well known through the biographies of Mr. Kegan Paul and Mrs. Pennell, and her memory has been so thoroughly vindicated from the contumely that was at one time[1] heaped upon it, that I do not propose to dwell upon her personal history. I have here endeavoured to consider the character of the initiative which she gave to the women's rights movement England, and I find that she stamped upon it from the outset the word Duty, and has impressed it with a character that it has never since lost. Women need education, need economic independence, need political enfranchisement, need social equality and friendship, mainly because without them they are less able to do their duty to themselves and to their neighbours. What was false and unreal in the old system of treating women she showed up in its ugliness, the native ugliness of all shams. That woman must choose between being a slave and a queen, quickly scorn'd when not ador'd," is a theory of pinchbeck and tinsel; it is difficult to discover its relation to the realities of life. Upon this theory, and all that hangs upon it, Mary Wollstonecraft made the first systematic and concentrated attack; and the women's rights movement in England and America owes as much to her as modern Political Economy owes to her famous contemporary, Adam Smith.
- ↑ Horace Walpole called her "a hyena in petticoats."
