mpe de Gouges, while for the most part she was Olympe's superior.
In 1792, a year after the _Declaration des Droits de la Femme_, Mary
Wollstonecraft--it is possible to some extent inspired by the brief
_Declaration_--published her _Vindication of the Rights of Women_. It
was not a shrill outcry, nor an attack on men--in that indeed
resembling the _Declaration_--but just the book of a woman, a wise and
sensible woman, who discusses many women's questions from a woman's
point of view, and desires civil and political rights, not as a panacea
for all evils, but simply because, as she argues, humanity cannot
progress as a whole while one half of it is semi-educated and only half
free. There can be little doubt that if the later advocates of woman's
suffrage could have preserved more of Mary Wollstonecraft's sanity,
moderation, and breadth of outlook, they would have diminished the
difficulties that beset the task of convincing the community generally.
Mary Wollstonecraft was, however, the inspired pioneer of a great
movement which slowly gained force and volume.[55] During the long
Victorian period the practical aims of this movement went chiefly into
the direction of improving the education of girls so as to make it, so
far as possible, like that of boys. In this matter an immense revolution
was slowly accomplished, involving the entrance of women into various
professions and employments hitherto reserved to men. That was a very
necessary preliminary to the extension of the franchise to women. The
suffrage propaganda could not, moreover, fail to benefit by the better
education of women and their increased activity in public life. It was
their activity, indeed, far more than the skill of the women who fought
for the franchise, which made the political emancipation of women
inevitable, and the noble and brilliant women who through the middle of
the nineteenth century recreated the educational system for women, and
so prepared them to play their proper part in life, were the best women
workers the cause of women's enfranchisement ever had. There was,
however, one distinguished friend of the emancipation of women whose
advocacy of the cause at this period was of immense value. It is now
nearly half a century since John Stuart Mill--inspired, like Thompson,
by a woman--wrote his _Subjection of Women_, and it may undoubtedly be
said that since that date no book on this subject published in any
country--with the single exception of