: A Woman's Philosophy of Woman; or Woman affranchised. An answer to Michelet Proudhon Girardin Legouvé Comte and other modern innovators by H Ricourt Madame D - Women's rights France

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em as their competitors in these, and even confess that they are superior in management. No man, worthy of the name, would dare contest that woman is his equal, and that the day of her civil emancipation is close at hand.

Such is what many women are, what they wish to be to-day; see if it is not madness to seek to revive the gyneceum and the atrium for these women, impregnated with the ideas of the eighteenth century, wrought upon by the ideas of '89 and of the modern reformers. To say to such women that they shall have no place in the state, nor in marriage, nor in science, nor in art, nor in the trades, nor even in your subjective paradise, is something so monstrous that I cannot conceive, for my part, how aberration could go so far.

I should say many more things to you, sir, were not this critical sketch too long already; but imperfect though it may be, having to my mind only the meaning of a woman's protest against your doctrines, I shall pause here.

LEGOUV?.

The inheritor of a name which commands respect, Ernest Legouv?, an elegant, eloquent, and impassioned author, has written a Moral History of Women, whence exhales a perfume of purity and love which refreshes the heart and calms the soul.

In every page of this book, we detect the impulse of an upright heart and lofty mind, indignant at injustice, oppression, and moral deformity. The author has deserved well of women, and it is with pleasure that I seize the opportunity of thanking him in the name of those who, at the present time, are struggling in various countries for the emancipation of half the human race.

What is the object of Legouv?'s work? We will let him tell it himself.

"The object of this book is summed up in these words: to lay claim to feminine liberty in the name of the two very principles of the adversaries of this liberty: tradition and difference , that is to say, to show in tradition progress, and in difference equality.

God created the human species double, we utilize but half of it; Nature says two, we say one; we must agree with Nature. Unity itself, instead of perishing thereby, would only then be true unity; that is, not the sterile absorption of one of two terms for the benefit of the other, but the living fusion of two fraternal individualities, increasing the common power with all the force of their individual development.

"The feminine spirit is stifled, but not dead.... We cannot annihilate at our pleasure a force created by God, or extinguish a torch lighted by his hand; but turned aside from its purpose, this force, instead of creating, destroys; this torch consumes instead of giving light.

"Let us then open wide the gates of the world to this new element: we have need of it."

Then, examining the position of women, the author adds: "No history presents, we believe, more iniquitous prejudices to combat, more secret wounds to heal.

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