he working and the results of such legislation.

[44] When Professor Giddings speaks of the "goal of mankind," it must, of
course, be remembered, he is using a bold metaphor in order to make his
meaning clearer. Strictly speaking, mankind has no "goals," nor are
there any ends in Nature which are not means to further ends.

II

THE CHANGING STATUS OF WOMEN[45]

The Origin of the Woman Movement--Mary Wollstonecraft--George
Sand--Robert Owen--William Thompson--John Stuart Mill--The Modern
Growth of Social Cohesion--The Growth of Industrialism--Its
Influence in Woman's Sphere of Work--The Education of
Women--Co-education--The Woman Question and Sexual
Selection--Significance of Economic Independence--The State
Regulation of Marriage--The Future of Marriage--Wilhelm von
Humboldt--Social Equality of Women--The Reproduction of the Race as
a Function of Society--Women and the Future of Civilization.

I

It was in the eighteenth century, the seed-time of modern ideas, that
our great-grandfathers became conscious of a discordant break in the
traditional conceptions of women's status. The vague cries of Justice,
Freedom, Equality, which were then hurled about the world, were here and
there energetically applied to women--notably in France by
Condorcet--and a new movement began to grow self-conscious and coherent.
Mary Wollstonecraft, after Aphra Behn the first really noteworthy
Englishwoman of letters, gave voice to this movement in England.

The famous and little-read _Vindication of the Rights of Women_,
careless and fragmentary as it is, and by no means so startling to us as
to her contemporaries, shows Mary Wollstonecraft as a woman of genuine
insight, who saw the questions of woman's social condition in their
essential bearings. Her intuitions need little modification, even though
a century of progress has intervened. The modern advocates of woman's
suffrage have little to add to her brief statement. She is far, indeed,
from the monstrous notion of Miss Cobbe, that woman's suffrage is the
"crown and completion" of all progress so far as women's movements are
concerned. She looks upon it rather as one of the reasonable conditions
of progress. It is pleasant to turn from the eccentric energy of so many
of the advocates of women's causes to-day, all engaged in crying up
their own particular nostrum, to the genial many-sided wisdom of Mary
Wollstonecraft, touching all