the
controversy which gave rise to them is over."

CHAPTER VI.

"VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN."

The "Vindication of the Rights of Women" is the work on which Mary
Wollstonecraft's fame as an author rests. It is more than probable that,
but for it, her other writings would long since have been forgotten. In
it she speaks the first word in behalf of female emancipation. Her book
is the forerunner of a movement which, whatever may be its results, will
always be ranked as one of the most important of the nineteenth century.
Many of her propositions are, to the present advocates of the cause,
foregone conclusions. Hers was the voice of one crying in the wilderness
to prepare the way. Her principal task was to demonstrate that the old
ideals were false.

The then most exalted type of feminine perfection was Rousseau's Sophia.
Though this was an advance from the conception of the sex which inspired
Congreve, when he made the women of his comedies mere targets for men's
gallantries, or Swift, when he wrote his "Advice to a Young Married
Lady," it was still a low estimate of woman's character and sphere of
action. According to Rousseau, and the Dr. Gregorys and Fordyces who
re-echoed his doctrines in England, women are so far inferior to men that
their contribution to the comfort and pleasure of the latter is the sole
reason for their existence. For them virtue and duty have a relative and
not an absolute value. What they _are_ is of no consequence. The
essential point is what they _seem_ to men. That they are human beings is
lost sight of in the all-engrossing fact that they are women.

It is strange that Rousseau, who would have had men return to a state of
nature that they might be freed from shams and conventionalities, did not
see that the sacrifice of reality to appearances was quite as bad for
women. Mary Wollstonecraft, farther-sighted than he, discovered at once
the flaw in his reasoning. What was said of Schopenhauer by a Frenchman
could with equal truth be said of her: "Ce n'est pas un philosophe comme
les autres, c'est un philosophe qui a vu le monde." She had lived in
woman's world, and consequently, unlike the sentimentalists who were
accepted authorities on the subject, she did not reason from an outside
stand-point. This was probably what helped her not only to recognize the
false position of her sex, but to understand the real cause of the
trouble. She referred it, not to individual cases of