Page:The Feminist Movement - Snowden - 1912.djvu/149

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THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT
141

of things to support the demand of women for their enfranchisement. But it is not recognised that the women of the suffrage movement are not bound to accept the teaching and the political principles of the Socialist or any other political party. The woman suffrage movement stands solely for woman suffrage, and supports or opposes a party according as it thinks its action will gain or lose support for its own object.

The woman suffrage movement is undoubtedly one of the great movements for human freedom of which the French Revolution was the progenitor. Men and women have not yet come to a real understanding of the value to humanity at large of the gift which it received from the French Revolution. The horrors and excesses with which the Revolution was accompanied, and by which it was disgraced, have obscured for the average man and woman the real and inward significance of the great cataclysm. The comparative freedom that the people of this land enjoy to-day is in no small measure due to the new thought and the new idealism which came to birth during the sorrowful days of that stormy period. Mary Wollstonecraft was the messenger of the new thought to this country, in so far as its application to women was concerned; and with the appearance of her Vindication of the Rights of Women began the