Quines by Gerda Stevenson sampler

Age has not abated my zeal for the emancipation of my sex
from the unreasonable prejudice too prevalent in Great Britain
against a literary and scientific education for women. The
French are more civilised in this respect, for they have taken
the lead, and have given the first example in modern times of
encouragement to the high intellectual of the sex. Madame
Emma Chenu, who had received the degree of Master of Arts
from the Faculty of Science of the University in Paris, has more
recently received the diploma of Licentiate in Mathematical
Sciences from the same illustrious Society, after a successful
examination in algebra, trigonometry, analytical geometry, the
differential and integral calculus, and astronomy.
When the First World War broke out, France delivered for
the female sex again – this time for Elsie Inglis, taking her up on
her inspired offer of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, the first
all-women mobile hospital unit. The British Government’s War
Office had turned down Elsie’s offer with the words: ‘Good lady,
go home and sit still’. Nothing daunted, Elsie approached the
French, and, on the 5th December, 1914, the swh was posted
to Royaumont. Its heroic work soon expanded to the Balkans,
and Elsie was the first woman to be awarded the Serbian Order
of the White Eagle. In Serbia, she holds the status of heroine,
and is known as ‘our mother from Scotland’.
Another remarkable woman who received the same award for
service with the swh was doctor and psychiatrist Isabel Emslie
Hutton. In her vivid autobiography, Memories of a Doctor in
War and Peace, she laments the potentially devastating effects of
the infamous Marriage Bar, a common practice which prevented
women from working in their chosen professions after they had
married. In this way, many a brilliant woman was excluded from
the thoroughfare and network of professional life, her career
losing momentum while, as Congreve puts it, she ‘dwindled into
a wife’. One notable case was the artist Dorothy Johnstone,
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