The book was not well received. On the contrary, it was very severely handled by the critics, and its author doubly execrated. One statesman and writer of the times spoke of her as a 'hyena in petticoats,' and she was much abused, even by those more advanced members of her own sex from whom she had a right to expect better usage.
It must be remembered, however, that the women of those times were only emerging from the condition of degradation into which they had been thrust at the Restoration period. Probably the women of the period immediately following the overthrow of Puritan domination in this country, and for a couple of generations afterwards, suffered from the most complete degradation that has ever befallen the sex in this country through all its history. Acts of the grossest cruelty had, frequently before this time, been perpetrated upon women, stupid disabilities had hampered them, and unfair laws had disfigured the Statute Book before the days of Charles II.; but in no other period was the popular estimate so clearly in harmony with the basest laws, and at no other time did so many public men express in speech, verse, and prose, and through infamous cartoon, the general contempt felt for women. Out of this slough the women of the country had been slowly rising. At the time of Mary
