Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/58

42 possibility of saving the better self is still conceivable. But a woman in a state of prostitution is both a slave and a human monstrosity at the same time. The woman is born for love, and drowns her heart in a bog of vice; the woman is born for motherhood, and to be a mother becomes a horror to her; the woman is born to be a wife, and of the happiness of a wife she has never any conception. Thus is the woman in a state of prostitution. Surely, to sell one's "love" without choice and without love is the lowest stage of human abjectness. If all women could feel the degradation which is the lot of millions of their sex in the state of prostitution, the whole sex would rise in rebellion and begin a sex war, as there have hitherto been national and religious wars,

The way in which woman has reached this degradation also indicates the way to free herself from it. First came force, which compelled the woman to give herself even to the man she most despised. Asa slave, and as an ornament to the harem, she was in the beginning mere booty. The preponderance of physical strength, force, was the immediate cause that made woman a tool, a thing without rights. This force was converted, also with respect to the men, into political power, the power of princes, and as such became at the same time an object of veneration. The men honored it as subjects, the women as tools of