r themselves
and their family,--the radical reformation of society that shall make
human beings of them all. In the measure that such insight gains ground
among the wives of the proletariat, then, despite want and misery,
their married life is _idealized_: both now have a common aim, after
which they strive; and they have an inexhaustible source of mutual
encouragement in the mutual interchange of views, whereto their joint
battle leads them. The number of proletarian women who reach this
insight is every year larger. Herein lies a movement, that is in process
of development, and that is fraught with decisive significance for the
future of mankind.

In other social strata, the differences in education and views--easily
overlooked at the beginning of married life, when passion still
predominates--are felt ever more with ripening years. Sexual passion
cools off, and its substitution with harmony of thought is all the more
needful. But, leaving aside whether the husband has any idea of civic
duties and attends to the same, he, at any rate, thanks to his
occupation and constant intercourse with the outer world, comes into
continuous touch with different elements and opinions, on all sorts of
occasions, and thus floats into an intellectual atmosphere that broadens
his horizon. As a rule, and in contrast with his wife, he finds himself
in a state of intellectual molting, while she, on the contrary, due to
her household duties, which engage her early and late, is robbed of
leisure for further education, and, accordingly, becomes mentally
stunted and soured.

The domestic wretchedness in which the majority of wives live to-day, is
correctly depicted by the bourgeois-minded Gerhard von Amyntor in his
"Marginal Notes to the Book of Life."[85] In the chapter entitled
"Deadly Gnat-bites" he says among other things:

"Not the shocking events, that none remain unvisited by, and that bring,
here the death of a husband, yonder the moral downfall of a beloved
child; that lie, here in a long and serious illness, yonder in the
wrecking of a warmly nursed plan;--not these undermine her (the
housewife's) freshness and strength. It is the small, daily-recurring
marrow and bone-gnawing cares.... How many millions of brave little
house-mothers cook and scour away their vigor of life, their very cheeks
and roguish dimples, in attending to domestic cares until they become
crumpled, dried and broke-up mummies. The ever-recurring question, what