It has been seriously asserted, that during the last half century more books have been written by women and about women than during all the previous uncounted ages.  It may be true; although, when we think of the innumerable volumes of Memoires by French women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—­each justifying the existence of her own ten volumes by the remark, that all her contemporaries were writing as many,—­we have our doubts.  As to the increased multitude of general treatises on the female sex, however,—­its education, life, health, diseases, charms, dress, deeds, sphere, rights, wrongs, work, wages, encroachments, and idiosyncrasies generally,—­there can be no doubt whatever; and the poorest of these books recognizes a condition of public sentiment of which no other age ever dreamed.

Still, literary history preserves the names of some reformers before the Reformation, in this matter.  There was Signora Moderata Fonte, the Venetian, who left a book to be published after her 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 Uomini,”—­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 1848, 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, proving 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.”