It is not here that we must look for the ground of ...

It is not here that we must look for the ground of the social transformation that our own time has seen, but in the rapid improvement and extension of women's education, and their increasing activity in the professions and Universities, in local administration, in philanthropic work, in the Inspectorates.

'Women', wrote one of the wisest of them, 'are certainly great fools', and if she could have heard some of the cruder feminist utterances of the later Victorian time, she might have doubted whether a hundred years had made much difference. Childers at Pontefract, the first election by ballot.

His reasons are interesting.

One was that women had not much to complain of. The other, that they were unduly susceptible to clerical influence.