Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/378

362 could only become what man either directly or indirectly made of her through education and rulership! To demand qualities and to pass judgment on qualities in a state of slavery which only liberty can develop or destroy, would be to crown injustice by stupidity. Only the free woman can manifest the true nature of woman. The woman of the future will be an entirely different being from the woman of the present. What she may once be, what she may strive after and accomplish, we can even now realize by the aid of the example given us by several favored natures, and by the contrast between free conditions and the unfree conditions in which she moves and has her being. What a difference, for instance, between the aspirations and achievements of American and of German women! Women, brought up in the philistine, police and military atmosphere of Germany, have no idea of what women undertake and accomplish in America. Neither can we now have an adequate conception of that which American, and, it is to be hoped, also GermanAmerican women, will one day undertake and accomplish, when they can enter every arena which a free government opens to human aspirations, in the full possession of their rights and independence. Let us not be afraid that in an atmosphere of liberty womanliness will disappear. It will not commit suicide because it is permitted to unfold freely. Oppression, not liberty, destroys true womanliness, as it does true manliness. This so frequently expressed