With a return train ticket in her pocket, Emily Wilding Davison, one of England’s most prominent suffragettes, made a determined charge towards King George VI’s racehorse at the famous Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913. She probably wanted to put the distinctive Suffragette bugle on the horse in protest, but the incident ended tragically. A few days later, she died in hospital from her injuries, instantly becoming a martyr of the Suffragette movement, which began to fill the headlines even more prominently after her death. Her funeral is still regarded as one of the greatest women’s rallies in English history. Whether Davison’s dramatic death may have been truly planned, or whether it was just another attempt in the series of sensationalist and media-hyped moves for which militant campaigners for women’s suffrage in England have become famous, will never be known. But the point is that there was no going back – women were prepared to die to achieve equality.
The struggle for women’s suffrage radically transformed political and social life in different ways in different countries in the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. Like all movements, it was shaped by the spirit of the times and by the particularities of the national and social contexts in which it took shape. It was set in the broader context of the struggle for women’s rights and equality in the social, legal, economic and political spheres. The right to vote was thus one of the demands in the struggle for women’s emancipation, which was spurred on by the French Revolution as a driver of democratic change and the emergence of modern democracy. Women were no longer prepared to accept their subordinate position in society as a matter of course.
The origins of the struggle for women’s rights to participate in the political process date back to a time when women were unequal in all other areas of society. Married women in particular had few rights – they could not inherit or own property, they could not enter into contracts, and in the few cases where they were employed, they did not earn a salary. Legally speaking, a married woman was one with her husband, one could say that she was civilly dead. In the event of divorce, which in principle could only be requested by the husband, she had no right to custody of the children. Women had no access to education, especially higher education; they needed a male escort when they travelled; they had to be quiet in public and could be beaten by their husbands, as well as their fathers and brothers, for disobedience.
Women, of course, did not have the right to vote in national elections, nor did all men. There were property and tax censuses, and in some places also educational censuses. When, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, demands for universal suffrage for all men began to emerge, women were excluded. Local and municipal elections were generally different, and in many places some women – especially landowners – were allowed to vote under special conditions.
The first women to vote in national elections were New Zealand women in 1893 and Finnish women in Europe, who gained the right to vote alongside men in 1906. This was a notable exception in the process of the extension of suffrage, as men were usually entitled to vote years, if not decades, before women. In Europe, before the First World War, only Norwegian, Danish and Icelandic women joined the Finns. In the period between the two wars, women’s suffrage was legalised in 17 European countries, but the rest, including Slovene women, did not get it until after the Second World War.
Pioneers of change
Anger about gender inequality awakened gradually among progressive thinkers, at the same time as women entered the public sphere, in the spirit of the French Revolution and its principles of equality for all.
“If all the faculties of the female spirit are to be developed only in such a way as to maintain woman’s dependence on man; if woman has achieved her goal by getting a husband and, with selfish pride, has satisfied herself with such a worthless laurel – let her be /…/, but if, in the struggle to achieve her high mission, she looks beyond the current situation, then let her develop her intelligence /…/.”
So wrote Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a key work of early feminism. A free-thinking and radical philosopher, she was one of the first to publicly address the issue of women’s inequality in society and its causes. She attributed these mainly to the lack of and faulty education of girls, who were assigned a place in the private sphere at birth, regardless of class, and to the limited roles of mother, wife, daughter and housewife. They were brought up accordingly – obedience, docility, passivity and care for appearance were the qualities that every woman should possess.
Until then, it was generally accepted that men were intellectually superior by nature. Women were therefore left to look after the home and their husbands, who were then better able to devote themselves to their economic, social and political duties. For Wollstonecraft, such superiority was only illusory. She argued that women were by no means dumber than men, but they could not prove it because they were denied the right to a proper all-round education. Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosopher of the Enlightenment, who also wrote extensively on the principles of education, believed that women should be educated primarily for the pleasure of their husbands. “/…/ it is her duty to be pleasing to her master – and this is the glorious purpose of her existence” (Wollstonecraft, Mary. (1993): A Vindication of the Rights of Women).
