of the womanliness of women that comes with their
greater freedom makes itself felt in helping to form a
sounder public opinion upon all forms of physical
excess, and with this a truer and nobler ideal of
manly virtue.
In one other important respect Mary Wollstonecraft was ahead of her own time in regard to women, and in line with the foremost thinkers on this subject in ours. Henrik Ibsen took the lead among the moderns in teaching that women have a duty to themselves as well as to their parents, husbands, and children, and that truth and freedom are needed for the growth of true womanliness as well as of true manliness. But Mary Wollstonecraft anticipated him in teaching that self-government, self-knowledge, and self-respect, a worship of truth and not of mere outward observances, are what women's lives mainly need to make them noble. I have already quoted her saying: "I do not want them to have power over men, but over themselves," and other quotations of a similar drift may be given: "It is not empire, but equality and friendship which women want;" and again: "Speaking of women at large, their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures, and the next, in point of importance, as citizens, is that, which includes so many, of a mother." The words italicised foreshadow almost verbatim Nora's expression in the well-known scene in "A Doll's House," where she tells her astounded husband that she has discovered that she has duties to herself as well as to him and to their children.
The facts of Mary Wollstonecraft's life are now so
