to think for herself, therefore she was deprived of all
training which would enable her to think at all. The girl must
appear to be dependent upon the mental strength of a man, as
well as upon his physical strength."

It is necessary to remember this attitude if we are to understand the
direction that woman's emancipation has largely--and, as some of us
think, mistakenly--taken in this country. It explains the demand for
equality of opportunity with men, which has become the watch-cry of so
many women, thinking that here was the way to solve the problem. A cry
good and right in itself, but one which is a starting-point only for
woman's freedom, and can never be its end.

Little more than fifty years have passed since Miss Jex-Blake
undertook her memorable fight to obtain medical training for herself
and her colleagues at the University of Edinburgh.[5] At about the
same time arose women's demand for the right of higher education, and
colleges for women were opened at Oxford and Cambridge. These were the
practical results which followed the revolt of Mary Wollstonecraft,
and later, the great revival due to the publication of John Stuart
Mill's epoch-marking book, the _Subjection of Women_.

During the first period of the woman's movement the centre of
restlessness was amongst unmarried women, who rebelled at the old
restrictions, eager for self-development and a more intellectually
active life. These women undertook their own cause, insisting that
their humanity came before their sex. They were picked women, much
above the average woman, and to a certain extent abnormal in so far as
they denied the important factor of sex. To them the average male was
not a subject of overwhelming interest, and marriage and motherhood
were not of prominent importance in their thought. For them "equality
of opportunity for women with men" seemed to solve the problem of
woman's emancipation. The constructive result of their campaign was
the winning of the higher education of woman, the right to work, and
the rush of women into the professions. Much, indeed, was gained,
though it may be said with equal truth that much was lost. With this
solution--the increased power of self-realisation in a narrow class of
picked women, chiefly unmarried women of the middle-class--the woman's
movement might well begin, but in this alone it can never end. The
movement was incomplete as far as woman's emancipation went, because
it was won by