Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/27

 and scientific achievements of women. Let it be remembered, then, that a hundred years ago a learned woman was esteemed a monstrous thing, a perversion of nature. When women have become as free as they may be, the world will have the grace to laugh at itself for its foolish fear of the political woman.

One other observation should be made before the specific demands of the feminist are briefly stated. The feminist movement is comparatively modern. Individual women with advanced ideas there have been in every country and in every age. There were women like Hypatia, the pupil of Plotinus, the beautiful and learned lecturer and orator of Alexandria, whose good fortune it was to have a cultured and enlightened parent. He gave his daughter the best education available, and made her the companion of his studies. She was so far in advance of her times, and had withal so wonderful an influence upon the people, that, at the instigation of the jealous Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, who worked upon the fanaticism of his half-starved followers and the sex bias of his times, she was torn in pieces by the wild monks of the desert. There have been women like Joan of Arc, who have declined to allow the supposed limitations of sex to interfere with what they considered to be their own