Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/379

Rh anxiety, translated into sincere language, is nothing more than the fear that masculine vulgarity must retreat before the civilizing influence of woman. In order to secure its existence and continued sole-rulership, this vulgarity strives to prevent woman from entering public life, by intimidating her with the false alarm that she will sacrifice or besmirch her nobler self, by associating with her former masters on a plane of equality. A very extraordinary way, this, of making the calling of a person the decisive judge in the matter of the exercise of human rights! Is it not strange that men do not trust women to decide for themselves what is womanly? Let them once learn to recognize and appreciate the true woman and it will be with pride, rather than anxiety, that they will behold woman entering the polls or the halls of legislation side by side with them. Before the woman who breaks her chains, before the free woman trembles not — the free man.

In the time when this shall have become the desire, the senseless clamor will also cease, that now still arises whenever woman tries to make her most personal property, her emotions and affections, her person and her happiness, independent of the tyrannical egotism of man, by asserting that inalienable right, which is wont to be called "free love." There are certain ruling prejudices and dogmas of habit, which, being favored by narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, take on the character of a moral ban, because the intellectual arguments which could give