As the Frenchwoman Olympe de Gouges, a contemporary and contemporary of Mary Wollstonecraft and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizen (1791) in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1790), wrote, men and women are born equal. Women’s rights should therefore be equal in other areas than education – so that they too can contribute to the overall development of society and the creation of a new political order. Olympe de Gouges paid for her revolutionary ideas with her life and, like thousands of others, ended up under the guillotine in the post-revolutionary period of terror of the Jacobin dictatorship.
As pioneers in the struggle for political and social equality between the sexes, Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges also had a significant impact on the global feminist movement by demanding women’s suffrage. Their work was successfully continued and built upon in the 19th century by the most influential English philosopher of all time, John Stuart Mill.
John Stuart Mill against the subordination of women
Liberal Mill was one of the first male advocates of full equality between the sexes. His philosophical work and political programme consistently advocated women’s suffrage, and when he became a Member of the House of Commons in 1865, he firmly planted the issue on the British political stage. Among other things, he presented the first mass petition for women’s suffrage to Parliament. Between 1866 and 1918, when some women finally won the vote, another 16,000 petitions were submitted! Petitions were standard political procedure at the time, and were used when they wanted to raise a particular social issue.
Mill also initiated the first ever parliamentary debate on women’s suffrage, which sparked a great deal of ridicule among MPs, with laughter even coming from the Ladies’ Gallery of Parliament. But he argued with dignity his belief that political gender inequality was contrary to the British Constitution, which enshrined the principle of equality for all. It was also controversial to him that, with the electoral reforms of the 19th century, men were increasingly becoming eligible to vote, while women were systematically ignored. In a country that held itself up as a model of progress and democratisation, this was a glaring anomaly. Interestingly, as early as 1848, even the famous Tory politician Disraeli wondered how, in a country led by a woman – Queen Victoria – women could be banned from voting.
Mill’s strong stand in defence of women’s rights is of course due to his critical view of the existing social system, but the great love of his life also played a major role in this. Harriet Taylor, later Mill, was young and beautiful, extremely bright and politically astute. They became one of the most intellectual and spiritual couples of their time.
From their pens came the founding texts of feminism. Although signed only with Mill’s name, perhaps to maintain their credibility in the “male” society of the time, where Mill was a highly respected thinker and Harriet unrecognisable, they were the product of shared ideas and thoughts. The highlight of this period is the essay The Subordination of Women, which, with Marx’s Capital, is one of the most influential works of 19th-century political philosophy. The text is a critical description of the social relations of the time, which dictated the dependence of one sex on the other. Such relations were, in Mill’s view, unnatural, unjust and wrong, and constituted one of the main obstacles to human progress.
John Stuart Mill became the spiritual father of the global movement for gender equality and is still regarded as the most prestigious male advocate of women’s rights of all time. His work gave rise to many women’s suffrage initiatives towards the end of the 19th century, and these have grown like mushrooms ever since. Translations of The Subordination of Women have flooded women’s societies and been quoted in their constitutions from Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France, Italy and Central Europe to the USA, Australia and New Zealand. And it was New Zealand that first gave women the right to vote in national elections.
Progressive thoughts and progressive actions on the other side of the world
Not only Mill’s legacy, but also those of Mary Wollstonecraft and Olympe de Gouges, who stressed the importance of education, played an important role in this.
As a result of early efforts to provide universal education for girls in New Zealand, half of all female students were already female in 1893. This allowed women to enter the workforce in large numbers and to work in a wide range of occupations, thereby facilitating their access to public life. It is perhaps no coincidence, then, that New Zealand was the first country to enact universal women’s suffrage. In local elections, some women were granted this right as early as 1867, even though they had to be landowners and taxpayers – such limited suffrage for women was already established elsewhere in the world.
New Zealand society has been more open-minded and progressive about gender relations than its colonial parent, Great Britain. In the young country, the newly emerging political class was made up of enterprising and resourceful immigrants, not the offspring of rigid aristocracy and political families. For New Zealanders, an open and inclusive society was a value. Traditional party divisions on social issues were not as pronounced, as parties were only just emerging. Once the issue of women’s suffrage was intellectually accepted, it became not a political toy but an issue that brought society together rather than dividing it.
