The world is full of books about women,—most often alluded to in such books as “Woman.” The vast majority of these books have been written by men, and until quite lately the few women who wrote about women confined themselves to repeating the precepts laid down by men. There were remarkable exceptions, of course: Mary Astell and Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Sand and Elizabeth Barrett Browning spoke as women and not as echoes of men. Quite recently women have suddenly broken the long silence, and there is a flood of exposition which is likely, from its volume and force, to make confusion take the place of silence. Ellen Key in Sweden, Rosa Mayreder in Austria, Mrs. Gilman in America and Olive Schreiner in South Africa are a few of the most distinguished writers; but there are troops of others who, in books and magazines and papers, strive to deliver their souls. This little book aims merely at being a brief survey of the women’s movement and of the directions it appears to be taking; a survey which shall deal with principles and the broad aspect of things rather than with details, and that will rather suggest what are the difficulties and in what spirit they should be approached, than offer a universal solution for the deepest and most complex problem that has been set before the human race. The women’s movement in Great Britain has for the last seven years been directed so considerably into political channels, the struggle for the parliamentary vote has absorbed so much of the active, organised and thinking women of the nation, that one hears people talk sometimes as if the suffrage movement _were_ the women’s movement, and as if, when the vote shall be won, there will be no more women’s movement. One would have to be very shallow and very insular, too, to think so. And what a tragedy it would be! What! Shall all these sacrifices be made to get the vote and then nothing be done with it? Shall the vote be at once the record of the progress of women and its grave? The women’s movement is world-wide, and whether or no it has taken a political turn depends on the circumstances of each several nation. That it will be of political import some day everywhere is unquestionable to us who believe that it will not die, but that it _is_ life and “holds a promise for the race that was not at our rising.” A condition of virtuous anarchy may be the highest of all ideals; no one, it is to be imagined, regards government, laws and compulsion as good in themselves; but so long as governments exist, so long are social reforms at their mercy, and no civilisation is internally stable until it has moulded the body politic into harmony with itself. This is not to say that no progress can be made except by law-making; it is to say that the time comes in the development of every civilisation when laws and the administration of social affairs must change to meet the growing needs of the people. It is because British men