Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/268

252 a difference or by the denial of her rights, he either declares her as unable or as unworthy to stand upon an equal plane with himself; he divests her of her human dignity or degrades her into a second-class human being. He says to her: I dove you as a person, but this person has no will of her own, only my will; you are an angel, but this angel does not know what she is about; I adore you as a goddess, but this goddess has not brains enough to judge of the most commonplace things; you can make me happy for life, but you cannot decide what is good or bad, right or wrong, reasonable or unreasonable; T am wholly yours, but I am your law-maker and your judge; all my possessions are at your disposal, but I must be your guardian, and must vote for you as the slave-holder does for the slave; you are my mistress in theory, but my servant in practice. How ought she to answer all these inconsistencies? Simply thus: You are either a hypocrite in your professions of love, or a fool in your arrogance; in the first case, I despise you, and in the second case, I laugh at you, but in no case do I love you. Adieu!

The contradictions in which men involve themselves, in their struggle against the equality of the sexes, are as obvious as they are innumerable. They think they are paying us the very highest compliment when, in assigning us our "sphere" in their well-known arbitrary manner, they entrust us with the high task of educating their children. We are to be educators without having had an education