The fact that a quarter of all adult women have signed the petition for the right to vote also speaks volumes about the cohesiveness of New Zealand society. On the day the law was passed, a 275-metre long roll of signatures was ceremoniously unrolled, which had been gathered for weeks by tireless women activists in the New Zealand wilderness.
Aboriginal Maori women were granted the right to vote at the same time. New Zealanders were extremely proud that they were able to take a decisive step towards a more equal society, including on the racial question, before the Old World. In the USA, for example, black women did not get the vote until 1960. The Australians, where the fate of Aboriginal women was similarly shamefully delayed – they did not get the vote until 1962, along with the Aborigines. In 1902, when the Australian Parliament voted on new electoral legislation, and therefore women’s suffrage, and the Aboriginal question was raised, mainly because their neighbours had given the vote to the Maoris, one MP said: “The Aboriginal is not as clever as the Maoris. In fact, there is no scientific evidence at all that Aborigines are human.”
Despite Australia’s complicated history of race relations, it has stood alongside New Zealand in terms of women’s suffrage, having legislated for it in 1902. At the same time, Australian women have been able to run for the House of Representatives.
The colonies clearly attracted more radical and socially experimental people. They successfully imported and put into practice the progressive ideas of the old democratic world. The New Zealand and Australian movements for women’s equality were inspired by similar movements that had first emerged in the UK and the USA.
So in imperial Britain, with progress in the colonies and stagnation at home, feelings of injustice and frustration grew rapidly, especially among middle-class educated women. At the same time, they were finally beginning to gain new social and economic rights, and more and more of them were gaining access to an increasing quality of education. Women began to participate more visibly and courageously in public life, but were still formally excluded from political life.
Does a beautiful word always find a beautiful place?
Women’s suffrage advocates were convinced that they would only be able to radically improve their position in society by being able to directly influence the laws that govern their lives and the legislators who make them. And they will only take them into account if they have to make an effort to win their support and votes. To vote and to be elected was therefore their unconditional objective.
The first associations of so-called suffragists (the word comes from the Latin suffragium, meaning a vote or the right to vote) were peaceful organisations of like-minded, predominantly middle-class members who mainly collected signatures for petitions, lobbied politicians, distributed pamphlets, wrote newspaper articles and set up newsletters, recruited supporters, organised public meetings and networked internationally. They tried to put pressure on the government and MPs with intellectually sophisticated arguments. Why are women obliged to pay taxes but are not represented politically? Their duties to society are the same as men’s, but their rights are not. Are they or are they not citizens in the true sense of the word?
In the UK, these societies have brought many prominent figures into their ranks, including Liberal MPs in particular, yet their efforts have failed to become a political priority.
Of course, this is also due to the fact that universal suffrage for men did not yet exist – everywhere, and not just in the UK, the franchise was for a long time conditional mainly on wealth and tax payment, and in some places also on educational attainment. In 1914, for example, only around 60% of men in Britain were eligible to vote.
The fact that every electoral law reform proposal had to pass through both Houses of Parliament created an additional problem. The House of Lords, as the representative of the aristocracy and consequently much more conservative, was an almost insurmountable obstacle. In principle, the process of extending the franchise was slower and more difficult in arrangements with bicameral representative bodies.
It is important to note that many of the early supporters of women’s suffrage were themselves exclusionary and were not only willing to accept, but even supported, a limited suffrage for women. As it was, only women property owners and taxpayers were to become eligible to vote, which would have been comparable to the conditions for male suffrage.
But married women were also to be sacrificed – this was in keeping with the spirit of the times and the traditional values that pervaded society. A married woman was also supposed to be represented by her husband at the ballot box, and a surprisingly large number of women also held this view. For example, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, founder of the National Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies and one of the most influential women’s suffrage campaigners of all time, wrote: “If a married woman had the vote, it would actually give her husband two votes. A woman is legally bound to obey her husband. “
The discriminatory treatment of married women was accused by opponents of Fawcett and her followers of puritanism and ignoring working-class women. Moreover, despite the spread of consciousness and the growth of support and membership, no concrete successes and changes were yet on the horizon. The time has come for a change of strategy. The Pankhurst family and their suffragettes marched decisively onto the scene.
