Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/90



is the present storm-centre of the modern feminist movement. For this reason the history of the movement in this country is of peculiar interest at the present time, and particularly to British readers. The foundation of the movement for sex-equality in this country was laid when Mary Wollstonecraft published her famous book, The Vindication of the Rights of Women, in 1792. This book might well be used, possibly is widely used, as a text-book by the woman suffrage movement, so well does the argument used more than a century ago fit the present situation. Mary Wollstonecraft spent some time in Paris during the most stormy period of French history, and drew her ideas in part from the leaders of the French Revolution. Being a woman of understanding she was able to strip the Revolution of all its terrible, but, in the circumstances, perfectly natural excrescences, and to lay hold upon the glorious idealism, the essential spirit of this great upheaval—the spirit of human freedom. The ideas thus gained she gave to her country in the form of a book.