tion by popular election that the responsibilities of women as women came to be treated as matters open to question. How did this come about? It would be outside the scope of this book to answer that enquiry with any detail, moreover, it has been well done already by Mrs. Stopes in her British Freewomen-but two important influences have profoundly affected the condition of women; one more especially affects the cultured, the other the industrial portion of the community. Side by side with the Peeress had stood the Abbess. Women who sought a career outside the domestic circle had found it in one or other of the Religious Orders. These offered opportunity to the studious, the contemplative, the philanthropic for honoured and honourable careers, and often for attaining to positions of great influence. The great Abbesses of Barking, Shaftesbury and Wilton, who filled the territorial duties of great land-owners, were powers in the land. The education afforded by conventual establishments was the best to be acquired at the time: they were to all intents and purposes the colleges and high schools of the centuries from Alfred to Henry VII. With the disappearance of these stately centres of ordered life, the doors to honourable careers of studious, useful service were closed to many women, the stream of culture cut off from all except the few and exceptionally placed. The influence which affected the industrial portion of the community was the disappearance of the Guilds, that remarkable system of co-operation which in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries supplied the workers. in trades with a dignity and independence all their own. Working hand in hand with the Church, the Guilds created a system of mutual responsibility between their members and towards the community, as well as a system of protection against want for the sick and aged. The abrupt annihilation of these two great institutions has been grievous for women. Each had held out a hand of equal welcome to them, amid the encroaching tendencies of legal pedantry which, held in check by the strong will of the Tudors, had full scope under the sway of James I. The story of the "Long Ebb," as Mrs. Stopes happily phrases it, has been told by her in her British Freewomen with vigorous grasp, and to her pages the reader who would study this portion of our story in detail should turn.1 § 3. The Period of Non-User. It has been the misfortune of women in England that at the period when the fundamental lines of the Constitution were subjects of keen Parliamentary strife, they themselves lived in an atmosphere of discouragement which paralyzed their political existence. The strong personality of Anne Clifford 2 stands out 1 British Freewomen, their Historic Privilege, by Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, being one of the Social Science Series, published by Messrs. Swan Sonnenschein. 2 Countess of Dorset, Montgomery, Pembroke. She died 1675, respected and honoured by all, at the age of eighty-six. Our portrait shows her as a young girl of thirteen. as the last of the women of the old traditions-largeminded, generous-hearted, dignified and determined withal, she lived true to her motto, "Maintain your loyalty and preserve your rights." She upheld her lawful claim as hereditary Sheriff of Westmorland against King James I. himself, and she defended her castles against the troops of Cromwell. While her strenuous life closes the ancient type of aspirant womanhood, the writings of Mary Astell gave the first note of the aspirations only attained to by the women workers of to-day. The Institution planned by Mary Astell was neither the Convent of the past, nor the College of this present time, but a kind of connecting link between them. And though the forces of the day were against her, and her plan remained only as a vision, yet it was a vision to encourage. Her Serious Proposal to Ladies, wherein her scheme was set forth, published in 1697, had in 1701 already reached a fourth edition. "One great end of this Institution shall be, to expel that cloud of ignorance which custom has involved us in, to furnish our minds with a stock of solid and useful knowledge that the souls of women may no longer be the only unadorned and neglected things." Nor did she wish for any mere show of learning. The inmate of her Institution would not need to trouble herself in turning over a great number of books, "but take care to understand and digest a few well-chosen ones. Let her but obtain right ideas, and be truly acquainted with the nature of those objects that present themselves to her mind, and then no matter whether or no she be able to |