ress smiled, and
probably most German women smiled with her. At the present time,
however, there is an extraordinary amount of intellectual activity in
Germany, a widespread and massive activity. For the first time,
moreover, it has reached women, who are taking it up with characteristic
Teutonic thoroughness. But they are not imitating the methods of their
Anglo-Saxon sisters; they are going to work their own way. They are
spending very little energy in waving the red flag before the fortresses
of male monopoly. They are following an emotional influence which,
strangely enough, it may seem to some, finds more support from the
biological and medical side than the Anglo-Saxon movement has always
been able to win. From the time of Aristophanes downwards, whenever they
have demonstrated before the masculine citadels, women have always been
roughly bidden to go home. And now, here in Germany, where of all
countries that advice has been most freely and persistently given, women
are adopting new tactics: they have gone home. "Yes, it is true," they
say in effect, "the home is our sphere. Love and marriage, the bearing
and the training of children--that is our world. And we intend to lay
down the laws of our world."

FOOTNOTES:

[52] In 1787 Condorcet declared (_Lettres d'un Bourgeois de New Haven_,
Lettre II) that women ought to have absolutely the same rights as men,
and he repeated the same statement emphatically in 1790, in an article
"Sur l'Admission des Femmes au Droit de Cite," published in the _Journal
de la Societe de 1789_. It must be added that Condorcet was not a
democrat, and neither to men nor to women would he grant the vote unless
they were proprietors.

[53] Leopold Lacour has given a full and reliable account of Olympe de
Gouges (who was born at Montauban in 1755) in his _Trois Femmes de la
Revolution_, 1900.

[54] It is noteworthy that the Empire had even a depressing effect on the
physical activities of women. The eighteenth-century woman in France,
although she was not athletic in the modern sense, enjoyed a free life
in the open air and was fond of physical exercises. During the
Directoire this tendency became very pronounced; women wore the
scantiest of garments, were out of doors in all weathers, cultivated
healthy appetites, and enjoyed the best of health. But with the
establishment of the Empire these wholesome fashions were discarded, and
women cultivated new ideals of fragile refinement indoo