y her pen an income was secured that
was not only sufficient for herself, but ministered to the needs of an
aged father and mother and sisters as well.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote one great book (which is all any one can write):
"A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." It sums up all that has since been
written on the subject. Like an essay by Herbert Spencer, it views the
matter from every side, anticipates every objection--exhausts the subject.
The literary style of Mary Wollstonecraft's book is Johnsonese, but its
thought forms the base of all that has come after. It is the
great-great-grandmother of all woman's clubs and these thousand efforts
that women are now putting forth along economic, artistic and social
lines. But we have nearly lost sight of Mary Wollstonecraft. Can you name
me, please, your father's grandmother? Aye, I thought not; then tell me
the name of the man who is now Treasurer of the United States!

And so you see we do not know much about other people, after all. But Mary
Wollstonecraft pushed the question of woman's freedom to its farthest
limit; I told you that she exhausted the subject. She prophesied a day
when woman would have economic freedom--that is, be allowed to work at any
craft or trade for which her genius fitted her and receive a proper
recompense. Woman would also have social freedom: the right to come and go
alone--the privilege of walking upon the street without the company of a
man--the right to study and observe. Next, woman would have political
freedom: the right to record her choice in matters of lawmaking. And
last, she would yet have sex freedom: the right to bestow her love without
prying police and blundering law interfering in the delicate relations of
married life.

To make herself understood. Mary Wollstonecraft explained that society was
tainted with the thought that sex was unclean; but she held high the ideal
that this would yet pass away, and that the idea of holding one's mate by
statute law would become abhorrent to all good men and women. She declared
that the assumption that law could join a man and a woman in holy wedlock
was preposterous, and that the caging of one person by another for a
lifetime was essentially barbaric. Only the love that is free and
spontaneous and that holds its own by the purity, the sweetness, the
tenderness and the gentleness of its life is divine. And further, she
declared it her belief that when a man had found his true mate such a
u