ement with her
lips as if she was blowing a bit of thistledown from her. "Remember,"
she said, "that is what you will be directly you get there ... nothing
at all." But I had been to Germany so often that I was prepared to be
"nothing at all" for a time, and not to mind it much. What I wanted to
discover was how far German women had arrived at being "something" in
the eyes of their men. In my eyes they had always been a good deal:
admirable wives and mothers, for instance, patient, capable, thrifty,
and self-sacrificing. At first I thought that my friend was wrong,
and that women of late years had made great strides in Germany. I met
single women who had careers and homes of their own and were quite
cheerful. When you are old enough to look back twenty or thirty years,
and remember the blight there used to be on the "old maid," and the
narrow gossiping life she was driven to lead, you must admit that
these contented bachelor women have done a good deal to emancipate
themselves. In England they have been with us for a long time, but
formerly I had not come across them in Germany. On the contrary, I
well remember my amazement as a girl at hearing a sane able-bodied
single woman of sixty say she had naturally not ventured on a summer
journey to Switzerland till some man who looked after her money
affairs, but was in no way related, had given her his consent. I did
once hear a German boast of having struck his wife in order to bring
her to submission. He was not a navvy either, but a merchant of good
standing. He was not a common type, however. German men, on the whole,
treat their womenfolk kindly, but never as their equals. Over and over
again German women have told me they envied the wives of Englishmen,
and I should say that it is impossible for an English woman to be in
Germany without feeling, if she understands what is going on around
her, that she has suddenly lost caste. She is "nothing at all" because
she is a woman: to be treated with gallantry if she is young and
pretty, and as a negligible quantity if she is not. That perhaps is a
bitter description of what really takes place, but after reading Herr
Riehl, and hearing that his ideas are still widely accepted in
Germany, I am not much afraid of being unjust. His own arguments
convict the men of the nation in a measure nothing I could say would.
They are in extreme opposition to the ideas fermenting amongst modern
women there, and the strange fact that they are no