104 A Short History of Nursing The saving influence of the eighteenth century was that vast human aspiration which culminated in the French revolution. Radical The on- coming of groups of the century, led by rational- rationalism .g^g intellectuals of France, did more than any others to undermine, by ridicule and by reason, the old debasing superstitions that underlay the social order. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the degraded position of women received attention from English pioneers in the woman movement. Mary Wollstonecraft's famous and epoch-making book, A Vindication Women , tt 7 r tTr who were of the Rights of Women, was written m path 1791. The "rights" claimed by this radical and brilliant woman were, in effect, simply human rights, to be impartially applied to women as human beings. Conservative women were led more cautiously by Hannah More, who wrote strictures on the Modern System of Fe- male Education in 1 799. She was one of the human- itarian blue-stockings of England, and sincerely devoted to the welfare and education of the poor, but her aim was rather to make them submissive to their lot than to change it. Neither of these women had anything to do directly with nursing, but their influence, one on the advanced, the other on the conventional activities of women was very great.
