To complete the movement, all that we required was, (=a=) a large body of disgruntled females, either spinsters or wives, all ready to slander life and man; and (=b=) economic pressure driving women into open competition with men in all paid employment. Both these conditions having been fulfilled, the rest naturally followed. The first indication we had that Feminism consisted of these elements was the fact that the old passionate calls to which women once responded gradually began to yield before calls of mere vanity and to the desire for notoriety. Numbers of women no longer showed the old eagerness to express physical passion, or the old sad resignation when it was rebuffed: they were content with gratifying their vanity in every kind of sterile pursuit that gave them the appearance of being important. Without any promise whatsoever of doing better than degenerate men, and certainly without any past record of achievement that would justify us in expecting wonders from them—for in those departments of life over which they have held supreme sway for thousands of years the most deplorable muddle and ignorance prevail[10]—they claimed municipal and even parliamentary power, they sought prominence even in empty privileges, such as the right of sitting among the Peers; and were triumphant when, at last, they figured in a position which has naturally excited the abhorrence of all decent men for centuries—the jury box. Footnote 10: _Vide_ Chapter X of _Woman: A Vindication_. The whole change revealed in the leaders of the movement and numbers of their followers a transmutation of the once powerful bodily passion into something more feeble, more volatile, and more exclusively dependent on vanity; while accompanying it throughout were the two elements growing daily more acute—the longing to be rid of the thraldom of sex, and hostility to man, which these women like to see more general. Nothing startling has come of women’s political power, and we can prophesy with perfect confidence that nothing ever will; even when, as may quite possibly happen, Parliament consists only of females. So far, the measures they have introduced or clamoured for have indicated merely a continuation and intensification of the Puritanical tradition, but not a sign of anything hopeful or new, in the sense that it was beyond degenerate men.