advocates of the emancipation of women
who desired to arrogate to themselves what is by natural laws the domain
of man. But realizing that the political conditions might make fearful
gaps in the ranks of Polish men, and that there might be hundreds of
thousands of widows and orphans, she desired to open to women all
possible avenues of independent life and work, and to set before them
the ideal of toil toil with the hands and toil with the head as the one
worthy purpose of life. The works of this remarkable Polish author were
edited in 1877, in twelve volumes, with an introduction, by another
important Polish writer and extraordinary woman, Gabriele Narzyssa
Zmichowska, who herself wrote admirable tales and a collection of
charming lyric poems which reveal a lofty soul and a melancholy
disposition.

Klementyna Tanska's fears of a depopulation of her beloved country
became a reality by the revolution of 1831. Deaths on the battlefield,
wholesale exiles to Siberia, political flight and emigration en masse,
deprived Poland of numbers of her noblest sons. Those who remained
behind were cowed, and reduced to servile obedience: no wonder that
Poland's women lost much of their former admiration for, and dependence
upon, the strong sex. They began to realize that they must become
independent, and wage the campaign of nationalism for themselves, if the
Polish language, literature, and genius were to be saved, or a
regeneration of the aftergrowth was to be possible. The right of a
higher, or rather of the highest education for woman was demanded, to
enable her to participate effectively in the political problems of the
nation, in the social questions and the welfare of the race, to free her
from the shackles of conventionalism which had reduced woman well-nigh
to the standard of a social toy or an adornment of the "salon."

Women were trained to work, to live up to the higher ideals of life and
nationality, to subordinate the common petty interests to a higher, more
universally human existence. A circle of superior women, the so-called
enthusiasts, gathered around Gabriele Zmichowska, who worked for the
rights of man, for the abolition of servitude, for the free development
of the natural forces of their great race. The result was that Gabriele
languished for two years in the fortress of Lublin and the other
prominent members of her circle were scattered by persecution. But
Polish women thus attained their revolutionary citizens