more free in
fact, and being trained to bodily exercises in the same manner with
men, gave ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified for
them. There can be little doubt that Spartan experience suggested to
Plato, among many other of his doctrines, that of the social and
political equality of the two sexes.

But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all
these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted
voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to
it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it.
Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known
by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society permits
to them), an increasing number of them have recorded protests against
their present social condition: and recently many thousands of them,
headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned
Parliament for their admission to the Parliamentary Suffrage. The
claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of
knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great
prospect of success; while the demand for their admission into
professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes
every year more urgent. Though there are not in this country, as
there are in the United States, periodical Conventions and an
organized party to agitate for the Rights of Women, there is a
numerous and active Society organized and managed by women, for the
more limited object of obtaining the political franchise. Nor is it
only in our own country and in America that women are beginning to
protest, more or less collectively, against the disabilities under
which they labour. France, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Russia now
afford examples of the same thing. How many more women there are who
silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know; but
there are abundant tokens how many _would_ cherish them, were they
not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the
proprieties of their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no
enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once. When Simon de
Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit for the first time
in Parliament, did any of them dream of demanding that an assembly,
elected by their constituents, should make and destroy ministries,
and dictate to the king in affairs of state? No such thought entered