out in marked contrast to the demand for Woman Suffrage which we advocate. In England we find, too, that women may take part in elections for local bodies; but this again is only under conditions of owning a certain amount of property or paying a certain sum in taxes. But when we demand Woman Suffrage, we can only do so on the ground, not that it should be a right attached to the possession of a certain amount of property, but that it should be inherent in the woman herself. This insistence of the personal right of woman to exercise her own influence in the affairs of the town and the State has received no small measure of support, owing to the large increase in the capitalist methods of production. You all know that already in the beginning of the capitalist development these thoughts found their first exponents among members of the middle-class democracy. There is no need for the middle-class to be ashamed of this, that they—in the time of their youth—still dreamed their dreams, and that their more advanced members were brave fighters in the struggle for women’s rights. We see, moreover, people in England arguing in favour of Woman Suffrage as a personal right. We see them also striving like the French middle-class, which achieved their political emancipation over the body of Louis Capet. We see that they fought with great energy during the struggle in North America for the abolition of slavery. Briefly, in all those periods in which the middle-class agitated for the complete attainment of democratic principles as a means of effecting its own political emancipation and securing power, it also fought for the recognition of equal rights for women. But with whatever zeal and whatever trouble and whatever energy this question of the rights of women was demanded by the middle-class, yet it was not till the advent of Socialism that the struggle began in earnest. Already in 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft, in her celebrated work, “The Claims of Woman,” already in 1787, Condorcet, in his Letters from a Citizen of Newhaven,[1] had claimed equal rights for women; and the cause also received an impetus from the French Revolution. The demand for Woman’s Suffrage was inscribed among the list of reforms desired by some electors at the French Revolution, and a petition asking for it was also presented to the National Assembly. But this body contented itself by issuing a platonic declaration that it relegated the question to the consideration of mothers and daughters. But in 1793 the Committee of Public Safety, on the motion of Amar, dissolved all the women’s organisations, and forbade their meetings. Then the French middle-classes gave up the struggle for Woman Suffrage; and the first Socialists—the Utopians—Saint Simon and Fourier, and their disciples, took up the cause. In 1848 Victor Considérant, in 1851 Pierre Leroux, agitated concerning this question. But they received no encouragement, and their arguments were received with scorn and derision.