Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/381

Rh domineering manner, as a matter of duty, liberty alone can teach men the meaning and the price of true love. The free woman will teach them to regard that as a reward that must be earned, which in the unfree woman they had regarded as booty. With the liberation and elevation of woman we liberate and elevate ourselves. Indeed, I would almost say: Only in so far, as we men learn to understand and appreciate woman, are we true human beings. The full wealth and the complete significance of the relationship between man and woman only superior individuals have hitherto been able to grasp and to represent. We must look to the liberty of the future to bring it into more general consciousness. Love is more than the desire for sexual union, or the renewal of self in progeny; marriage is more than the means of setting up housekeeping and founding a family; the upward striving toward the "eternal womanly" is more than a dark longing for an object that may agreeably occupy the emotions and the imagination. It is the longing, equivalent to a noble life, toward the perfection of our being through the union with a being in harmony with ourselves; toward the complete satisfaction of our personality by becoming one with another personality, by a blending of souls that perfects both, as the blending of two metals results in a third that is superior to and more durable than either alone. It is finally the need that every nobler individual feels for the realization of the ideal, a