From words to action – militant suffragettes
Today, the surname Pankhurst is synonymous with the fight for women’s suffrage. But behind it lies the complex story of just one branch of the movement, which popularised the notion of suffragettes. The Suffragettes were exclusively women and differed from the Suffragettes mainly in the way they operated, but the former also openly campaigned for the rights of working women, whose numbers were growing rapidly in the age of industrialisation. It was working-class women who were the most marginalised, disenfranchised, exploited at home and in the workplace. That is why they were more in need of political emancipation than others.
The Suffragettes have made history for their striking and uncompromising, often radical and even violent actions, which have divided English and world public opinion. Emily Davison, for example, who paid with her life for her commitment to the cause at the famous Derby, was a member of the Suffragettes.
Emmeline Pankhurst, arguably the movement’s most recognisable name, founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), whose members were nicknamed suffragettes, at the beginning of the 20th century in response to stagnation in the political arena and what she considered to be a too-wet commitment to the cause of existing societies and movements. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) became a real family enterprise, with her three daughters actively involved. The descendants of the Pankhursts are still active today in the fight for gender equality.
The Pankhursts and their followers literally revolutionised British society at the beginning of the 20th century, bringing the fight for women’s suffrage into every home. They organised the WSPU as a real military organisation, with hierarchical decision-making and precise roles for members, who had to follow to the letter the instructions of the sometimes dictatorial Emeline, who even introduced disciplinary procedures for “heretics”.
They were true marketing experts, adopting punchy slogans, marching orders and anthems, uniforms and symbolic colours. Purple for dignity, freedom and the royal blood that runs through every suffragette’s veins, white for purity in public and private life and green for hope. Their trademark has become a banner with these colours and the slogan “Women’s Suffrage!”, and they have even had souvenirs made, such as badges and tea sets. The Suffragettes’ visibility was therefore not accidental, but tactically created.
With calls such as Actions, not words!, Women stand up! and Women’s Suffrage!, they have also called for violence at rallies and through pamphlets. Over the years, their actions have become more violent – smashing shop windows and office windows, setting fires, cutting telephone wires, destroying public property and works of art, disrupting the work of Parliament and ministers, spitting on MPs, planting bombs in letterboxes, and the list goes on. Destroying property was a message to men to respect the material world more than women’s rights. Many of the provocations were also fun for the crowds – they liked to stalk politicians, and for example one Irish woman followed Winston Churchill around for a week on an official visit to Ireland, ringing a loud bell every time he was about to speak. Churchill was a staunch opponent of women’s suffrage.
As a charming and charming strategist, Emmeline, despite the growing controversy surrounding such activities, has won the support of many prominent members of society, who have both protected and financed her movement.
But the authorities got fed up and the suffragettes began to be imprisoned en masse. Many refused to pay bail and went on hunger strike in prison, partly because they did not want to be treated as political prisoners. This drew even more attention to themselves, but the government’s response was harsh. In fact, between 1909 and 1914, women protesters were force-fed in extremely inhumane ways, bordering on torture. Most often, the food mixture was fed through a funnel or rubber hose up their nostrils, and special forceps were often used to open and fasten their jaws and pour raw eggs down their throats. They were sometimes fed in this way up to ten times a day, and often drugged. More than 1 000 suffragettes were imprisoned, dozens of whom were force-fed, a practice condemned even by doctors who signed a petition against this treatment. All this cast the government in an extremely bad light in the public eye.
At the outbreak of the First World War, however, British society became more unified and the suffragettes temporarily ceased their militant activities. The question of women’s suffrage had to wait for calmer times. Partly fearing a renewed wave of violence, the British government granted them the vote immediately at the end of the war, but only to those over 30 years of age and women property owners. The actual impact of the suffragette movement, however, continues to divide opinion today – for some they remain heroines and role models, for others anarchists and even terrorists.
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A Brave New World
Even in the United States of America, which was so fond of boasting about the Declaration of Independence and its principles of equality as guiding principles for social development, it has not been easy. The American Revolution, like the French Revolution, was founded on Enlightenment philosophy, but the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, which states that ‘all men are created equal, and that the Creator has endowed them all with certain unalienable rights, among these are the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, clearly did not apply to either blacks or women.
