use, a journal with many distinguished
contributors, and undoubtedly the best periodical in this field to be
found in any language.

At the same time the new movement of German women, however it may arise
from or be supported by political or scientific movements, is
fundamentally emotional in its character. If we think of it, every great
movement of the Teutonic soul has been rooted in emotion. The German
literary renaissance of the eighteenth century was emotional in its
origin and received its chief stimulus from the contagion of the new
irruption of sentiment in France. Even German science is often
influenced, and not always to its advantage, by German sentiment. The
Reformation is an example on a huge scale of the emotional force which
underlies German movements. Luther, for good and for evil, is the most
typical of Germans, and the Luther who made his mark in the world--the
shrewd, coarse, superstitious peasant who blossomed into genius--was an
avalanche of emotion, a great mass of natural human instincts
irresistible in their impetuosity. When we bear in mind this general
tendency to emotional expansiveness in the manifestations of the
Teutonic soul we need feel no surprise that the present movement among
German women should be, to a much greater extent than the corresponding
movements in other countries, an emotional renaissance. It is not, first
and last, a cry for political rights, but for emotional rights, and for
the reasonable regulation of all those social functions which are
founded on the emotions.[62]

This movement, although it may properly be said to be German, since its
manifestations are mainly exhibited in the great German Empire, is yet
essentially a Teutonic movement in the broader sense of the word.
Germans of Austria, Germans of Switzerland, Dutch women, Scandinavians,
have all been drawn into this movement. But it is in Germany proper that
they all find the chief field of their activities.

If we attempt to define in a single sentence the specific object of this
agitation we may best describe it as based on the demands of woman the
mother, and as directed to the end of securing for her the right to
control and regulate the personal and social relations which spring from
her nature as mother or possible mother. Therein we see at once both the
intimately emotional and practical nature of this new claim and its
decisive unlikeness to the earlier woman movement. That was definitely a
demand for