Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/215

Rh to an amazon, to share the power of such rulers. Then keep your politics for yourselves until onehalf of you has butchered and buried the other half! Perhaps the gladiatorial spirit of man will then change into humanity from exhaustion, and to us women will then accrue the task of guarding it against relapses.

But there is still another stage of action, upon which we are now daily playing our part, and that is social life. Here, too, we find, as on the throne of legislation, the men as liars, and even as the biggest liars of all.

What is honor? What is character? What is conscience? What is morality?

Should any one ask me these questions, I would first inquire whether they meant them for the male sex alone, or also for the relations of the latter to the female sex. For just as men deny women all rights, to begin with, they also are devoid of honor, of character, of conscience, of morality, in their relations to women, and when they speak of it they lie. In all these things they use quite different weights and measures for the women than for themselves, and whatever they condemn and abhor among themselves, they consider permissible and honorable when it is directed toward the weaker sex. (Let it be borne in mind that, throughout this entire article, am speaking of the great, great majority without condemning the small, the very small, minority along with them.)