swallowing a whole harvest of forbidden fruit, in these revolutionary
days, unless something be done to cut off the supply.

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 _Mémoires_ by Frenchwomen of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries,--each one 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 which no other age ever dreamed of. 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 Nobilità 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; où 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