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"progress" of woman on her flags and banners, the very opposite realises
itself with terrible obviousness: WOMAN RETROGRADES. Since the French
Revolution the influence of woman in Europe has DECLINED in proportion
as she has increased her rights and claims; and the "emancipation of
woman," insofar as it is desired and demanded by women themselves (and
not only by masculine shallow-pates), thus proves to be a remarkable
symptom of the increased weakening and deadening of the most womanly
instincts. There is STUPIDITY in this movement, an almost masculine
stupidity, of which a well-reared woman--who is always a sensible
woman--might be heartily ashamed. To lose the intuition as to the ground
upon which she can most surely achieve victory; to neglect exercise in
the use of her proper weapons; to let-herself-go before man, perhaps
even "to the book," where formerly she kept herself in control and in
refined, artful humility; to neutralize with her virtuous audacity man's
faith in a VEILED, fundamentally different ideal in woman, something
eternally, necessarily feminine; to emphatically and loquaciously
dissuade man from the idea that woman must be preserved, cared for,
protected, and indulged, like some delicate, strangely wild, and
often pleasant domestic animal; the clumsy and indignant collection of
everything of the nature of servitude and bondage which the position of
woman in the hitherto existing order of society has entailed and still
entails (as though slavery were a counter-argument, and not rather a
condition of every higher culture, of every elevation of culture):--what
does all this betoken, if not a disintegration of womanly instincts,
a defeminising? Certainly, there are enough of idiotic friends and
corrupters of woman among the learned asses of the masculine sex, who
advise woman to defeminize herself in this manner, and to imitate
all the stupidities from which "man" in Europe, European "manliness,"
suffers,--who would like to lower woman to "general culture," indeed
even to newspaper reading and meddling with politics. Here and there
they wish even to make women into free spirits and literary workers: as
though a woman without piety would not be something perfectly obnoxious
or ludicrous to a profound and godless man;--almost everywhere her
nerves are being ruined by the most morbid and dangerous kind of music
(our latest German music), and she is daily being made more hysterical
and more incapab