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Read Ebook: Rambles in Womanland by O Rell Max
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Ebook has 995 lines and 65824 words, and 20 pages
INTRODUCTION 7
PREFACE 9
CHAP.
OBJECTIONS TO THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMAN 211
NATURE AND FUNCTIONS OF WOMAN 224
LOVE; ITS FUNCTIONS IN HUMANITY 248
MARRIAGE 270
SUMMARY OF PROPOSED REFORMS 294
APPEAL TO WOMEN 314
INTRODUCTION
TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.
"The work is calculated to do an immense service to French society at the present time--just when the literature of the country is on the verge of decay from the rottenness which is eating to its very core. 'La Femme Affranchie' points out the remedy to the social cancer which has gnawed away the vital principle of domestic life in France, and caused that antagonism between the sexes which foreigners behold with the most profound amazement. Madame d'H?ricourt's bold and nervous arguments completely destroy the brutal commonplaces of Proudhon as regards the moral and intellectual capacity of women. She takes him on his own ground, and to his medical propositions returns medical objections of far greater weight and power, being more competent to judge the question, as she has passed examinations as 'Maitresse sage femme' of 'La Clinique,' and received her diploma as medical practitioner many years ago."
TO MY READERS.
Readers, male and female, I am about to tell you the end of this book, and the motives which caused me to undertake it, that you may not waste your time in reading it, if its contents are not suited to your intellectual and moral temperament.
My end is to prove that woman has the same rights as man.
To claim, in consequence, her emancipation;
Lastly, to point out to the women who share my views, the principal measures that they must take to obtain justice.
The word emancipation giving room for equivocation, let us in the first place establish its meaning.
To emancipate woman is not to acknowledge her right to use and abuse love; such an emancipation is only the slavery of the passions; the use of the beauty and youth of woman by man; the use of man by woman for his fortune or credit.
To emancipate woman is to acknowledge and declare her free, the equal of man in the social and the moral law, and in labor.
At present, over the whole surface of the globe, woman, in certain respects, is not subjected to the same moral law as man; her chastity is given over almost without restriction to the brutal passions of the other sex, and she often endures alone the consequences of a fault committed by both.
In marriage, woman is a serf.
In public instruction, she is sacrificed.
In labor, she is made inferior.
Politically, she has no existence.
I claim the rights of woman, because it is time to make the nineteenth century ashamed of its culpable denial of justice to half the human species;
Because the state of inferiority in which we are held corrupts morals, dissolves society, deteriorates and enfeebles the race;
Because the progress of enlightenment, in which woman participates, has transformed her in social power, and because this new power produces evil in default of the good which it is not permitted to do;
Because the time for according reforms has come, since women are protesting against the order which oppresses them; some by disdain of laws and prejudices; others by taking possession of contested positions, and by organizing themselves into societies to claim their share of human rights, as is done in America;
Readers, male and female, several of the adversaries of the cause which I defend, have carried the discussion into the domain of science, and have not shrunk before the nudity of biological laws and anatomical details. I praise them for it; the body being respectable, there is no indecency in speaking of the laws which govern it; but as it would be an inconsistency on my part to believe that blamable in myself which I approve in them, you will not be surprised that I follow them on the ground which they have chosen, persuaded that Science, the chaste daughter of Thought, can no more lose her chastity under the pen of a pure woman than under that of a pure man.
Readers, male and female, I have but one request to make; namely, that you will pardon my simplicity of style. It would have cost me too much pains to write in the approved fashion; it is probable, besides, that I should not have succeeded. My work is one of conscience. If I enlighten some, if I make others reflect; if I awaken in the heart of men the sentiment of justice, in that of women the sentiment of their dignity; if I am clear to all, fully comprehended by all, useful to all, even to my adversaries, it will satisfy me and will console me for displeasing those who love ideas only as they love women: in full dress.
TO MY ADVERSARIES.
Gentlemen, I cannot write otherwise than as a woman, since I have the honor to be a woman.
If am I harsh and unsparing to my adversaries, it is because they appear to me to be those of reason and of justice; it is because they, the strong and well armed, attack harshly and unsparingly a sex which they have taken care to render timid and to disarm; it is, in short, because I believe it perfectly lawful to defend weakness against tyranny which has the audacity and insolence to erect itself into right.
I have no heart, you say. I am lacking in it, perhaps, towards tyrants, but the conflict that I undertake proves that I am not lacking in it towards their victims; I have therefore a sufficient quantity of it, the more, inasmuch as I neither desire to please you, nor care to be loved by any among you.
Be advised by me, gentlemen; break yourselves of the habit of confounding heart with nerves; cease to create an imaginary type of woman to make it the standard of your judgment of real women; it is thus that you pervert your reason and become, without wishing it, the thing of all others the most hateful and least estimable--tyrants.
TO MY FRIENDS.
Now to you, my friends, known and unknown, a few lines of thanks.
You all comprehend that woman, as a human being, has the right to develop herself, and to manifest, like man, her spontaneity;
That she has the right, like man, to employ her activity; that she has the right, like man, to be respected in her dignity and in the use which she sees fit to make of her free will.
That as half in the social order, a producer, a tax-payer, amenable to the laws, she has the right to count as half in society.
You all comprehend that it is in the enjoyment of these various rights that her emancipation consists; not in the faculty of making use of love outside a moral law based on justice and self respect.
Thanks to you, in particular, my oldest friend, Charles Fauvety, the indefatigable searcher after truth, whose elegant, refined and limpid style is solely and constantly at the service of progressive ideas and generous aspirations, as your rich library and your counsels are at the service of those who are seeking to enlighten humanity. Why, alas! do you join to so many talents and noble qualities the fault of always remaining in the background to give place to others!
Thanks to you, Charles Renouvier, the most learned representative of Critical Philosophy in France, who join to such profound doctrine, such acute perception and such sureness of judgment; I would add, such modesty and unpretending virtue, did I not know that it displeases you to bring you before the public.
It is from your encouragement and approbation, my friends and former co-laborers, that I have drawn the strength necessary to the work I am undertaking; it is just, therefore, that I should thank you in the presence of all.
It is equally just that I should publicly express my gratitude to the Italian, English, Dutch, American and German journals that have translated many of my articles; and to the men and women of these different countries as well as of France, who have kindly expressed sympathy for me, and encouraged me in the struggle which I have undertaken against the adversaries of the rights of my sex.
MICHELET.
Several women have sharply criticised Michelet's "Love."
Why are intelligent women thus dissatisfied with so upright a man as Michelet?
Because to him woman is a perpetual invalid, who should be shut up in a gynaeceum in company with a dairy maid, as fit company only for chickens and turkeys.
Now we, women of the west, have the audacity to contend that we are not invalids, and that we have a holy horror of the harem and the gynaeceum.
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