Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/44

28 In the French revolution no definite position could be developed for women. They indeed played a great part in it, just as the French nation possesses the most excellent women, but even in France the theoretical and historical preparations, which could become the foundation for a new position of the weaker sex, were wanting; moreover the revolutionary struggle very soon changed into the history of Napoleonic "heroism" in which the women of course were forced into the background before soldiers and weapons. The soldier has no other position for women than that of whores or daughters of the regiment.

After the Napoleonic period, women as well as men, as we know, spent their days in a condition of vacillation, unconsciousness, prostitution, and philistinism. The position of women can still be designated by three words: they are tolerated, used, and protected so far and so long as men see fit, and must always remain about as far behind them in their demands and their progress as their physical strength remains behind that of the men. Although, after passing through Antiquity and the Middle Ages, time has developed more humane customs and forms, women, in relation to men or in comparison with men, are still without rights in almost every respect; and in a thousand cases where a man may and can emancipate himself, emancipation for woman remains a crime and an impossibility. The history of women up to