especially in Berlin, where
the conquerors were quartered, German ladies conducted themselves "with
much dignity, and such reserve as was becoming them toward the enemies
of their fathers, husbands, and brothers." Only the dregs of society
were at the disposal of the invaders. Voss reports that "the
frequentation of the temples of lust was so great that the number of
Venus's priestesses was found to be too small." The shamelessness of
vile women became intolerable. Unnatural vices arose, and continued
despite the severity of the law, which the police strove to enforce
rigidly.

During the years of reconstruction, however, which carried with them the
social liberation of the peasant-serfs and the Jews, the autonomy of the
communes unavoidably produced a mighty advance in the emancipation of
women. The frivolity and immorality of Romanticism, which appeared
barefaced in Schlegel's Lucinde and in the lives of almost all the
romanticists in their intercourse with women, was indignantly rejected
in those troubled times, and a return to simple virtue, chastity, and
housewifely qualities was preached and inaugurated. German youths began
to yearn for pure and pious women, such as had fought in male attire for
the fatherland, or healed the wounded patriots in the hospitals, or
worked, suffered, and sacrificed fortune, comfort, and personal
interests for the holy cause.

In the thirties of the nineteenth century, however, there was again, in
the so-called Young-German movement, a retrogression to the lax morality
of the first romanticists. The moral code of abstinence was represented
as an antiquated conventionality, and the emancipation of the flesh was
preached. Naturally the emancipation of woman became a principle of the
new doctrine. Again Rahel Levin, the spirited Jewess, and Bettina
Brentano (wife of Arnim), the free patrician, led the campaign, and
added to arts and letters the fields hitherto alone accessible to women
politics and religion. Freedom from the bonds of convention, liberation
from social limitations, was the aim of the advanced women. They
preached the extreme cultivation of their own individuality. They
recognized only the perfection of love and beauty. The most earnest
exponent of that exaggerated doctrine was Charlotte Stieglitz, who, to
arouse her weakling husband from his indifference, committed suicide. By
her voluntary death she wished to elevate him to activity, to heroism;
desiring greatness for