ABSTRACT
Perhaps we have no better way of observing how entirely different was the general status and ideal of womanhood than by turning to the more strictly comic literature of the day, where we find that as yet any idea of change was so remote that even ridicule of such a change was undreamed of. Many of what we are accustomed to view as the stalest jests against learned women, and women devoted to political and social work, wet·e not even breathed. We have, for instance, in a little comic publicati.:>n of 1848 a squib upon the then recently established institution of Queen's College, and a description of a fictitious town and gown row perpetrated by the young ladies. They become uproarious after an orange wine party, to commemorate one lady having obtained her degree "in crochet; " they insult "the professor of steel bead purse making," and drink toasts of "success to matrimony." The age did not as yet recognise female students of classics and mathematics, even to laugh at them, nor had it as yet learned to assume that advanced women contemnecl malTiage on principle, and if girls fifty years ago were charged with imitating men it was only in the things least worth imitating.
