Page:Women Wanted.djvu/305

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IN THE PROFESSIONS
277

her client was a soldier. This is the Conseil de la Guerre. See the epitage, the sash that falls from Suzanne Grinberg's left shoulder. It is edged with ermine, the sign that she is entitled to plead before the Tribunal of War. It is the first time in the history of the world, here in France, that women lawyers have been empowered to appear in military cases. The Salle de Pas-Perdus, they call the great central promenade at the Palais de Justice. Note that these new women lawyers who wear the ermine walk in the Hall of Lost Footsteps! On the walls of this court house in which Suzanne Grinberg pleads, you may read wreathed in the tricolours of France, "Avocats a la Cour d'Appel de Paris Morts pour la Patrie," and there follow 127 names.

Only the day before yesterday woman's capacity for the higher education to fit her for the professions was in grave doubt. Vassar College once stood as the farthest outpost of radical feminism, and Christian women were counselled by their clergymen not to send their daughters there. Even after the moral stigma of a college education had passed, the critics said that anyhow the female mind was not made to master science and Greek and mathematics. And it was only about twenty years ago that Phi Beta Kappa decided to risk the opening of its ranks to college women—of course provided that any of them should be able to attain the high scholarship that it required. The female mind, you know!

Well, at the last Phi Beta Kappa council meeting, the secretary reported to that distinguished body that