In France, the eighteenth century, more than any other period of history, is “the century of woman.” The salons are the focussing point of all ideas; the most eminent men write for women, who become electric batteries from which the ideas of the time send out kindling sparks in all directions. Thus the women of France help to prepare the French Revolution. During the Revolution, Olympe de Gouges writes her “declaration of the rights of woman,” as a counterpart to that of the rights of man, and Condorcet speaks in support of woman’s claims. The same spirit of a new age confronts us in Mary Wollstonecraft’s _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ (1792), as also in Hippel’s _Ueber die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber_, published the same year, and in the Swede Thorild’s contemporary treatise _Om kvinnokönets naturliga höghet_ (“On the Natural Greatness of Women”). Each in its way was a remarkable sign of the time which already included the whole “emancipation” programme of equality of position: the same rights for woman as for man as regards education, labour, a share in legislation, and an equality of position under the law and in marriage. Isolated instances of emancipated women were nothing new. In Greece, the type was common enough to be employed in comedy; in Rome, self-supporting women were to be found; during the Middle Ages not only Bridget but many another woman—in the quality of abbess or regent—exercised a great and often beneficial activity. The days of antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and of the Renaissance all possessed female scholars, physicians, and artists. But it is not until the century of the great Revolution that we find among women themselves as well as among certain men a persistent and conscious striving to elevate the education and to secure the rights of women. And wherever this striving has been profound, it has been united with the desire to reform the position of woman in love and in marriage. It is a very common but erroneous opinion that monogamy has given rise to love. Love appears already among animals, and with them, as in the world of men, has shown itself independent of monogamy. The origin of the latter in human society was the relation of proprietorship, religious ideas, considerations of collective utility, but not perception of the importance of love’s selection. On the contrary, love has been in perpetual strife with monogamy, and it is therefore a profound mistake to suppose that the higher view of love has been formed solely through monogamy. The idea of love has been developed in as great a degree by attacks on marriage as in association with marriage itself.