Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/50

 favoured the complete freedom of women, but that many were able to unite for a partial enfranchisement or a specific demand. It is to the unmeasured language, to the passionate and unwisely expressed enthusiasm of the extremist and the fanatic that the critical outsider's suspicion of the larger, more temperate, movement is due. Let the timid console himself with the knowledge that the world has no room for fanatics. One is born now and then, to shake the sleepy world and rouse it to action; but he dies, and the world resumes its jog-trot pace.

The women's movement has everywhere evolved along certain definite lines, and these are very much the same wherever the movement has presented itself. First has come the struggle for educational opportunity; then, as an inevitable corollary, women have striven to qualify themselves for callings, up to that time the special preserve of men, in which to apply their newly gained knowledge. They have sought to enter the learned professions. Side by side with these activities, women have endeavoured to fit themselves by special training for philanthropic work on a larger scale than the baronial household or the village community afforded. These endeavours developed naturally and inevitably into a demand for more public authority and the power to elect local representatives. In this country,