ABSTRACT
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton returned to Britain in November 1886 she found hopeful signs in an increasing forcefulness within the women’s movement, ‘even here in slow old England’. She was impressed with a younger generation now coming to the fore, and warned ‘of one thing men may be assured…the next generation will not argue the question of women’s rights with the infinite patience we have displayed this half century’. Priscilla Bright McLaren also saw grounds for optimism: ‘We see everywhere women rising to a much higher moral and intellectual stature than twenty years ago.’1
