ars as the eruption of
sex questions in Germany. We had always been given to understand that
the sphere of women and the laws of marriage had been definitely
prescribed and fixed in Germany for at least two thousand years, since
the days of Tacitus, in fact, and with the best possible results.
Germans assured the world in stentorian tones that only in Germany could
young womanhood be seen in all its purity, and that in the German
_Hausfrau_ the supreme ideal had been reached, the woman whose great
mission is to keep alive the perennial fire of the ancient German
hearth. Here and there, indeed, the quiet voice of science was heard in
Germany; thus Schrader, the distinguished investigator of Teutonic
origins, in commenting on the oft-quoted testimony of Tacitus to the
chastity of the German women, has appositely referred to the detailed
evidences furnished by the Committee of pastors of the Evangelical
Church as to the extreme prevalence of unchastity among the women of
rural Germany, and argued that these widespread customs must be very
ancient and deep-rooted.[59] But Germans in general refused to admit that
Tacitus had only used the idea of German virtue as a stick to beat his
own fellow-countrywomen with.

The Social-Democratic movement, which has so largely overspread
industrial and even intellectual Germany, prepared the way for a less
traditional and idealistic way of feeling in regard to these questions.
The publication by Bebel of a book, _Die Frau_, in which the leader of
the German Social-Democratic party set forth the Socialist doctrine of
the position of women in society, marked the first stage in the new
movement. This book exercised a wide influence, more especially on
uncritical readers. It is, indeed, from a scientific point of view a
worthless book--if a book in which genuine emotions are brought to the
cause of human freedom and social righteousness may ever be so
termed--but it struck a rude blow at the traditions of Teutonic
sentiment. With something of the rough tone and temper of the great
peasant who initiated the German Reformation, a man who had himself
sprung from the people, and who knew of what he was speaking, here set
down in downright fashion the actual facts as to the position of women
in Germany, as well as what he conceived to be the claims of justice in
regard to that position, slashing with equal vigour alike at the
absurdities of conventional marriage and of prostitution, the obverse