As is well known the repression of the mental activities and the low physical condition which for more than thirteen centuries had prevailed, prevented the seed sown in the sixteenth century from taking root among the masses of the people. Their instincts were those of the slave and two centuries were required to waken them from their lethargy. Finally, however, even among the class mentioned the constructive forces began to assert themselves. Free thought and to a certain extent free speech were established. With the further development of liberal ideas a belief in the Divine Right of Kings and in the principles underlying monarchial institutions became somewhat weakened. A few attempts were even made to establish republics. Because of the glimmering light of scientific truth put forth in the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical authority was no longer supreme. Although many important steps had been taken to free men from the thraldom of the past, so firmly had the idea of woman’s inferiority been established that no thought of including her in the new régime was ever entertained. Justice, equality, and liberty are subjects upon which man descants loudly and long. He talks glibly of his free institutions and even designates a number of his one-sided governments as republics, and this too notwithstanding the fact that women are still denied representation in the governments to which they owe allegiance, and that a large proportion of men are still within the grasp of economic slavery; all of which shows the extent to which the moral sense and the judgment have been dwarfed by prejudice and selfishness. Democracy is still a meaningless term—an ideal yet to be realized. At the beginning of the nineteenth century such were the conditions surrounding women that an attempt on their part to extricate themselves from their legal and social bondage would have proved utterly futile. At that time women had practically no legal rights; even the right to control their own bodies was denied them. As woman was dependent upon man for support her sex-functions were controlled by him and the children which she bore belonged exclusively to him. He constituted the family—wife and children did not count. To a considerable extent these conditions still prevail. Masculine law, masculine religion, and masculine ideas concerning the duties and uses of the female sex had made of woman a nondescript—a creature neither male nor female. Her mental constitution had become atrophied, the diluted reflections of men’s opinions having been substituted for the natural feminine instincts and ideas. Among the great mass of women the original feminine type had disappeared.