Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/262

246 3. The conception of man as a genus excludes every inequality of rights as an inherent contradiction and irrationality. Equality of kind implies equality of rights. By subordinating woman man raves against himself. If vulgarity and habit have led him to make this monstrous mistake of branding his mother and his wife as slaves by disqualifying them, while he would have his children and himself free, of degrading the woman below himself while desiring to love her as an equal, then the time has indeed come when he must be brought to realize this contradiction, by the abolition of which, alone, will he himself, as well as woman, be able to occupy their true position in life.

4. Equal rights will suffer no deductions and no exceptions. They can be thought of only as a complete, absolute, individual sovereignty, secured from all sides, in the state as well as in the family, in social as well as business intercourse. To exclude woman from suffrage is simply tyranny; to subordinate her in the family is barbarism; to limit her in social intercourse is arbitrariness; to measure the fruits of her labor with an unequal standard is fraud. 5. In the family, as well as in the state, this collection of families, interests, sentiments and aspirations can be brought into a state of humane harmony only by a co-operation of both sexes on a basis of equality. The one-sided preponderance of one sex to the exclusion of the other from public activity is not accompanied merely by the disastrous