Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/269

Rh. We are to do our share in making the children worthy members of society, competent citizens, without having learned ourselves what society needs, and what constitutes a good citizen. We are to teach them the rights of man when we have none ourselves. We are slaves and are expected to rear free men; we are brought up as dolls, and are entrusted with the task of training men. In short, we are charged with incapacity for and deprived of the opportunity of learning and practicing the very thing which it is to be our highest task to teach.

But although women in general have no opportunity to fit themselves for public life, they nevertheless show, in all questions that do not require a special training, that they stand on the right side. I need only to call to mind the slave question. Slavery, so long admired by the majority of men, would certainly have been abolished several decades earlier had women had a voice in the matter. That women of the South, spoiled by education, and dehumanized by habit, have taken the side of slavery need not astonish us; but how many women in the North sided with this barbaric institution, of the preservation of which the men made a vital question? And especially among the German women, where do you find that revolting fanaticism for slavery, that stupid ‘hatred of the negro, by which the majority of the German men have distinguished and are still distinguishing themselves as "Democrats?" I have never yet found a German woman