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Apocalypse of Baruch, The. Translated by R. H. Charles. A. & C. Black, Publishers.

Beginnings of Art. By Ernst Grosse. D. Appleton & Company, Publishers. Price $1.75.

Behind the Stars. By E. Longworth

Dames. T. Fisher Unwin, Publisher. Children, The. By Alice Meynell. John Lane, Publisher.

Dawn of Modern Geography, The. By C. Raymond Beazley. John Murray, Publisher.

English Sonnets. Edited by A. QuillerCouch. Chapman and Hall, Pub

lishers.

Essays and Speeches. By W. S. Lilly. Chapman and Hall, Publishers. Essays in Liberalism. By Six Oxford Men. Cassell & Company, Publishers. Fiercehart the Soldier. By F. C. Snaith. A. D. Innes & Company, Publishers.

Guavas the Tinner. By S. BaringGould. Methuen, Publisher.

History of Ancient Greek Literature, A. By Gilbert Murray. D. Appleton & Company, Publishers.

House of Dreams, The. Anonymous. Dodd, Mead & Company, Publishers. Price $1.25.

In the Guiana Forest. By James Rodway. T. Fisher Unwin, Publisher. Jucklins, The. By Opie Read. A. & C. Black, Publishers.

Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett, The. By Evelyn Abbott and Lewis Campbell. E. P. Dutton & Company, Publishers.

Merry Maid of Arcady, His Lordship, and Other Stories. By Mrs. Burton Harrison. Lamson, Wolffe & Company, Publishers.

Nature in a City Yard. By Charles M.

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From The Fortnightly Review. FEMINISM IN FRANCE.

When, shortly before the FrancoGerman War, Villiers de Lisle Adam produced his play “La Révolte,” it was withdrawn from the boards of the Vaudeville, after some three or four performances, amid a general chorus of condemnation. The play, which asserts in a tentative fashion a woman's right to self-development, independently of her husband's direct interests, was held to be, as the author subsequently phrased it, injurious to the morality of the bourse and the boulevards. Last winter "La Révolte" was revived at the Odéon, and met with a sympathetic, even an enthusiastic, reception, its moral teaching surprising, if anything, by its moderation; for whereas Ibsen makes Nora persist in her revolt to the bitter end, Lisle Adam, his precursor by ten years, drives Elizabeth back into conjugal servitude.

This suggestive fact may be taken as an indication of the notable change that has come over French thought in respect to the social position of woman since the fall of the third empire. That change is mainly due to the growth among our Gallic neighbors of "Feminism," the elegant French variant of what we in England bluntly call women's rights. And "feminism" to-day is a force to be reckoned with, whether in social life, in politics or in literature. After much lurking in backgrounds and frequenting of holes and corners, in spite of much flouting from conventionality and much frowning down from religion, feminism has suddenly emerged of late into broad daylight, and has developed into a practical question of the hour, with which serious journals and recognized "literature" condescend to concern themselves.

A strong-minded French woman, clamoring for the suffrage and making speeches on public platforms, seems to us a contradiction in terms, so accustomed are we to the conventional heroine of modern French fiction and modern French drama; a creature compounded variously of sensuality and jealousy, vain, fickle, frivolous, with a

fatal gift for intrigue, whose most solid virtue is her undeniable taste in dress.

The portrait is so ludicrous a caricature for all who can boast the smallest personal acquaintance with the average French woman, adorned as she is with admirable social and practical qualities, that it is amazing how it could ever have come to be carelessly accepted as a more or less accurate presentment. Our only excuse is that numbers of her gifted compatriots have deliberately chosen to adopt this grotesque view of the sex, and have devoted their best work and their most brilliant talents to presenting this abnormal type to the world as representative of a whole nation. It is in great measure as a protest against this literary perversity, this moral blindness which has sullied the pages of all but the greatest French writers of the century, that the new feminist movement has arisen. It is against what has grown to be the traditional attitude of the French man towards the French woman, an attitude that has penetrated into all ranks of society, that educated French women, aided by not a few of the sterner sex, are revolting to-day. From the first it has been an intellectual and literary rather than a democratic movement; it has sprung from the imaginative brain of the writer and thinker rather than from the painful experience of the sufferer, and it is spreading to-day from the cultured few to the uneducated many.

In several of its aspects the movement differs profoundly from that with which we have so long been familiar in England. With us women have devoted their main energies to carrying certain definite reforms by act of Parliament. They have descended frankly into the political arena and have fought men with their own weapons. In France politics, as we understand them, have entered for very little into the question. French women as yet care practically nothing about the vote; they have not contemplated the possibility of

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very definite grievances from which they suffer and for which they claim redress. They demand the right of voting for the Chambers of Commerce and the Conseils des Prud'hommes, a very important privilege for all who are engaged in trade; the right to sit on the Conseil de Famille, the very backbone of French family life; the right to act as legal guardians to their own children after the father's death; and, above all, the right of married women to the exclusive possession of their own earnings. But these eminently reasonable reforms have not hitherto been brought forward with any degree of insistence, and although quite recently a departure of a more practical nature has been made by Madame Schmahl, an Englishwoman by birth, and editor of L'AvantCourriere, not more than one or two, at the most, have as yet been incorporated into definite bills to be laid before the Chamber. French women hitherto have devoted themselves rather to creating an atmosphere favorable to their own development, and to promoting a sense of the antagonism that exists between the law which decrees the absolute inferiority of the sex, and the facts which prove her complete natural equality. Thus feminism-a word, by the way, first introduced into the language by Fourier-may be described as representing a certain state of mind, an atmosphere of thought, opposed, indeed, by its very essence to that which has inspired that vast section of modern French literature occupied with questions of sex, but which has not yet crystallized into an aggressive agitation for reform. And so where the practical English woman pours her energies into political associations and petitions to Parliament, her French sister finds, for the present at least, a sufficient expression of her needs in the issuing of brochures and leaflets, in the now fashionable "conference" and in a perfervid flow of talk. For us, reduced to its simplest expression, women's rights is a matter of elementary justice; for French women it is above all a sentiment, a chivalrous rehabilitation of their sex to the place from which it has

been dethroned by the selfishness and cruelty of man.

Frankly, there is a good deal of what English women would feel tempted to denounce as "silly vaporing" in the French movement, but before harshly criticising our neighbors we should bear in mind the profound moral and intellectual differences which, on all subjects, divide the Latin from the AngloSaxon race, making it impossible to judge them according to any single standard. And in this particular instance it must be remembered further that in all matters relating to women's work and women's independence, we are at least a quarter of a century ahead of all the nations of central and southern Europe, and that their women are struggling to-day with the same forces of custom and prejudice against which our first generation of women reformers made successful war.

In a recent article Madame Adamherself no mean auxiliary of the feminist movement on its more moderate and literary side-pointed to the siege of Paris and the disasters of 1870-71 as one of the objective causes of women's new impulse towards social independence. In this she is doubtless right, for the heroism displayed by French women during those terrible months must have gone some way towards dissipating old prejudices, and towards giving to the women themselves a new realization of their own dignity and their own powers. But the movement could not have sprung into life so quickly had not the seed been sown at a far earlier date. Like every other tendency of modern France, whether for good or evil, the feminist movement may be traced back to the Revolution of 1789. On being asked by Napoleon since when women had occupied themselves with politics, Madame de Staël is reported to have replied. "Since they have been guillotined, sire!" The reason was certainly a sufficient one. When the emancipated French women compose, after the manner of Auguste Comte, a New Calendar of Great Women, one of their heroines of humanity will surely be Olympe de

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