The movement has its excesses, and the gain has not been without loss.
"When we turn to modern literature," writes Mr. Money, "from the pages in
which Fenelon speaks of the education of girls, who does not feel that
the world has lost a sacred accent--that some ineffable essence has
passed out from our hearts?"

How far the expectation has been realized that women, in fiction, for
instance, would be more accurately described, better understood, and
appear as nobler and lovelier beings when women wrote the novels, this is
not the place to inquire. The movement has results which are unavoidable
in a period of transition, and probably only temporary. The education of
woman and the development of her powers hold the greatest promise for the
regeneration of society. But this development, yet in its infancy, and
pursued with much crudeness and misconception of the end, is not enough.
Woman would not only be equal with man, but would be like him; that is,
perform in society the functions he now performs. Here, again, the notion
of equality is pushed towards uniformity. The reformers admit structural
differences in the sexes, though these, they say, are greatly exaggerated
by subjection; but the functional differences are mainly to be
eliminated. Women ought to mingle in all the occupations of men, as if
the physical differences did not exist. The movement goes to obliterate,
as far as possible, the distinction between sexes. Nature is, no doubt,
amused at this attempt. A recent writer--["Biology and Woman's Rights,"
Quarterly Journal of Science, November, 1878.]--, says: "The 'femme
libre' [free woman] of the new social order may, indeed, escape the
charge of neglecting her family and her household by contending that it
is not her vocation to become a wife and a mother! Why, then, we ask, is
she constituted a woman at all? Merely that she may become a sort of
second-rate man?"

The truth is that this movement, based always upon a misconception of
equality, so far as it would change the duties of the sexes, is a
retrograde.--["It has been frequently observed that among declining
nations the social differences between the two sexes are first
obliterated, and afterwards even the intellectual differences. The more
masculine the women become, the more effeminate become the men. It is no
good symptom when there are almost as many female writers and female
rulers as there are male. Such was the case, for instance, in the
Hellenisti