CONCLUSIONS
Feminism was one of the defining political movements of the nineteenth century. Feminists were humanitarians, seeking to improve not only the position of women but also relations between men and women.
Across Europe they had begun to redefine the legal, economic, moral and political relations between the sexes through campaigns on property and marriage law, the right to an education and to gainful employment, on prostitution and the double-standard and finally on political representation. By improving the position of women, feminists believed that they were contributing to progressive social change.The nineteenth-century feminist movement was remarkably successful in such a short period of time in terms of the concrete reforms it achieved and in its challenge to the ideology of separate spheres and female subordination. With the exception of the socialist women, feminists did not aim to overturn society but to work within it to achieve fundamental changes in the relations between the sexes based on a recognition of women's right to equal opportunity. Bearing in mind that feminist activism for the whole of the period before the war was undertaken outside the formal political sphere, and that women had virtually no political power, the achievements — improvements in education, access to the universities and the professions, greater recognition of women's rights within marriage, and, in many countries, the vote — changed women's lives, and gave women a language and a platform to change their own.