I feel so lucky that I live in 21^st century after I read “Introduction to the Enlightenment”. “The question raised by Enlightenment thinkers about human powers and limitations have left a legacy so lasting that it is hard to imagine our world without the Enlightenment. (Norton 5)” Yes, without the Enlightenment, I think that the great advances cannot have been made in our social life. I am a woman. I can’t imagine that women had less opportunity for education, service in government, and the political and economic rights than men before the Enlightenment period. “Among the privileged classed, men had many opportunities: for education, for service in government or diplomacy, for the exercise of political and economic power. (Norton 7)” Looking around women’s social life, women can get a better job after she graduated from colleges, women also work in many departments of the government, women also can support themselves through their work. I can’t bear such situation, “Both men and women generally accepted as necessary the subordination of women, who, even in the upper classes, had few opportunities for education and occupation beyond the household. (Norton 7)” I can’t imagine that the women only can stay at home. It’s unfair because “If God have given all human beings reason, the women were just as entitled to develop and exercise their minds as their male counterparts (Norton 7)”. “The emphasis on education in virtually all of the period’s tracts about women provides proof that the concert of rational progress offered a device that could be used to gain at least rights for women – if not civil rights, which were long in coming, at least the right to thought and knowledge (Norton 7)”. Women started fighting for theirs rights. For women contemporary social life, the Enlightenment legacies are the equal opportunities for men and women and the struggle for women’s rights.