Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/719

 REVIEWS.

Die Frauenfrage : ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung und wirtschaftliche Seite. Von LILY BRAUN. Leipzig, 1901. Pp.xii + 55/.

IT is somewhat remarkable how frequently the subjects which are most discussed receive the least serious study. Of this fact perhaps the most striking example is afforded by the fiery arguments ranging around the position of women. There must be many thousands of articles dealing with this matter to be found in the magazines of the last sixty years ; there are not a few partisan books. But of genuine study, of patient thought and investigation, there is hardly a trace. To take the earliest book on the subject, Mary Wollstonecraft's work is the wail of a woman suffering under the restrictions imposed on her sex ; it is not a consideration of the questions how these restrictions arose, to what extent they are justified by fact, and what effect might be expected from their abolition. John Stuart Mill's famous pamphlet, The Subjection of Women, is a mere one-sided and rhetorical outburst, composed under the immediate influence of Mrs. Taylor. Mrs. Stetson's clever little book is rather the brilliant suggestion of a new hypothesis than its careful working out through the actual study of fact. In short, all the books on this subject have been composed under the auspices of the abstract and destructive liberalism of the beginning of the last century, of that individualism which believed so fervently in the prescience and power of "nature" that it expected the happiest results from the mere abolition of all artificial regulations. The rise of the new economics, which bases its conclusions rather on historical study and on patient investigation of existing conditions than on abstract reasoning, has resulted in the description of many economic institutions. It has produced monographs on mediaeval craft guilds, on trade unions, on the organization of modern business, on the growth of trusts. But, save incidentally, no economist of this school has condescended to investigate the economic aspects of the position of women. There is, indeed, Bebel's work, but it is too much permeated by the doctrines of the German Social Democracy to be accepted as an outcome of serious research into the actual facts.

But the book before us is of quite another stamp. True, we dis-

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