ion must admit that it is shameful to consider woman as an
instrument of pleasure.

"The emancipation of woman is not to be effected in the public courts or
in the chamber of deputies, but in the sleeping chamber. Prostitution is
to be combated, not in the houses of ill-fame, but in the family. They
free woman in the public courts and in the chamber of deputies, but she
remains an instrument. Teach her, as she is taught among us, to look
upon herself as such, and she will always remain an inferior being.
Either, with the aid of the rascally doctors, she will try to prevent
conception, and descend, not to the level of an animal, but to the
level of a thing; or she will be what she is in the great majority of
cases,--sick, hysterical, wretched, without hope of spiritual progress."
. . .

"But why that?" I asked.

"Oh! the most astonishing thing is that no one is willing to see this
thing, evident as it is, which the doctors must understand, but which
they take good care not to do. Man does not wish to know the law of
nature,--children. But children are born and become an embarrassment.
Then man devises means of avoiding this embarrassment. We have not
yet reached the low level of Europe, nor Paris, nor the 'system of two
children,' nor Mahomet. We have discovered nothing, because we have
given it no thought. We feel that there is something bad in the two
first means; but we wish to preserve the family, and our view of woman
is still worse.

"With us woman must be at the same time mistress and nurse, and her
strength is not sufficient. That is why we have hysteria, nervous
attacks, and, among the peasants, witchcraft. Note that among the young
girls of the peasantry this state of things does not exist, but only
among the wives, and the wives who live with their husbands. The reason
is clear, and this is the cause of the intellectual and moral decline of
woman, and of her abasement.

"If they would only reflect what a grand work for the wife is the period
of gestation! In her is forming the being who continues us, and
this holy work is thwarted and rendered painful . . . by what? It is
frightful to think of it! And after that they talk of the liberties and
the rights of woman! It is like the cannibals fattening their prisoners
in order to devour them, and assuring these unfortunates at the same
time that their rights and their liberties are guarded!"

All this was new to me, and astonished me very much.

"But if th