American women were the first to start an organised struggle for the right to vote in 1848, twenty years before the first associations were formed in Britain. Most of the early supporters were active in the movements to abolish slavery, and so were politically germinated. It was abolitionists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott who, in 1848, initiated the first women’s rights rally in the now legendary town of Seneca Falls, where participants – men and women – adopted the so-called Declaration of Views. This was a paraphrased and thus controversial version of the Declaration of Independence and included, among other things, the following passages:
“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injustices and violence perpetrated by man against woman, with the immediate aim of establishing absolute tyranny over her. /…/ He has never allowed her to exercise her inalienable right to vote. He has forced her to submit to laws in the making of which she had no say. He has denied her the rights granted to the most ignorant and bankrupt of men – both natives and foreigners. When he deprived her of that first right of citizenship, the right to vote, and thus left her without representation in legislative bodies, he oppressed her in every corner. /…/”
In the US, the women’s rights movement was closely linked to the black rights movement, but when slavery was abolished with the end of the Civil War in 1865, thus achieving the goal of an era, the relationship became difficult. Doubts about full racial equality were deeply ingrained in the American consciousness, and this was also true of women suffrage campaigners, especially those from more southern and conservative areas.
When black men – as it later turned out, only on paper – got the vote, but white women still did not, they flooded the newspapers and the public with racist remarks about the superiority of white educated women compared to ignorant “blacks”. Black suffragettes were, of course, doubly discriminated against, but they nevertheless made an important contribution to the struggle for women’s suffrage. As late as 1913, at one of the major rallies in support of women’s suffrage in Washington, symbolically staged on the eve of President Wilson’s inauguration, they had to march separately from white women!
This rally was also the culmination of the struggle for women’s suffrage in America. It brought together women from every state, every religious and ideological persuasion, and invited women from countries where women’s suffrage has already been recognised, to march together proudly in the face of overwhelming violence from crowds of male observers. They marched to tell the new President Wilson that they would not give up. For he had long sidelined women’s suffrage.
The militant tactics of the English suffragettes were also a model for the more radical American women, who, just as in Britain, were a real nuisance to the government. Their speciality was their tireless, continuous, months-long silent protests outside the White House, with delegations of women from all over the country taking turns every few hours. A combination of perseverance, social progress, indirect international pressure, spiced with a little luck and the advice of a determined mother, finally brought women’s suffrage to America too.
“Be a good boy!”
“And vote for women’s suffrage.” So said a letter from a mother to her son, Harry Burn, 24, the youngest ever Tennessee MP, whose vote for the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which gives women the right to vote, made it possible for it to be passed at federal level. After an extremely tense and long-lasting process in the US Congress, the amendment was finally approved in 1919, but then had to be ratified by three-quarters of the states. In Tennessee, the last hope of the suffrage campaigners, there was a real battle between supporters and opponents. But the balance was tipped by Mrs Febb Burn, whose letter was kept in her son’s pocket, when he gave his ‘aye‘ vote, thus changing the hitherto undecided result in favour of the amendment. He had originally been against it.
Burn, who was even physically harassed by opponents after the vote, later wrote in defence of his action, among other things, “I knew it was always best for a boy to follow his mother’s advice, and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification.”
The history of the American struggle for women’s suffrage, which finally reached its goal, is perhaps the most complex. Between 1848 and 1920, this struggle marked the course of many events that shaped the new country, from the Civil War, the abolition of slavery and the First World War. At the same time, a comprehensive understanding of the USA has always required trying to understand the specificities of the North, the South, the East and the West! For example, the progressive but wild Wyoming was the first in the world to legislate suffrage for all women at state level, as early as 1869.
The struggle for women’s suffrage was also closely intertwined with the struggle for equality and social and moral reform in general. These were not only linked to women’s emancipation, but also, as has been said, to the abolition of slavery. Interestingly, women suffragists were also very active in the temperance movements and even in the efforts to prohibit alcohol consumption altogether, the so-called Prohibition. Such movements were particularly influential in New Zealand and the USA, where excessive alcohol consumption often made women worse off. Without rights, they were regularly victims of violence behind four walls. The call for abstinence from alcohol became a widespread national campaign and soon the alcohol lobby began to financially support anti-suffrage movements. But these were not the only opponents of women’s suffrage …
What about the baby and lunch – opponents of women’s suffrage
While the liquor producers were concerned about financial interests, most other opponents of women’s suffrage had moral concerns. Why should a woman vote, be politically exposed and thus upset the natural order of relationships, according to which the private sphere belongs to her and the public sphere to the man? How will she look after her home and her husband if she becomes interested in politics and becomes independent? If such thoughts seem absurd to us today, they were prevalent just over a hundred years ago.
