Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/57

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has, in advance of man, the bitter sat. isfaction that there is a far greater chasm between the different positions which she occupies in poetry and in life than between all the positions which can be imagined for a male being. Worshipped as an ideal in poetry, degraded below the animal in life, woman may contemplate how much restitution must be made to her in order to fill out the chasm between her degradation and her apotheosis. Indeed, between the most exalted man of history orthe drama, and the lowest slave of the bagnio or the plantation, there is not so great a contrast by far as between a Laura or Heloïse and a prostitute of the street or the brothel.

Woman has a double task of liberation. First she bears with man the common yoke of the prevailing oppression; but if this yoke is cast off, there still remains for her the special yoke which the male sex has placed on her neck. In the man the human being alone can be oppressed or liberated, in the woman the sex as well.

The despot makes a slave of the man by oppression, but even this slave makes a sub-slave of the woman by purchase. Even for the slave the