Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/35

Rh nurse their own, sometimes the children of others in the common nursery. In the "Republic" of Plato there is no private property and no private interest. He is the grandsire of the communists. In another place he advocates different principles.

The above extracts show that even the most excellent writers of the most humane people of history have not attained to an entirely worthy conception, to an entirely free view, and to complete justice with regard to the nature and position of woman. Even Aristotle, who, among all, has laid down the most worthy principles, reaches, as it were, only a constitutional point of view, from which he concedes to woman an "advisory" counsel to governing man and a share in the "property," without even thinking of such a thing as an independent right for her. She is considered everywhere only as the property or appendage of man, nowhere as a sovereign being. They all judge woman only from the standpoint of men, statesmen, Greeks, not as human beings. But woman is the genuine representative of the purely human which must not be modified by State relations and nationalities.

When Greek liberty had vanished, the regard for women and the taste for "adoring" them increased. But this adoration was false, and a product of degenerate conditions. Men had no longer their former importance, consequently women came to be more equal to them; men