When at the end of the period of Orthodoxy and Absolutism, the great fundamental principle of Protestantism, the principle of personality, once more made headway, one of the most characteristic expressions of this reaction is that, in England, Milton wrote upon the right of divorce and Defoe upon the right of woman to the development and exercise of her mental powers. Among others who demanded greater education for women were Comenius in Germany and Fénelon in France. It was not in the former country that woman, so long oppressed, first won her great cultural influence. That happened in the land where women had never wholly lost it. In France, in the age of enlightenment, it was the salons created by women that determined the European spirit of the time. Letters and memoirs indicate sufficiently the influence of woman—in good as well as in bad sense—in politics and literature, manners, customs, and taste. Women transform indirectly the political, philosophic, and scientific style. For they demand that every subject be treated in a manner easily comprehensible and agreeable to them. A number of writings appeared which aimed to make it easy for “women folk” also “to be freed through the reason.” Since it was the approval of women which determined fame, men were only too eager to fulfil their expressed demands. Women disseminated the ideas of men in wide circles, partly by buying their writings in great numbers and distributing them, partly also by social life. Never has woman more perfectly accomplished the important task of adjusting culture values. The art of conversation, developed to the highest perfection, was, it is true, often only a game of battledore and shuttlecock with ideas. But it performed at the same time, and in more elegant and more effective manner, a great part of the office of to-day’s Press. The political leader, art and literary criticism, gossip (_causerie_), the “portrait gallery” of contemporaries—all this was gathered from clever discourse. Through their art of conversation the women became—next to the philosophers and statesmen who in this or that salon were the leading spirits—the intellectual leaders of the time; they created “enlightened opinion,” they co-operated finally in the Revolution. The mistresses of these salons scarcely felt the need of an emancipation of woman; for they had for themselves as many possibilities of culture, of development of their powers, of the exercise of their faculties, as even they themselves could wish. The intellectual curiosity, which coveted learning, and the cultural interest of these women penetrated in wider circles, and a result of this general awakening was the Woman’s Lyceum founded in Paris in 1786, among the students of which were found, some years later, enthusiastic supporters of the Revolution.