It is more than fifty years ago that I read _Hertha_, Sweden’s first “feministic” (dealing with the woman question) novel, and listened to the numerous contentions concerning it. With ever keener personal interest I have since followed the operations of the woman movement—above all, the new psychic conditions, types, and forms of activities which the woman movement has evoked; I have also given consideration to the new possibilities and new difficulties resulting therefrom for individuals and for society. The limited compass of this little book prevents me from substantiating my assertions by means of parallels with earlier times, comparisons which might illuminate certain spiritual transformations and new formations. My comparisons of the present with the past do not go farther back than my own memory reaches. And these touch, moreover, in what concerns the past, principally upon Swedish conditions; while my impressions of the present were gathered throughout Europe. I have considered, however, that I could summarise both in a comprehensive picture. For although the women of Sweden a generation ago possessed rights for which the women in many countries are still struggling to-day, yet the woman movement in the last decade has advanced so rapidly that the conditions have in great measure been equalised. Indeed, some of the grey-haired champions of the woman movement have seen one after another of their demands fulfilled in this new century—demands which in the fifties and sixties, in many countries even in the seventies and eighties, were publicly and privately derided even in the very person of these champions. And among peoples who even ten years ago were unaffected by the emancipation of women, for example the Chinese and the Turks, it is already progressing. It amounts to this, that even if national peculiarities in character and in laws occasion differences in the curve which the woman movement describes in the different countries, yet everywhere the movement has had the same causes, must follow the same main direction, and—sooner or later—must have the same effects. * * * * *