The Rights of Women and the Sexual Relations/Part 1/17. Conclusion
CONCLUSION.
Women in gerieral still make themselves the slaves of fashion; their heart is set on gewgaws, and they grow enthusiastic over a thousand trifles. To please women in general one must be a man without intellect or heart. Women in general — but why talk of all these things? I pass them by all the more readily because they stand in relation with most of the chief evils examined above. This examination, the critical and reformatory survey of the existing chief evils, their causes, their relation, and the means of abolishing them, was the only thing of importance.
The fair readers must have become convinced by this survey that their oppression, their dependence, their degradation is founded on
the rule of force,
the rule of money, and
the rule of priests.
It must, therefore, have become clear to them that they cannot depend on an improvement of their lot before
the liberty and the right of all men have been attained,
the existence of all men has been secured, and the essence and dignity of all men have been recognized in purely human conceptions.
Everything that they can be and can wish for depends on these three points: their liberty, their rights, their dignity, their social position, their marital happiness, their love, their education, their everything.
Therefore these three points also suffice as a guide to women for the direction which their antipathies and sympathies, their hate and their love must take. Let all despotism with its supporters, all aristocracy of wealth with its representatives, all religious humbug with its priests, be recommended to the hatred and the abhorrence of the women; let liberty with its champions, socialism with its apostles, reason with its teachers, appeal to the love and sympathy of all women of right thought and noble feeling, whose striving, whose interests, whose happiness, whose future do indeed lie only in the path of these revolutionary motors.
Let them but smile upon you, entice you, flatter you, those brilliant despots, those perfumed slave-holders, those gay soldiers, those suave diplomatists, those proud money-lords, those fawning priests—turn your backs on them, cast them from you with contempt, and swear to them the hatred of destruction, for they are the creators of your slavery, the fathers of your shame, the teachers of your degradation. Only free men are your friends, and only with the era of complete liberty and justice does the morning of your true being dawn for you.
Powerless and degraded as you have hitherto been, you can attain to power and distinction from the moment that you combine with the correct appreciation of your ends the sincere will to serve them. Your tender hands are a thousandfold able to interfere in the course of events and the actions of men, if you will only put them in the service of your hatred and your love, and if you will hate what is bad and love what is right. You can encourage and deter; you can reward and you can punish; you can twine wreaths and crowns of thorns. If a virgin, cast off your suitor if he does not prove himself a servant of liberty. If a wife, desert your husband if he deserts the cause of liberty. If a mother, rear your children on the milk of liberty, and early enflame in their hearts the hatred for tyranny, that the dagger of Harmodious and Aristogeiton may become the plaything of their youth.
Look about you in Europe! It lies downtrodden beneath the feet of those in whose eyes your entire sex is nothing but a herd of servants and whores, under the feet of those who have had you flogged beneath the gallows on which they had hanged your husbands and sons, What will your future be if in the impending struggles these men again remain the victors?
Look about you in America! It was approaching a time which was to put the stamp of slavery on this entire republic in the name of "democracy." And what would your future have been if this slaveholder democracy had not been overthrown? The poison of corruption would have corroded all moral conceptions, and the passion of vulgarity have severed all moral ties; expoliation would have completed the right of the stronger, and degradation would have completed the law of the weaker; power would have been taught to rule everything, and money to buy everything; the recognition of the rights of man would have become a stupidity, and the assertion of humanity treason; the standard of the slaveholder would have measured every interest, and the interest that would have been felt for you would have been nothing more than that felt for the women in Europe.
Well, slavery has been abolished, but its chief supports, vulgarity, wealth, the priesthood, have come into the inheritance, and they will endeavor to keep you in a state of semi-slavery until you help to make them harmless by championing science, justice, and enlightenment.
Must you still be told what you are to love and what you are to hate, in America as well as in Europe?
The reaction everywhere reveals three points: force, money rule, priesthood. The points of the opposition are: liberty, justice, reason. The points of the reaction are always the proper targets for the hatred, the points of the opposition always the proper objects for the sympathy, of women. For they, as the weaker party, are always the ones whom the victory of the reaction, continuing to operate, affects most disastrously, and, as the most disqualified party, they are always the ones who receive the greatest aid for their interests in the most radical opposition.
In Europe it is the banner of the revolution, in America the banner of radical democracy, which leads the hosts on towards the time when the free woman can proudly rejoice by the side of the freeman. On the grave of the tyrants blooms your liberty, from the ruins of aristocracy arise your rights. Therefore follow the banner of the revolution in Europe, and the banner of radical democracy in America!
It is not for us alone; no, it is for you yourselves, ye women, if you heed the call of the time which Says to you: Women must enter the ranks of the revolution for the object is the revolution of humanity.