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THE
One Hundred Twenty-four
Since the medieval minnesingers ceased to
sing, the literature of Germany and Scandi-
navia, dominated by Lutheranism, bears wit-
ness chieiiy of “ the lust of the flesh.” Women
are esteemed according as they fulfil their
destiny as bearers of children, and housewives.
G1 The abolition of the cloister and celibacy
has, however, brought about the good result
of the transmission of spiritual forces which
formerly died with the individual. And it
may well have been through some of those
who formerly took refuge with their idealism
in a cloister, that the longing for a great love
has been left as an inheritance to sons and
daughters.
In Germany, the leading poet of the “age
of enlightenment,” Gottsched, asserts woman’s
right to culture; in America, during the War
of Independence, the women gave evidence
of their sense of citizenship; and it was during
a more recent struggle for liberty, that against
slavery, that the woman's question came to
the front in that country.
In France, the Eighteenth Century, more than
any other period of history, is “ the century
of woman.” The salons are the focusing point
of all ideas; the most eminent men write for
women, who become electric batteries from
which the ideas of the time send out kindling
sparks in all directions.
Thus the women of France help to prepare
the French Revolution. During the Revolu-
tion, Olympe de Gouges writes her “ decla-
ration of the rights of woman,” as a counter-
part to that of the rights of man, and Con-
dorcet speaks in support of woman’s claims.
The same spirit of a new age confronts us
in Mary WolIstonecraft’s Vindication of the
Rights of Woman, as also in the Swede
Thorild’s treatise On the Natural Greatness
of Women. Each in its way was a remarkable
sign of the time which already included the
whole “emancipation” program of equality
of position: the same rights for woman as for
man as regards education, labor, a share in
legislation, and an equality of position under
the law and in marriage.
Isolated instances of emancipated women
were nothing new. In Greece, the type was
common enough to be employed in comedy;
in Rome, self-supporting women were to be
found; during the Middle Ages not only
Bridget but many another woman-in the
quality of abbess or regent-exercised a great
FRFI
January
and often beneficial activity. The days of
antiquity, of the Middle Ages, and of the
Renaissance, all possessed female scholars,
physicians and artists. But it is not until
the century of the great Revolution that we
find among women themselves as well as
among certain men a persistent and conscious
striving to elevate the education and to secure
the rights of women.
And wherever this striving has been pro-
found, it has been united with the desire to
reform the position of woman in love and in
marriage so- so
so
Love, we say, is life; but love without hope
and faith is agonizing death.
sc-
Parasitism
By Olive Schreiner"‘
T is often said of those who
lead in this attempt at the
readaptation of woman’s rela-
tion to life, that they are
“ New Women ”; and they
are at times spoken of as
though they were a some-
thing portentous and unheard-
of in the order of human life.
([But, the truth is, we are
not new. We who lead in
this movement today are of
that old, old Teutonic woman-
hood, which twenty centuries ago plowed its
march through European forests and mor-
asses beside its male companion; which
marched with the Cimbri to Italy, and with
the Franks across the Rhine, with the Vara-
gians into Russia, and the Alamani into
Switzerland; which peopled Scandinavia, and
penetrated to Britain; whose priestesses had
their shrines in German forests, and gave
out the oracle for peace or war. We have in
us the blood of a womanhood that was never
bought and never sold; that wore no veil,
and had no foot bound; whose realized ideal
of marriage was sexual companionship and
an equality in duty and labor; who stood
side by side with the males they loved in
peace or war, and whose children, when they
had borne them, sucked manhood from their
breasts, and even through their fetal existence
‘Regulated from “Women and Labor," published by F1'GdH’l‘l‘ Nswk"
Company, New York.