While St. Leon, with various coadjutors and ministers, endeavoured to effect such moral, religious, and political changes, among human beings, another very noted person laboured with equal activity, and greater ardour, to fashion one half of mankind to the new doctrines. This was Jemima, the celebrated propounder of a new theory, and a new system of practice, for the information and use of women. Ever desirous of tracing moral effects to moral causes, Hamilton was at great pains to enquire into the parentage, education, temperament, habits, and conduct of Miss Jemima, in the hopes of being able to discover whence sprang her aberrations from common sense, and from the principles and sentiments which the experience of mankind, in all ages, has found it most beneficial to society to cherish among women. Of this female champion, he found means to learn the history, as well as the doctrines and opinions. Jemima, it seems, was a woman of strong and lively parts, and ardent feelings; who, not having found the world to her mind, proposed to model it to her wishes. She had lived to the age of thirty, without any invitation to marriage, although very strongly disposed to that state, and finding little chance of getting a man married to herself, had cast her eyes upon a man that was married to another. But the intervention of a wife, either stopped or limited the proposed converse with this object; and finding celibacy no longer tolerable, she was filled with rage at the restraints which all civilized societies have imposed upon women; the rigour of which was strongly enhanced, by the contrast that it exhibited with the free and uncontrouled range of the ladies of Otaheite. She had hitherto conformed to the absurd and aristocratical ideas respecting female reputation; but these she now resolved to renounce, and to live openly in a state for which _she had long secretly panted_[7], and having before abjured religion, without regarding its precepts, she took to herself a mate; or in the language of the vulgar, became a kept mistress. It was neither a new nor extraordinary occurrence in itself, for a woman tired of being a maid, and that had not succeeded in becoming a wife, to become a concubine; but an event intrinsically not very material, may be important in its consequences. Like Dr. Sangrado, she was not content with practicing herself according to the line which she had marked, but must prescribe the same course of medicine to all others. She must construct a theory, and write a book. But as chastity was not the only restraint which civilized society requires to be imposed on women, she proceeded at once to change their condition in the community, and in freedom of conduct, as well as the nature of their pursuits, to place them on the same footing with men. To compass this purpose, Jemima’s first care was in this her book, to instruct the understandings of the sex in the _rights of women_.