At the same time, however, it began to be seen that these demands, important as they are, by no means cover the whole ground, while, taken separately, they were liable to lead in a false direction; they tended to masculinise women and they ignored the claims of the race. In their ardour for emancipation, women sometimes seemed anxious to be emancipated from their sex. Thus it was not enough to claim woman’s place as a human being—especially in an age when man was regarded as the human being _par excellence_—but it also became necessary to claim woman’s place in the world as a woman. That was not, as it might at first seem, a narrower but a wider claim. For on the merely human basis women were reduced to the level of competitive struggle with men, were allowed to bring no contribution of their own to the solution of common problems, and, worst of all, their supreme position in the world as mothers of the race was altogether ignored. So that the assertion of the essential rights of women as women meant at the same time the assertion of the rights of society and the race to the best that women have to give. It was certainly by no accident that the Germans, who once before led the evolution of Europe by their triumphant assertion of the fundamental human impulses and have since been pioneers in social organisation, should take the leading part in the inauguration of this new phase of the woman movement. The publication of Ellen Key’s books corresponded in date with the recent tendency of the Germans to bring to bear on the questions of sex their characteristic Teutonic thoroughness and practicality. It is not surprising, therefore, that this Swedish woman, with her many-sided vision of the world, her daring yet serene statement of the secrets of human hearts, should be greeted as the natural leader of the movement on its most womanly side. Love, as Ellen Key regards it, is at the core of the woman question, and these opening volumes of _Lifslinger_ are, above all, a contribution to the woman question, a modern and more mature version of that _Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ which Mary Wollstonecraft had set forth a century earlier.