THE LATE LAWSUIT.

MEN AND WOMEN VS. CUSTOM AND TRADITION.

WHEN, in 1844, Margaret Fuller gave "The Great Lawsuit " to the pages of the first Dial, she stated with transcendant force the argument which formed the basis of the first " Woman's Rights Convention," in 1848. Nothing has since been added to her statement, nothing can ever be taken away from it, and every new step in the movement crowns her brow with a new laurel ; for to her it was left to make a complete, scholarly exposition of a question, only the first third of which came to treatment under the hands of Mary Wollstoncraft.

The progress of the "Woman's Rights" movement seems rapid, only because we have not traced its gradual historic development. The law of Christ, involving perfect human justice, is constantly changing future possibilities into present facts. Previous to the time of Christ, and indeed for some centuries after his coming, eminent women in several countries had seized position and privilege. The oppressions and innuendoes of Vedantic lore could not annihilate the metaphysical and mathematical power of the Hindu Lilirati, but scores of commentators have wearied themselves for ages in explaining, in a miraculous manner, such an exception to her sex. Aspasia defied the insults of actors and play-wrights, and unveiled her features in the streets of Athens as freely as under the blue heaven of her native isle. It was doubtless due, in a great measure, to the Empress Theodora, that in the reign of Justinian the Roman law underwent a favorable change. Unhappy were the women who died before the invention of the printing press! What the character of this Empress was, the insight and patience of some woman may yet reveal; but certainly history so far has not enlightened us. The woman whose first thought, when raised from a life of infamy to the throne of the world, was to save the wretched companions of her early career, even though she could not solve the problem she set to herself; the woman whose courage and presence of mind saved not merely Justinian, but the peace of the empire in the alarming sedition of 532 A. D., was a woman worth saving. Procopius, who was not too tender to put vile stories of her into his anecdotes, praises her

in his history; and contemporaries did not hesitate to call pious the woman whom her husband, weak coward that he was, unceasingly regretted.

But position and privilege, seized after this Old-World fashion, however pleasant they may have proved to the individual, secured no position, opened no privilege to the sex. Fortunately for us, no daily record of womanly life at that period survives; only now and then long-buried walls, covered with the street drawings of Pompeii, or abominable decorations of Old-World cathedrals, give to the instructed eye some dim vision of the depths out of which woman has arisen.

In England, centuries later, the general corruption of manners which characterized the Stuart Courts brought its own remedy. Women of surpassing beauty, or more than average ability, born to wealth and station, fell in groups before the prevailing contempt which classic studies and continental habits had not failed to nurture. But these women fell to find the tyranny of license no better than the tyranny of law; and to learn, by a bitter experience, that restraints may be divine in their nature and effects. The first cry of the tortured victims was for education - education which should raise them to a certain social equality, and should defend them from the inevitable miseries of worn-out toys, whose use departed with their beauty; and this cry met with a certain sort of response for education, vocation, and civil position, were not yet linked by logic in the public mind.

Among those who took a high rank in this movement was Mary Astell, a woman distinguished for theological and literary labors, and the intimate friend of a celebrated Platonist, John Norris, of Bemerton. "A Letter to a Lady," in "Defence of the Female Sex," went through three editions in the year 1697. "A Proposal to Ladies, for the Advancement of their True Interests," composed by her, was so effectively written that a wealthy friend, supposed to be Lady Elizabeth Hastings, immediately offered £10.000 towards the erection of a college for the education of women; and the scheme would have been carried into execution, but for the bigoted opposition of Bishop Burnet. Her "Reflections on Marriage" were said by a contemporary "to be the strongest defence that ever appeared in print, of the rights and abilities of her sex.'

Between the death of Mary Astell, in 1731, and that of Mary

Wollstoncraft, in 1797, a great change occurred in the condition of European women. The noble names which lighted up the times of Elizabeth and the Commonwealth, were the names of women, who, in lofty social position, aided by wealth and the emulation of gifted men, amused their leisure with learning, as other women frittered theirs away at tapestry. But while these exceptions shone like bright particular stars, the flood of social corruption which issued from the Court overwhelmed in its waves the mass of the sex. They were more unfortunate than men, for civil and social requisitions forced even the idlest of courtiers into a healthier activity.

When the revolution put an end to frivolous maskings and unwomanly revels, the women, whom the sword had startled, began to think, and were won to listen to any schemes for employment and respectability. Mary Astell found her peers upon the continent; and in France and Germany leading women began to demand publicly, not merely learning for the few, but a good education for the many of the middle class; not yet, alas! not even a hundred years later—the common school or the college for the million.

