ours has been the work of the pioneer, and it is a beginning that has been largely followed.

There is not so great a pressure for these positions on the part of young men, for men have other openings which are more lucrative, and women are as yet content, poor things, with very modest salaries.

At the same time there has been a great change in the demands of the colleges as regards the preparation required of their young professors. For many years, in the history of education in this country, nothing more than a diploma from some reputable college was essential to the obtaining of the position of assistant or instructor in an institution of corresponding rank, but that state of thing is now very nearly superseded, and the young person who wishes to enter upon the professorial career must have had something far more brilliant than this in the way of preparation. He must either have taken the degree of doctor of [p. 54] philosophy, or, if he has not actually obtained the degree, he must have carried out a course of study somewhat equivalent to what is required for that; to be a plain college graduate is no longer a sufficient foundation for the honors of the professor's life. Thus the existence of women who have secured for themselves the highest possible degree of training, coincides with the advent of greater stringency in the requirements for college appointments.

It is hard for us to realize -- so familiar a feature of modern life has the college girl become -- that it is only about forty years since it has been possible for women to obtain a college education, in anything like the proper sense of the term; and it is a still shorter time since such a rara avis as the doctor of philosophy first came into existence among women. But the world is moving rapidly in these days, as regards the affairs of the more modest sex, and it is now no inconsiderable number of women who have absolved the requirements of the highest rank of scholarship.

I have given the title "Endowed Professorships for Women" to the subject which I wish to bring before you today for the sake of simplicity, but I must premise that what I have in mind is not so much the regular full professorship in one of our larger colleges, but rather what the Germans have a good name for, a docentship -- a modest position, suitable for the beginner in college work, but one which offers the compensation that instead of being all work and no research, it gives to its holder a large amount of time in which to carry on the studies which he is himself interested in. It is these minor professorships which, as the next stage in the advancement of women, I wish to show the necessity for and the possibility of obtaining, not exceptionally, as is now the case, but in numbers proportional to the number of young women who are already fitted to hold them.