So significant had the psychic power of woman shown itself to be in the Middle Ages that already in the early Renaissance it brought forth a number of “feminist” writers, both women and men. And in the height of the Renaissance there was quite an “emancipation” literature, about women and by women. This literature increased during the following centuries. Famous men emphasised the importance of a higher education of woman; some, as early as the beginning of the 16th century, claimed the absolute superiority of woman in all things. Greater freedom, education, and rights, in one or another respect, were demanded by men as well as women “feminists.” This literature purposed less, however, to alter some given conditions than, by means of examples of famous women of antiquity, to demonstrate the personal right and the social gain of what already obtained without hindrance, although with the disapproval of many:—that numbers of women had appeared who in classic culture, in the practice of learned professions, in political or religious, intellectual or æsthetic interests, stood beside the men of Humanism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. The ideal of the time, the fully developed human personality of marked individuality, determined the conduct of life of women exactly as that of men. Both sexes cherished the life value which the original, isolated, individual personality signified for other such personalities. Both sexes appropriated to themselves the right to choose that which was harmonious with their own natures, that which soul or sense, thought or feeling, desired. It followed from this conception that women sought to attain the highest degree of the beauty and grace of their own sex and at the same time to cultivate what “manly” courage or genius nature had given them—attributes which men valued in them next to their purely womanly qualities. But at this time it was not the _work_ of woman which had the great cultural significance, but the human essence of her being reflected in _the works of men_. In antiquity woman exhibited the manly qualities of greatness of soul and civic virtue; in the Middle Ages she revealed the same faculty as man for saintliness and exercise of love; in the Renaissance she manifested the same ability as man to mould her own personality into a living work of art. If the spirit of equality between the sexes, which prevailed in the Renaissance, had further directed the progress of development, a “woman movement” would never have arisen, because its ends, which are to-day still contended for, would have been attained one after another, at the appointed time, as natural fruits of the florescence of the Renaissance.