Franklin's "Endowed Professorships for Women"

MindHacks has posted a number of interesting sites geared for mind/brain students here.  Among them is a list of the 100 most influential cognitive science articles of the 20th Century, according to these faculty members of the Center for Cognitive Science at U. of Minnesota.  No full-text links, I'm afraid. 

They do, however, have a link to full-text classic works in the history of psychology.  Here's an excerpt from "Endowed Professorships For Women" by Christine Ladd Franklin, over 100 years ago (1904):

It is a comparatively new thing for women to have either the possibility or the desire to carry their studies so far as to meet the present requirements for the college professor. 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. 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position of assistant or instructor in an institution of corresponding rank, but that state of thing is now very nearly superseded, and the young person who wishes to enter upon the professorial career must have had something far more brilliant than this in the way of preparation.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 true that the same thing holds for men: where doctors of philosophy were once the exception, they are now the rule, and he who wishes to become a college professor is quite prepared to give three years to study after he has obtained his college diploma. Rut here the resemblance ends: the exacting positions are filled to too large an extent by the highly trained of one sex only; the women have not as yet been given a representation in proportion to their attainments. It is this discrepancy that we are anxious to see removed. . . .

And later:

The editors of reviews and the publishers of books do not ask, with reference to a given manuscript, "Is the author of it a woman?" but simply, "Is what she has to offer a thing of value?" All we ask is that the college positions (at least in the co-educational colleges) should be filled in this same dispassionate way, by doctors of philosophy without regard to their sex, or with very little regard to their sex -- with the understanding, say, that whenever the woman applicant for a position is distinctly superior to the man, she shall have the position. That this is not already the case is a residuum of prejudice on the part of the unfair sex which is certainly not destined to survive much longer.