In 1861, several scholarly gentlemen in Europe were delving in fields of research where they were destined to upturn facts of great interest to the inferior sex. One of these was John Stuart Mill, whose impassioned protest against the subjection of women was then being written, although it was not published until eight years later. Another was Henry Maine, who was disclosing some significant things about the ancient law on which our modern laws are founded. Another was Lecky, who was gathering material for his _History of European Morals, from Augustus to Charlemagne_, and--incidentally--discovering that "natural history of morals" wherewith he was to shock the world in 1869. But two of the others were searching back of Augustus--"back" of him both in point of time and also in degree of civilization. One of these was Bachofen, a German, who published, in 1861, _Das Mutterrecht_, in which he made it clear that women had not always been subordinate, dependent, but among primitive peoples had been the rulers of their race. McLennan's _Primitive Marriage_, published in 1865, brought prominently to British thinkers this quite-new contention of woman as a creature born to rule, but defrauded and degraded. Then, in 1871, Darwin startled the world with _The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex_; and those who accepted his theory of evolution had to revise all their previous notions about the relations of the sexes. During the next quarter-century many minds were busy with this wholesale revision of ideas, but nothing signal was set forth until Charlotte Stetson--working with the historical data of Maine and Mill and Lecky and their followers, with the ethnological data of Bachofen and McLennan, and many more, and with the natural history of morals as Darwin and Wallace and Huxley and their school disclosed it--declared that the enslavement of women was economic in its origin and in its final analysis. This was not the whole truth, but it was so important a part of the whole that the book _Women and Economics_ may be said to have given the most productive stimulus the feminist movement had had since _The Descent of Man_. Scores, almost hundreds, of books dealing with some phase or other of woman's history, appeared in the next few years. But while many of them were valuable, and some were all but invaluable, none of them was epoch-marking until Olive Schreiner put forth her magnificent fragment on _Woman and Labor_, the chapter on Parasitism being the noblest and most pregnant thing that any student of woman has given to the world. Olive Schreiner saw much further into the question of women and economics than Charlotte Stetson knew how to see. She has a greater vision. She perceives that women are ennobled by what they do--just as men are--and that they are degraded by being denied creative, productive labor--not by being denied the full reward of their toil.