Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/205

Rh of an officer of the guards, regard women as inferior beings, or toys, whom you think to amuse with the most trivial flatteries, or with compliments which sound doubly shallow, coming from such as you; or whom you think to silence with a bit of irony. It is an apparently trivial matter to which I am here giving so much space, but you will have to admit that there is more in it than most men think, and, I add, most women, too. That the majority of my sex take these shallow compliments, which at bottom are nothing but insults, as signs of respect, has often made me indignant, and I could only excuse them on the ground that their education by men has left their minds so empty that they cannot attain to any consciousness of their position and dignity.

I shall now take up the important points. The emancipation of woman seems to me to be an expression not well chosen, and easily misunderstood. What is necessary is not to emancipate the woman, but rather the human being in the woman. If we speak of the emancipation of woman, men at once assume that woman is to be introduced into an unwomanly sphere; but the emancipation of the human being in woman signifies that she is to come into possession of the common human rights, of which she is still for the most part dispossessed, and which nobody can deny her upon any tenable grounds. Self-determination, the preservation of our human rights, without let or hindrance in every direction, the possibility of educating ourselves for