Before they cross the Channel in the company of Mary Wollstonecraft, and take a look at revolutionary Paris, readers of this work should be told something more of her _Vindication of the Rights of Woman, with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects_. In christening this book after Thomas Paine’s notorious work, and thereby rendering him the sincerest kind of flattery, Mary Wollstonecraft did herself a serious injury; for the inappropriate title caused her to be associated in public sentiment with her friend’s evil repute and evil principles,--an association from which she suffers to this hour. So named, the treatise on feminine disqualifications and grievances was naturally assailed with excessive virulence by all persons, who held Paine in abhorrence. Appearing under an inoffensive title, the treatise would have displeased the majority of educated Englishwomen, and been severely handled by reviewers; but it would not have sent its author down to posterity hand in hand with the scurrilous politician and flippant freethinker. The _Rights of Woman_ is a statement of woman’s need for a higher and healthier education; a demand that women should have equal educational advantages with the other sex; should be raised by education as nearly as possible to intellectual equality with men, and for this end should from earliest childhood be taught from the same books and trained in the same schools as persons of the male gender. The proposal that girls should be educated in the same schools with boys; that young women should pursue their higher studies in the same classrooms and colleges with young men; that from infancy to adult age, the young of both sexes should be reared and trained side by side, was a proposal certain ninety years since to provoke angry disapproval;--certain, even in these days of liberality and innovation, to cause fierce disputes, should it be put forward, as a serious suggestion to be acted upon by people of all classes throughout the country. But this bold and startling proposal was not the chief cause of the outcry against the _Rights of Woman_. To show their urgent need of a better education, the author gave a picture of the women of her period and country that stung them to fury, and in so doing, caused their fathers, and sons, and brothers, to rise in wrath against so merciless an assailant of the gentler sex. Mary Wollstonecraft’s charge against Englishwomen was that they were frivolous, silly, deceitful, mean-natured, violent in their tempers, querulous, peevish, indolent, immodest, uncleanly in their habits, wanting in delicacy; so wanting in common decency as to be in the habit of exposing their persons shamelessly to one another, although they affected to be unutterably shocked if by any accident they let a man get a view of their ankles. All this Mary Wollstonecraft said of Englishwomen of her own social degree; and she said it coarsely. No wonder there was an outcry against the author of the