Since feelings determine thoughts—for the thought always goes in the direction in which the feeling says happiness is to be found—so it is natural that, in the second half of the 18th century, the idea of freedom is the ideal which kindles the soul of increasing numbers of women. _The emancipation of the individual_ is the tale within the tale, from the Renaissance up to the struggles of the Reformation for freedom of conscience, freedom of learning, freedom of investigation, and freedom of thought. Then finally came the struggle for constitutionally protected civic freedom. In America as early as 1776 the demand for the enfranchisement of women was raised, because they had taken part in the struggle for freedom with such great enthusiasm and constancy. With the same passion they threw themselves into the struggle in France for the “Rights of Man.” But both times they had to learn to their sorrow that “fellow-citizen” and “man” were terms which as yet referred only to men. That a woman during the French Revolution proclaimed “Women’s Rights,” that women discussed these questions as well as questions of education and other vital questions, with ardour, had as little immediate effect as the attempt at that time to enforce the right of the fourth estate. These sorely oppressed movements, of women and of working men, dominate the 19th century and now at the beginning of the 20th have every reason for assurance of victory. In the 17th and 18th centuries men and women writers appeared in different countries to demonstrate and establish the worth and right of woman as “man.” Indirectly inspired by the great women of the earlier centuries, they were immediately influenced by woman’s political and cultural exercise of power in the 18th century. Especially notable are the arguments which were advanced in the 90’s of the 18th century by writers manifestly uninfluenced by one another—the Swede, Thorild, in _The Natural Nobility of Womankind_; the German, Hippel; the Frenchman, Condorcet; the English woman, Mary Wollstonecraft. All insist that difference in sex can form no obstacle to placing woman on an equality with man in the family and in society; that she shall have the same right as man to education and free agency. The men writers emphasised more her individual human right, as “man,” and the advantage to society; the women writers more the mother’s need of culture and her right to it, in order to be able to rear and protect her children better. But all four ideas are, at heart, determined by the same point of view which the great philosopher of evolution thus formulated later: _the fundamental condition for social equilibrium is the same as for human happiness and lies in the law of equal freedom_. And this means that every one—without regard to difference between sex and sex, man and man—must have the right and the opportunity to develop and exercise his own capacities. For no one to-day can undertake so certain a valuation of talents that