y way the
original nature of man, which is established and standardized "by
eternal and immutable laws." Anthropology is continuously progressing
toward a firm scientific foundation, and is beginning to organize even
the vast domain of psychology into a well-defined system. The
interdependence between physical, mental, and moral traits is well
recognized, but its exact determination is impossible, owing to the
infinite complexity of the endless ancestral potencies.

So much is established, however: Teutonic woman, as she appears in
history, is the product of two groups of influences, the one group,
inherited nature; the other, environment; she is the exact sum of these
antecedent causes. And only so far as these causes differ does the
Teutonic woman differ from her sister of any other race of other times
and climes.

In this book of a purely historical, literary, and cultural character
must be excluded all that refers to the physiological and ethnographical
characteristics of the Teutonic woman and of her Slavic sister. Nor are
we concerned with the theory of their evolution, _i. e._, the search of
the physical principles according to which the consequences of their
existence are true to the laws of their antecedents. Many eminent
scientists have tried their great faculties on this subject of universal
interest and importance. Standard works of a scientific character, like
Floss's _Das Weib in der Natur und Volherhunde_, abound in scientific
and medical bibliography.

Our limited task is merely to deal succinctly with the most general
evolution of the social position and the cultural status of the Teutonic
and, even more briefly, of the Slavic woman at the various epochs of
their respective histories, and how far the history of civilization
among those races was influenced by them, how far the symptoms of
national morality and the degree of culture were shaped by feminine
achievements, proclivities, virtues, and vices. Two thousand years of
the richest, almost unfathomable, history had to be traversed in the
attempt to glean the essential red thread from the enormous masses of
facts which in their entirety would be inaccessible even to the most
universal historical scholar. Most difficult of all the periods is
perhaps the question of the present and actual women's movement, which
is now in its liveliest flux and in a most variable condition both in
the German and in the Slavic world. It is impossible as yet to
syste