stly, women have the same natural right to knowledge
and enlightenment as men. The education should be given in common, and
this will powerfully further the interests of morality. The separation
of the sexes in youth really proceeds from the fear of unequal
marriages, in other words, from avarice and pride. It would be dangerous
for a democratic community to allow the spirit of social inequality to
survive among women, with the consequence that it could never be
extirpated among men. Condorcet was not a brilliant writer, but the
humanity and generosity of his thought finds a powerful and reasoned
expression in his sober and somewhat laboured sentences.

So far a good and enlightened man might go. The substance of all that
need be said against the harem with the door ajar, in which the
eighteenth century had confined the mind if not the body, of women, is
to be found in Holbach and Condorcet. But they wrote from outside. They
were the wise spectators who saw the consequences of the degradation of
women, but did not intimately know its cause. Mary Wollstonecraft's
_Vindication of the Rights of Woman_ (1792) is perhaps the most original
book of its century, not because its daring ideas were altogether new,
but because in its pages for the first time a woman was attempting to
use her own mind. Her ideas, as we have seen, were not absolutely new.
They were latent in all the thinking of the revolutionary period. They
had been foreshadowed by Holbach (whom she may have read), by Paine
(whom she had occasionally met), and by Condorcet (whose chief
contribution to the question, written in the same year as her
_Vindication_, she obviously had not read). What was absolutely new in
the world's history was that for the first time a woman dared to sit
down to write a book which was not an echo of men's thinking, nor an
attempt to do rather well what some man had done a little better, but a
first exploration of the problems of society and morals from a
standpoint which recognised humanity without ignoring sex. She showed
her genius not so much in writing the book, which is, indeed, a faulty
though an intensely vital performance, as in thinking out its position
for herself.

She had her predecessors, but she owed to them little, if anything.
There was not enough in them to have formed her mind, if she had come to
their pages unemancipated. She freed herself from mental slavery, and
the utmost which she can have derived from the two or