shall be cooked to-day? the ever-recurring necessity of sweeping, and
beating, and brushing, and dusting is the continuously falling drop that
slowly, but surely, wears away mind and body. The kitchen-hearth is the
place where the saddest balances are drawn up between income and
expense, where the most depressing observations are forced upon the mind
on the rising dearness of the necessaries of life, and on the ever
increasing difficulty to earn the needed cash. On the flaming altar,
where the soup kettle bubbles, youth and mental ease, beauty and good
humor are sacrificed; and who recognizes in the old care-bent cook, the
one-time blooming, overbearing, coy-coquette bride in the array of her
myrtle crown? Already in antiquity the hearth was sacred, near it were
placed the Lares and patron deities. Let us also hold sacred the hearth
at which the dutiful German bourgeois house-wife dies a slow death, in
order to keep the house comfortable, the table covered and the family in
health." Such is the consolation offered in bourgeois society to the
wife, who, under the present order of society, is miserably going to
pieces.

Those women, who, thanks to their social condition, find themselves in a
freer state, have, as a rule, a one-sided, superficial education, that,
combined with inherited female characteristics, manifests itself with
force. They generally have a taste for mere superficialities; they think
only about gew-gaws and dress; and thus they seek their mission in the
satisfaction of a spoiled taste, and the indulgence of passions that
demand their pay with usury. In their children and the education of
these they have hardly any interest: they give them too much trouble and
annoyance, hence are left to the nurses and servants, and are later
passed on to the boarding-schools. At any rate their principal task is
to raise their daughters as show-dolls, and their sons as pupils for the
_jeunesse dore_ (gilded youth) out of which dudedom recruits its
ranks--that despicable class of men that may be fairly put upon a level
with procurers. This _jeunesse dore_ furnishes the chief contingent to
the seducers of the daughters of the working class. They look upon
idleness and squandering as a profession.

FOOTNOTES:

[58] Mainlaender, "Philosophie der Erloesung," Frankfort-on-the-Main,
1886, E. Koenitzer.

[59] D. A. Debay, "Hygiene et Physiologue du Marriage," Paris, 1884.
Quoted in "Im Freien Reich" by Ioma v. Troll-Boros