“What I desire to show you is that woman had not then received all that was due her, although men seemed to think she was fully emancipated. But events moved rapidly in that stirring age, and this great question could not be kept in the background in a day when every abuse and injustice was allowed a hearing and reform was in the very air. Even the dumb beasts had such powerful advocates that cruelty and unkindness were greatly checked. What wonder then, as men’s sensibilities and consciences became quickened, that they should begin to see, what they could not see before, that a fuller liberty ought to be accorded to woman? But this vision came not without help. Sometimes in our history we have known of a race being deprived of their freedom, and so benumbed by their condition that they desired nothing better, and so perforce waited for a movement for their enfranchisement to come from without. It was not so in this case. Women themselves cried out against their lot. They were not so enraptured with the calm and quiet of their conventional life but that they felt the stirrings of ambition for something different, and they did not fear to raise their voice for more liberty.” “Liberty!” I echoed. “Were they really deprived of liberty?” “Yes, liberty to choose a calling that would suit their individual tastes and satisfy their growing ambition.” “Excuse me,” I again interrupted, “but were not these women who exhibited so much restlessness unattached--that is, without many family ties? And were not the great majority so contented in the shelter of home and so engrossed in the care of husband and children that they were entire strangers to any such disturbing fancies, or ambitions as you call them? And, again, did not this large class of happy and busy wives and mothers resent the action of those self-appointed liberators who were fighting for an image of straw and crying themselves hoarse over imaginary wrongs?” Zenith smiled again in that peculiar manner which told me, in the pleasantest possible way, that she was perfectly sure I was on the losing side, and with the smile she resumed: “Your questions are so familiar to one who has studied this subject that they seem like another plagiarism, as it were, from our histories, but I will give you fair answers. “It is true that the early protests came from the solitary women, unfortunately not a small class at that day, who, being without legal protectors, felt the inequalities of the law and the unjust restraints put upon their sex by society, but the truths they spoke came with added force because of their intimate acquaintance with their needs.