Thus, in parallel with the rise of women’s suffrage initiatives, opponents of women’s suffrage began to mobilise. They warned of the apocalyptic consequences of women’s emancipation, which would lead to the end of humanity, and they too became masters of propaganda. They spread images of men with crying babies in their arms, burnt lunch on the table and a woman in the background, happily roaming and perhaps even smoking. The newspapers were competing with each other in the most stupid slogans, and the prominent personalities and intellectuals of the time were no exception. One Member of Parliament said, during a debate in the English Parliament, that he asked two women who they would vote for if they could, and they replied that they would vote for the man who could buy them bigger diamonds. This statement, of course, drew huge applause. Not only did women belong between four walls, they were also supposed to be intellectually inferior.
But it would be wrong to assume that all women were in favour of the vote – not only those who were influenced by the existing social order were against it, but also educated women and celebrities, ranging from the politically active, literary women to artists and noblewomen. While they wanted equality in other areas, especially in terms of access to proper education, they also believed that men and women were naturally assigned different tasks, or that women were morally superior and should not get their hands dirty in politics. In Britain alone, before 1914, opponents had collected half a million signatures.
Even slower here
In any case, we have heard similar stereotypical arguments in our own country. For example, Ivan Hribar, the long-time liberal mayor of Ljubljana at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, said that women’s suffrage would be “detrimental to family and social life” (Slovenec, 6 March 1907, quoted in Selišnik, page 82). However, it was the women of Ljubljana who were the first Slovenes to be able to vote in person and in large numbers with the electoral reform of Kranj in 1911 – taxpayers, landowners and teachers were granted the municipal franchise. Slovenian MPs were proud of this progressive arrangement, and one of them quoted John Stuart Mill when the reform was passed: “The more rights you give to the individual, the more cheerfully he will do his duty to the State.” (Stenographic records of the sessions of the Carniola Provincial Assembly 1910: 796, taken from Selišnik, page 82, 2008)
The story of women’s suffrage is also complicated, as Slovenians have often changed masters and thus legal frameworks during the period of awakening demands for women’s emancipation. For example, in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, some women could vote by proxy as early as the mid-19th century. At that time, it was considered that the wealthy could vote and the right to vote was not linked to gender. However, legislation varied from country to country and progress was uneven. But, unfortunately, the emergence of the Kingdom of SHS after the First World War was a step backwards in the expansion of women’s suffrage.
After both men and women in the Slovene part of the Kingdom were granted the right to vote in municipal elections in 1920, Belgrade revoked it a year later. During the inter-war period, Slovenian women were nonetheless active in political life, although there were some distinctly undemocratic tendencies, such as calls for the abolition of the right to vote for men. In 1927, they organised a meeting at which they presented a resolution which was supported by all women’s movements. In it, they called for the right to vote to give them a more equal position in society. However, it was only after the Second World War that they gained it within Yugoslavia.
The unfinished story
Today, we take universal suffrage for both sexes for granted. We often neglect the fact that even in Switzerland, at the heart of Europe, women were only granted the right to vote in 1971, and even in Liechtenstein in 1984. In Kuwait, women were granted the right to vote in 2005, and in Saudi Arabia in 2015. Women’s suffrage has been even more time-consuming in other parts of the world, most notably in the Muslim world, where the principles of social equality, let alone political equality, are still not universally accepted. So is full gender equality, like racial equality, science fiction?
Judging by the zeal and perseverance of women’s rights defenders and advocates over the past two centuries and the progress they have made, there is hope for all those women who still do not have these rights. And what Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in 1792 in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman still holds true today: “In the present state of society, it seems necessary to resort to basic principles in the search for the simplest truths and to shake, inch by inch, some of the prevailing prejudices.”
