#VintageMagTweets tonight come from this Punch book of Women's Rights.

The publishing date is 1967. It's a straightforward look at the history of female rights up to and including suffrage.

I think it's useful to reflect just how few rights women had before the 21st Century. For instance, married women weren't allowed their own property (an issue Jane Austen references several times in her novels).

For many centuries, they were not allowed to live apart from their husbands (something Anne Bronte writes of in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall).

Violence against wives was treated with relative lenience. (So, quite a lot like today.)

Until 1885, girls as young as 13 were deemed capable of "consent".

Married women began to get some rights to their own property in 1870.

Around the late 1800s, there seems to have been a dawning acknowledgement of women as human beings with fundamental needs and with something to contribute to society.

The first college for women.

And the second.

However, female students were regarded as too feeble to follow a traditional academic curriculum.

'Plain' women were preferred by selection panels. If they thought you were attractive, you were excluded.

I love how perplexed they are that an educated woman should still be deemed a good catch!

1873, and at last there is a Cambridge college open to female students.

Followed by Newnham.

Experts were on hand, though, to explain that feeble ladybrains were unsuited to learning and could implode at any moment.

I don't know who wrote this poem, but I'm sure he thought he was hilarious.

However, even though women were allowed to complete their university courses alongside men, female students were not awarded degrees until well into the next century.

This despite the fact that some women were getting better marks than their male classmates.

THIS is how long women had to wait to be awarded degrees.

But by 1870, some progress had been made in helping girls access an education.

I think we forget what a long and bitter fight women have had just to secure the very basic rights which men have enjoyed automatically.

And how that unfair and lowly status was thrust upon women just because they had been born female. For no other reason.

I'll tweet some more from this book on Thursday.

Oh, and lastly for tonight: don't come at us with this ladybrains nonsense. It's an archaic cod-science, and something which has been used for centuries to try and justify blatantly unfair treatment of women. Away with it.

OK, a bit more from the Punch book about the development of women's rights, now.

(To put that into context, compositors were one of the fiercest anti-women unions in the 1970s and fought to keep the job reserved for the male sex.)

Again, to put this quote into context, some of the unions as late as the 1970s were reluctant to let women in, and even when they did, some didn't bother frighting for their female members.

Here's a thread-within-a-thread about the struggle of one of the first women students to attempt to study and then practise medicine in the UK.

Garrett was initially barred from studying to be a doctor, so she took a different route into the medical profession. However, she was too good for the men around her.

She tried a different route to try and get her degree, but the university barred her from that, too.

She tried yet another route into practising medicine. It's crucial to remember that every time she was blocked, it was simply because she was female.

Finally she got her degree by fulfilling, in effect, a distance-learning course.

Not only did she fight for herself, but for other women to pursue the same career.

What was the reaction of the male students to the fact that women were starting to attend university alongside them?

Meanwhile the university itself made sure it denied those female students access to a crucial part of the course.

Finally they decided they would let women students complete the medical course, but that they would not be allowed a degree at the end. And no doctor was allowed to practise without a degree.

Groups of men actually resigned rather than interact with female students.

However, parliament finally stepped in and allowed women to sit examinations in the field of medicine.

When you focus on that one area, the force of misogyny is staggering. Women not even allowed to study the bodies of their own sex, and treat their fellow females!

Remember that even in the 1970s, female students were still routinely being asked for higher A level grades than males to study medicine, and that most medical courses capped women's admissions at around 20%.

I'll finish this thread on Sunday.