THE WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
IN education, social freedom, and opportunity, most satisfactory progress has been made by women during the last century.
But our political standing is still as it was in 1790, when a learned writer explained that people unfit for the county franchise were those who "lie under natural incapacities, and therefore cannot exercise a sound discretion, or (who are) so much under the influence of others that they cannot have a will of their own in the choice of candidates. Of the former description are women, infants, idiots, lunatics; of the latter, persons receiving alms and revenue offices." Men do not now speak of women as being in the same category as "idiots and lunatics," but for political purposes they place them there. Even in the eighteenth century such sentiments were resented by some women, and outraged feelings found vent in 1792 in that classic of the suffrage movement, Mary Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Women."
In 1810 another champion arose, Sydney Smith,
22
