esley A Hall 1 Katharina Rowold,  The Educated Woman: Minds, Bodies, and Women's Higher Education in Britain, Germany, and Spain, 1865–1914, Routledge Research in Gender and History, No. 7 ( London:  Routledge,  2010), pp. x + 311, £70.00, hardback, ISBN:  978-0-415-20587-0. Author information Copyright and License information 1 Wellcome Library, London Copyright © Lesley A. Hall 2011 PMC Copyright notice PMCID: PMC3199660 While one still finds the antifeminist pronouncements of Henry Maudsley and other late nineteenth-century medical men and scientists quoted as exemplary of attitudes towards the possibility of women being capable of, and benefiting from, higher education, one seldom finds these adequately contextualised as part of a much larger, and more contested, debate on women's minds and bodies; not to mention the fact that in spite of the diatribes as to their mental and physical unsuitedness to advanced studies and the deleterious effects of these on female health, women were nonetheless increasingly entering higher education during the later decades of the nineteenth century in Britain. Katharina Rowold has already performed the valuable service of producing an edited volume, Gender and Science: Late Nineteenth-Century Debates on the Female Mind and Body (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1996), documenting these debates in the UK. In The Educated Woman she sets the British story within a wider European context, invoking, in comparison, the situations in Germany and in Spain, which provide particularly useful examples of differing traditions affecting how these debates were framed and how they played out in practice. Both these nations saw women admitted to university education a good deal later than they were in the UK (not until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century). This did not occur very substantially earlier in Germany than in Spain, in spite of the existence of an organised women's movement from the late nineteenth century in the former, and no suc