ull of digressions, and almost
without a regular plan. Its style is unformed, sometimes rhetorical,
sometimes familiar. But with all these faults, it teems with apt
phrases, telling passages, vigorous sentences which sum up in a few
convincing lines the substance of its message. It lacks the neatness,
the athletic movement of Paine's English. It has nothing of the
learning, the formidable argumentative compulsion of Godwin's writing.
But it is sold to-day in cheap editions, while Godwin survives only on
the dustier shelves of old libraries. Its passion and sincerity have
kept it alive. It is the cry of an experience too real, too authentic,
to allow of any meandering down the by-ways of fanciful speculation. It
said with its solitary voice the thing which the main army of thinking
women is saying to-day. There is scarcely a passage of its central
doctrine which the modern leaders of the women's movement would
repudiate or qualify; and there is little if anything which they would
wish to add to it. Writers like Olive Schreiner, Miss Cicely Hamilton,
and Mrs. Gilman have, indeed, a background of historical knowledge, an
evolutionary view of society, a sense of the working of economic causes
which Mary Wollstonecraft did not possess and could not in her age have
acquired, even if she had been what she was not, a woman of learning.
But she has anticipated all their main positions, and formulated the
ideal which the modern movement is struggling to complete. Her book is
dated in every chapter. It is as much a page torn from the journals of
the French Revolution as Paine's _Rights of Man_ or Condorcet's
_Sketch_. And yet it seems, as they do not, a modern book.

The chief merit of the _Vindication_ is its clear perception that
everything in the future of women depends on the revision of the
attitude of men towards women and of women towards themselves. The rare
men who saw this, from Holbach and Condorcet to Mill, were philosophers.
Mary Wollstonecraft had no pretensions to philosophy. A brilliant
courage gave her in its stead her range and breadth of vision. It would
have been so much easier to write a treatise on education, a plea for
the reform of marriage, or even an argument for the admission of women
to political rights. To the last of these themes she alludes only in a
single sentence: "I may excite laughter, by dropping a hint, which I
mean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women ought
to have repre