want and exile.
Johanna Scherr, wife of the historian of culture Johannes Scherr, is
also one of the noblest types of able and modest women and heroines, who
are strong in endurance and even in encouragement of their husbands.

The changes in industrialism which began in the middle of the nineteenth
century began to produce the mass misery of machinery with which the
state was unable to cope. Crises were inevitable. The workingmen,
grouped in industrial circles, deprived of the right of association for
common protection, were often abused by employers, who had them entirely
at their mercy. Wages were entirely insufficient; Hungerlohne became a
technical term; women and children were forced to work in the factories
to supply the deficit in the amount needed for the support of the
family. Acute misery led to outbreaks like that of the Silesian weavers,
whose misery inspired the modern social drama of Hauptmann; typhoid
fever and diseases of starvation raged among the sufferers.

For the first time women entered the arena of the political movement.
Societies of women were formed in many German cities. Names of gifted
women sprang up everywhere. The social and political struggles of the
time are reflected in the memoirs of an idealistic woman, Malwida von
Meysenbug. Though reared in narrow aristocratic prejudices, she
struggled through them to a democratic association with her suffering
sisters of a lower social status. She bore the painful breach with her
family which, owing to her liberalism, became inevitable. She demanded
economic independence for woman, not only because labor ennobles, but
because only the economically independent woman is free to live
according to her convictions, "liberated from the threefold tyranny of
dogmatism, convention, and the ignoble bonds of forced marriage." Woman
is to cooperate in the great work of the regeneration of the nation.
"How could," says she, "a nation regenerate itself and become free, if
one-half of it is excluded from the careful, all-around preparation
which true liberty demands for a nation as well as for individuals." An
institution was already founded which was to accomplish this ideal. A
university for females, at Hamburg, was to give to young women the
necessary preparation for a higher mission than had been theirs.
Energetic Emilie Wustenfeld was the soul of the foundation, Professor
Karl Froebel its head. Its aim was to embrace "all the sciences which
practical, soc