The Woman Question in Europe

Abstract

The American journalist Theodore Stanton (1851–1925), son of the leading feminist and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, published this remarkable collection of essays in 1884. His intention had been to get from each European country 'the collaboration of one or more women, who … had participated, either actively or in spirit, in some phase of the women's movement'. In seventeen chapters, all but two written by women, the progress of 'the woman question' - the debate on the rights of women to financial independence, higher education and the franchise - across Europe (and in the Ottoman empire) is described, largely for an American and British readership. The work, introduced by the veteran feminist Frances Power Cobbe, has among the contributors (each given a short biography) many famous names in the struggle for women's rights at the end of the nineteenth century, including (from Britain) Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Jessie Boucherett and Maria Grey.