A Nation of Women by Luisa Capetillo

Author:Luisa Capetillo [Capetillo, Luisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

VARIETIES

Feminism

(from L’Avenir Médical of Paris)

The legislative elections, which have just been held, have not been favorable to feminism. One or another female candidate has run, but none has been able to sustain a true struggle until the end. But this doesn’t mean despair for those apostles of women’s causes. All countries will continue to heed their aspirations, either under a timid veneer as in France, or in tumultuous abundance, as in England or in the Americas.

In fact, the feminist cause has had many important partisans among the strong sex. In 1877, Victor Hugo heatedly defended feminism in a letter to Leon Richer: “Women,” wrote the poet, “are seen as lesser beings civically and as slaves, morally. Her upbringing suffers from this double sense of inferiority, and from all the suffering that man inflicts on her, which is unjust. Men have tipped the scales of the law, in whose equilibrium human consciousness is invested, putting all of the rights on their own little plates, and all the duties on the woman’s. From this the profound upheaval, from this, the slavery of woman. We need reform and this reform will be achieved for the benefit of civilization, of society, of light.”

The eminent philosopher John Stuart Mill has written: “All of the egotistical inclinations, the cult of oneself, the injustice of self-preference that dominates humanity, has its origin and roots in the way that current relations between men and women take place, and it is from these relations that such egotisms derive their principal force. Consider the vanity of the young man who when he becomes a man is convinced that, without merit, without having done a thing on his own, and even if he is among the most frivolous and incapable of men, just by having been born a man, he is superior to half of humanity without exception, when in that half one can find people whose superiority is capable of weighing over him every day and at every moment. By giving women the freedom to use their faculties, letting them freely choose the manner in which they want to exercise those faculties, by opening up the same work opportunities, and offering the same stimuli as those available to men, one of the principle benefits of such an endeavor would be to double the total of intellectual faculties that humanity would have at its service.”

But perhaps we should not follow these authors so far along this road, and instead, to return to what concerns our profession, we can agree that various women have undertaken this profession with great success.

Even in remote times we have seen woman become interested in our art. In France, Diana of Poitiers and Marguerite of Valois are known for having practiced the art of medicine from antiquity.

Madame Necker, wife of the renowned minister of Louis XVI, was responsible for the reorganization of French hospitals.

In Germany, women doctors were numerous during the Middle Ages, and even more so in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

And in our times there are many women who have devoted themselves to medicine.

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