This aspect of the woman of South America, however, is the only one of characteristic form she has retained after her determined subduing of national individuality to European commonplaceness. The lady of Brazil, Peru, Chili, or the lesser South American states is not characteristic in appearance, in custom, or in thought; she stands simply as a modification of Latin civilization under variant conditions, and is hardly to be distinguished from her European sisters of similar stock. There is of course some individuality left among the lower class of women; but even this is fast disappearing before the inroads of the more insistent culture. As with the Mexican, so with the South American woman: she has ceased to possess racial uniqueness and so has ceased to be nationally interesting, however she may charm as an individual.
It is therefore rather in the individual than in the typical aspect that there may be presented to the notice of the reader the names of some of the more noted women of South American culture in later years. While it is true that during the last half of the nineteenth century, particularly in Chile and the Argentine Republic, the feminine status underwent a marked change, coming into closer touch with the standards of civilization in the more advanced civilizations, the woman of prominence, in anything save politics, is still the notable exception in South America. The most marked advance in this respect is to be found in Chile, where, in 1879, the University and its colleges were, by special statute, opened to women students, and where, in 1903, the Medical School contained thirty-eight women, not a few of whom were taking post-graduate courses after having passed through the regular curriculum. The government of Chile actually sent as a special student to Austria and Germany a woman, Ernestina Perez, who has since taken high rank as a physician.
The advance in the status of women in Chile was doubtless largely due to the influence of Mercedes Marin del Solar, whose writings first extorted from Spanish masculinity a reluctant confession that a woman might achieve deserved fame in paths hitherto thought to be sacred to the feet of men. Born in 1804, when among her countrymen women were considered mere child-bearers, she devoted her life to proving that her sex possessed the qualities requisite for high attainment in literary matters as well as in the graver concerns of life; and she won ample success. Even with the scant opportunities for obtaining an education which were then stingily meted out to women, Señora Solar managed to develop her natural culture; and while still a young woman she became an ardent public advocate for the higher education of her sex. She did not live to see her efforts crowned with full fruition; but they were effectual at last. It is, however, chiefly for her literary accomplishments that she will live in memory; her ode on the death of Don Diego Portales remains a standard, and her _Ode to Washington_, inspired by the interest taken by its author in the American Civil War, which was then raging, shows breadth of thought and fine philosophical powers, while it is of especial interest to us because of its subject and aim.