death, in 1592, “Dei Meriti delle Donne.”  There was her townswoman, Lucrezia Marinella, who followed ten years after, with her essay, “La Nobilita e la Eccelenza delle Donne, con Difetti e Mancamenti degli Domini,”—­a comprehensive theme, truly!  Then followed the all-accomplished Anna Maria Schurman, in 1645, with her “Dissertatio de Ingenii Muliebris ad Doctrinam et meliores Literas Aptitudine,” with a few miscellaneous letters appended, in Greek and Hebrew.  At last came boldly Jacquette Guillaume, in 1665, and threw down the gauntlet in her title-page, “Les Dames Illustres; ou par bonnes et fortes Raisons il se prouve que le Sexe Feminin surpasse en toute Sorte de Genre le Sexe Masculin”; and with her came Margaret Boufflet and a host of others; and finally, in England, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose famous book, formidable in its day, would seem rather conservative now,—­and in America, that pious and worthy dame, Mrs. H. Mather Crocker, Cotton Mather’s grandchild, who, in 1818, published the first book on the “Rights of Woman” ever written on this side the Atlantic.

Meanwhile there have never been wanting men, and strong men, to echo these appeals.  From Cornelius Agrippa and his essay (1509) on the excellence of woman and her preeminence over man, down to the first youthful thesis of Agassiz, “Mens Feminae Viri Animo superior,” there has been a succession of voices crying in the wilderness.  In England, Anthony Gibson wrote a book, in 1599, called “A Woman’s Woorth, defended against all the Men in the World, proouing them to be more Perfect, Excellent, and Absolute in all Vertuous Actions than any Man of what Qualitie soever, Interlarded with Poetry.”  Per contra, the learned Acidalius published a book in Latin and afterwards in French, to prove that women are not reasonable creatures.  Modern theologians are at worst merely sub-acid, and do not always say so, if they think so.  Meanwhile most persons have been content to leave the world to go on its old course, in this matter as in others, and have thus acquiesced in that stern judicial decree, with which Timon of Athens sums up all his curses upon womankind,—­“If there sit twelve women at the table, let a dozen of them be—­as they are.”

Ancient or modern, nothing in any of these discussions is so valuable as the fact of the discussion itself.  There is no discussion where there is no wrong.  Nothing so indicates wrong as this morbid self-inspection.  The complaints are a perpetual protest, the defences a perpetual confession.  It is too late to ignore the question, and once opened, it can be settled only on absolute and permanent principles.  There is a wrong; but where?  Does woman already know too much, or too little?  Was she created for man’s subject, or his equal?  Shall she have the alphabet, or not?