The ruling Republicans were well aware that education was the key to conquering minds and hearts. They no more ignored the problem of women's education than their opponents did. But the education offered by all parties would be separate and unequal. Women would benefit from a school system appropriate to their minds and needs­-for one thing, lacking Greek and Latin--and preferably they should be taught by women who had themselves been specially and separately trained. By the 1890s women had obtained access to higher education. Their problem was how to gain access to the same education as men. The argument that woman's place was in the home could only with some difficulty be raised in opposition to her sharing in the tasks of healing, with which she had been associated for centuries. Midwives apart, however, those drawn to lay cool hands on feverish brows long gravitated (or were oriented) to religious orders. Access to medical studies, hence to the medical profession, was opened only through the intercession of Empress Eugénie. In 1869 four women students were admitted to the Medical School in Paris, which granted the first M.D. to a Frenchwoman in 1875. Bordeaux followed in 1884, and Montpellier in 1888. The first women externes in Paris hospitals appeared in 1881, internes in 1886. But most women medical students between 1868 and 1888 had been foreigners (of Eugénie's first four, only one had been French), and women in medical practice remained few: seven in all of France in 1882, ninety-five in 1903-one-third of them in Paris. As late as 1928, when the French medical corps counted 28,380 members, only 556 were women, and well over half of them practiced in the Paris area.29

Other faculties were slower to accept women. The Sorbonne allowed a girl to enroll in the Faculty of Letters in 1883; the Law Faculty admitted a woman in 1884; the first doctorate in the Sciences would be awarded in 1888; in Letters in 1914. But when, in 1882, Camille Claudel, a sculptress of great talent, sought admission to the School of Fine Arts, the director, who appreciated her work, refused: "I can't afford to start a revolution in my school."30 Claudel had to continue in a private atelier for young women, as did most aspiring artists who could afford it. Paul Dubois, director of the Beaux Arts, knew whereof he spoke. In 1896 (the same year life-drawing classes in private academies were integrated at last) the Ecole des Beaux Arts announced that women students would be admitted to its classes and to competition for the prestigious Prix de Rome. The following year the first women students to tread the sacred precincts of the Beaux Arts set off a riot that ended with the intervention of the police and the temporary closing of the Ecole. The school reopened and women students stayed on (that first year forty-seven competed for admission and ten got in); but their right to compete for the Prix de Rome was rescinded and not restored until 1903. The first woman to win one of the coveted prizes and attend the Villa Medici would be a sculptor, Mademoiselle Heuwelmans, in 1911.

The experience of the Fine Arts was not exceptional. Male students, ready to riot in the best of circumstances, greeted the appearance of women in their preserves with hostility. At the Sorbonne in 1883 their demonstrations had forced the cancellation of the course in which the first woman admitted was enrolled. In 1885 the admission of women to the prestigious concours d'internat had been greeted with noisy demonstrations, and the first candidate for an internship had been burned in effigy. Candidates for the doctorate in medicine faced the hostility of examiners eager to discourage others from following in their footsteps. "I don't see what you expect to gain from your studies," Professor Charcot told Blanche Edwards, when she got hers in 1889. Law students were more disruptive, and in 1892 Jeanne Chauvin, the first woman to defend her dissertation, was forced to complete the public examination in camera. In 1897 she demanded admission to the bar and the right to exercise the profession for which she had qualified. She was refused, went to court, and lost on the ground that the legal profession should be reserved for men, who alone exercised civic rights. In 1900, finally, a special law permitted women to practice as lawyers. By 1910 the Paris bar counted seventeen female lawyers.

On Christmas Eve 1900, a fortnight after Chauvin finally gained admission to the bar, a women's magazine, La Nouvelle Mode, looked to the century that lay ahead and found it unpredictable but for one thing: "the new evolution of women," no longer passive but hence­ forth militant and counting on their own efforts to affirm their personality and win their independence. La Nouvelle Mode may have been premature, but its previsions would be vindicated.