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So it happened that in the eighteenth century some hundreds of women distinguished themselves in various kinds; and in London, Berlin, and Paris, unfortunate husbands found themselves more than once sustained, in bankruptcy and broken health, by the highly educated wives, whom a previous century would have left powerless under the same circumstances. So the same century which welcomed Lady Russell and Elizabeth Hamilton, which clasped the circlet of Necker, De Staël, and Recamier, with the precious name of Madame Roland, which gave Meta to Klopstock, the Frau Rath to Göthe, Emily Plater to Poland, which had already promised Rachel to Vamhagen, found Elizabeth Blackwell studying midwifery in London, to support a beloved but dying husband; and when the prejudice of the Faculty took the bread out of her mouth, devising at the early age of twenty-four the first medical botany, which she published with magnificent illustrations in 1736. This century, also, saw Sybilla Merian, eminent alike as painter, engraver, linguist, and traveler, publish with the one hand an Embroiderer's Guide, while with the other she unfolded skilfully all the mysteries of insect-life, in two magnificent volumes, issued at Nuremberg in 1679 and 1683. When political

storms overtook her husband, and she was forced to retain her maiden name, she sailed for Surinam, with no companion but her young daughter, and after three years of labor published, at Amsterdam, sixty superb plates describing the metamorphoses of the insects of Surinam. Her original drawings still hang in the Stadthouse of Amsterdam, and decorate with their beauty some of the best cabinets in Europe. Her shining honor lay in the fact that when she died, in 1717, she left two daughters able and willing to continue her work.

In the same century the Paris sun shone on the little daughter of the apothecary, Bihéron, who, working restlessly over dead bodies in her chamber, perfected the common manikin, and was the first to unfold, by the help of prepared wax, the inner mysteries of the human frame. For the deductions which gave special lustre to the name of John Hunter, he was indebted to the girlish observations of Mary Catherine Bihéron, made eight years before the publication of his book.

The same century saw the calm sense and womanly instinct of Elizabeth Nihell, contending in London against the obstetrical quackeries of Godalmin and Smellie; and sustaining, unassisted by the best London physicians, the dignity of medical science: while, in Germany, Madame Wittembach made sweetmeats in her pantry, or wore away in the use of her needle the young hours of a life that was to culminate, ere its close, in the lustre of unchallenged Greek scholarship and professional distinction, accorded by the best qualified judges of her time.

These instances not so remarkable, or they would be more widely known show how the work went on, and also that it was chiefly educational in its nature, so that no honest womanly work could fail to help. Such was the aspect of affairs when, just one hundred years since, Mary Wollstoncraft was bornborn to utter one wild, despairing cry for education; a passionate protest for her sex, against popular misapprehension and social injustice-born to melt, by the burning current of her words, the crust which had so long protected old insults and abuses. Few women of the present day know how much they owe to the strength and purpose of this one.

A "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" sounds like a hot argument for political rights; but read it, and you find only a claim for moral consideration a protest against the sensual sen

timentality which the public feeling still showed, when the name and sphere of the sex came under consideration.

Mary Wollstoncraft, it may be said, was no effective advocate, since a cloud rested on her own name, linked already to those of the French atheists; but when Mary Wollstoncraft published her book, slander and misapprehension had not had time to do their work, and it flashed upon the community with all the power of a noble effort made by a noble woman. True, wholesome words, spoken of life and marriage, of religion and duty, her appeal fell into the popular heart, redeeming what was left in it of soundness, and producing an effect, both social and literary, which may be traced emphatically for more than twenty years — and, by a discerning eye, to a far later period.

What did the public know of her? Only that she had succored a dying mother, sustained a bankrupt father, educated her sisters, and provided for her brothers-only that she was faithful to old friends, and grateful to new ones. So they read her book, and it did its work, let bigotry and the old church say what it might. Its historic significance was soon manifested, as the names of Maria Edgeworth, Sidney Morgan, Harriet Martineau, and Anna Jameson, dawned on the period that intervened between her life and that of Margaret Fuller. What an advance in the womanly ideal—what a change in the social atmosphere, is indicated by the mere mention of any one of them! The influence of Mary Astell and her compeers had roused woman to an effort after general education: Mary Wollstoncraft gave special impetus to this common effort. One of the first results of this impetus was the publication of hundreds of books concerning women, and the translation of the best works women had written, in any sort, in any tongue- such as the mathematical works of Cunitz and Agnesi, the theses of Wittembach and others. Then followed the special character of the culture which the women then developing began to show. As positively as Anna Jameson gave herself to art, and Maria Edgeworth to morals, did Harriet Martineau dedicate herself to political economy, and Von Heidenreich to obstetrics.

'Such lives on the Continent, no less than in England, roused the public mind to thought; and everywhere the "Sphere of Woman" came to be discussed, and much nonsense to be talked. Even the Hungarians, in the midst of revolutions, paused to dic