Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/72

 but really because the women were becoming too insistent in their demands for themselves.

The seed of feminism was sown during this stormy period, and although the Code Napoleon—the product of a period of raging militarism and despotism—lowered the status of women, those seeds were not destroyed, but are struggling upwards even now towards a perfect fruitfulness. The British women's movement owes much to the splendid courage of these French heroines of the Revolution, inasmuch as they were the instigators of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women, which, though it did not rouse British women at once to organise themselves, is now one of the text-books of the woman suffrage movement in this country.

Napoleon's opinion of women is too well known to need repetition, but it will be remembered as long as Napoleon's name is remembered; and in the age that is to come, when conquest and glory won through human bloodshed will seem to belong to the dark ages, and when the worth of the individual, man or woman, and the beauty of purity will be recognised by all, the memory of parts of this Code will make it difficult to regard this emperor as other than a selfish savage.

This Code provided, amongst other things of equal horror, that a husband might slay his wife for adultery, and that it would not