I refuse to admit the sovereign position given to love in life ; I deny it autocratic power and protest against the pusillanimous excuse of having been carried away by it.
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Surely we have not freed ourselves from every restraint on earth, from God and the devil, from the Roman and the crim:nal law, and proclaimed reason as our sole guide and governor, in order to lie down humbly, like Hercules at the feet of Omphale, or to fal l asleep in the lap of Delilah? Surely woman has not sought to be free from the yoke of the family, from perpetual tutelage and the tyranny of father, husband, or brother, has not striven for her right to independent work, to learning and the standing of a citizen, only to bPgin owr again cooing like a turtle-dove all her life and pining for a dozen Leone Leonis5
instead of one.
Yes, while considering this theme it is for woman that I am sorriest of all ; she is irreparably gnawed and destroyed by the all-devouring Moloch of love. She has more faith in it and she suffers more from it. She is more concentrated on the sexual relationship alone, more driven to love . . . . She is both intellectually more unstable and intellectually less trained than we.
I am sorry for her.
I I I
HAs ANYONE made a serious and honest attempt to break dO\vn conventional prejudices in female educationJ They are broken down by experience, and so it is life and not convention that suffers.
People skirt the questions we are discussing, as old women and children go round a graveyard or places where some villainy has been committed. Some are afraid of impure spirits, others of the pure truth, and are left with an imagined derangement amid uninvestigated obscurity. There is as l i ttle serious consistency in our view of sexual relationships as in all practical spheres. We still dream of the possibility of combining Christian morality, which starts from the trampling underfoot of the flesh and leads towards tlw other world, with the realistic, earthly morality of this world. People ;up annoyed bPcause the two moralities do not get on with each other and, to avoid spending time tormenting themselves ovPr thP solution of thP problem, they pick out according to their tastPs and retain what they like of the Church teaching, and reject what they do not care for, on the same
" Leone I.Poni is th" ""' v, or rather Yillain, whose name supplies the title of one of George Sand's ParliPr noYels. ( Tr. )
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principle as those who do not keep fasts will zealously eat pancakes and, while observing the gay religious customs, avoid the dull ones. Yet I should have thought it was high time to bring more harmony and manliness into conduct. Let him who respects the law remain under the law and not break it, but let him who does not accept it show himself openly and consciously independent of it.
A sober view of human relationships is far harder for women than for us; of that there is no doubt; they are more deceived by education and know less of life, and so they more often stumble and break their heads and hearts than free themselves. They are always in revolt, and remain in slavery; they strive for revolution and more than anything they support the existing regime.
From childhood the girl is frightened by the sexual relationship as by some fearful unclean secret of which she is warned and scared off as though it were a sin that had some magical power; and afterwards this same monstrous thing, this same magnum ignotum which leaves an ineffaceable stain, the remotest hint at which is shameful and sets her blushing, is made the object of her life. As soon as a boy can walk, he is given a tin sword to train him to murder, and an hussar's uniform and epaulettes are predicted for him; the girl is lulled to sleep with the hope of a rich and handsome bridegroom, and she dreams of epaulettes not on her own shoulders but on the shoulders of her future husband.
Dors, dors, man enfant,
Jusqu'a l'iige de quinze ans,
A quin::e ans faut te reveiller,
A quin::e ans faut te marier.
One must marvel at any fine human nature that does not succumb to such an upbringing: we ought to have expected that all the little girls lulled to sleep like this would, from the age of fifteen, set to work speedily to replace those who had been slain by the boys trained from childhood to murderous weapons.
Christian teaching inspires terror of the 'flesh' before the organism is conscious of its sex ; it awakens a dangerous question in the child, instils alarm into the adolescent soul, and when the time to answer it is come-another doctrine exalts, as we have said, for the girl her sexual assignment into a sought-for ideaclass="underline" the school-girl becomes the bride, and the same mystery, the same sin, but purified, becomes the cro·wn of her upbringing, the
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desire of all her relations, the goal of all her efforts, almost a social duty. Arts and sciences, education, intelligence, beauty, wealth, grace, all these are directed to the same object, all are the roses strewn on the path to her sanctioned fall . . . to the very same sin, the thought of which was looked on as a crime but which has now changed its substance by a miracle like that by which a Pope, when anhungercd on a journey, blessed a meat dish into a Lenten one.
In short, the whole training, negative and positive, of a woman remains a training for sexual relationships; round them revolves her whole subsequent life. From them she runs, towards them she runs, by them is disgraced, by them is made proud .
. . . To-day she preserves the negative holiness of chastity, today she whispers, blushing, to her bosom friend of love ; to-morrow, in the presence of the crowd, in glare and noise, to the light of chandeliers and to strains of music, she is flung into the arms of a man.
Bride, wife, mother, scarcely in old age, as a grandmother, is a woman set free from sexual life, and becomes an independent being, especially if the grandfather is dead. \'Voman, marked by love, does not soon escape from it. . . . Pregnancy, suckling, child-rearing are all the evolution of the same mystery, the same act of love ; in woman it persists not in the memory only, but in blood and body, in her it ferments and ripens and tears itself away-without breaking its tie.
Christianity breathed with its feverish monastic asceticism, vvith its romantic ravings, upon this physiologically strong, deep relationship, and fanned it into a senseless and destructive flame-of jealousy, revenge, punishment, outrage.
For a woman to extricate herself from this chaos is an heroic feat: only rare and exceptional natures accomplish it; the other
\Vomen arc tortured, and if they do not go out of their minds it is only thanks to the frivolity with which we all live without oversubtlety in the face of menacing blows and collisions, thoughtlessly passing from day to day, from fortuity to fortuity and from contradiction to contradiction.
\Vhat breadth, what beauty and power of human nature and development there must be in a woman to get over all the palisades, all the fences, within which she is held captive!