Thus this book may be considered as the greatest honour ever paid to women. Nothing but the most moral relation towards women should be possible for men; there should be neither sexuality nor love, for both make woman the means to an end, but only the attempt to understand her. Most men theoretically respect women, but practically they thoroughly despise them; according to my ideas this method should be reversed. It is impossible to think highly of women, but it does not follow that we are to despise them for ever. It is unfortunate that so many great and famous men have had mean views on this point. The views of Schopenhauer and Demosthenes as to the emancipation of women are good instances. So also Goethe’s
Immer is so das Mädchen beschäftigt und reifet im stillen Häuslicher Tugend entgegen, den klugen Mann zu beglücken. Wünscht sie dann endlich zu lesen, so wählt sie gewisslich ein Kochbuch,
is scarcely better than Molière’s
… Une femme en sait toujours assez, Quand la capacité de son esprit se hausse A connaître un pourpoint d’avec un haut de chausse.
Men will have to overcome their dislike for masculine women, for that is no more than a mean egoism. If women ever become masculine by becoming logical and ethical, they would no longer be such good material for man’s projection; but that is not a sufficient reason for the present method of tying woman down to the needs of her husband and children and forbidding her certain things because they are masculine.
For even if the possibility of morality is incompatible with the idea of the absolute woman, it does not follow that man is to make no effort to save the average woman from further deterioration; much less is he to help to keep woman as she is. In every living woman the presence of what Kant calls “the germ of good” must be assumed; it is the remnant of a free state which makes it possible for woman to have a dim notion of her destiny. The theoretical possibility of grafting much more on this “germ of good” should never be lost sight of, even although nothing has ever been done, or even if nothing could ever be done in that respect.
The basis and the purpose of the universe is the good, and the whole world exists under a moral law; even to the animals, which are mere phenomena, we assign moral values, holding the elephant, for instance, to be higher than the snake, notwithstanding the fact that we do not make an animal accountable when it kills another. In the case of woman, however, we regard her as responsible if she commits murder, and in this alone is a proof that women are above the animals. If it be the case that womanliness is simply immorality, then woman must cease to be womanly and try to be manly.
I must give warning against the danger of woman trying merely to liken herself outwardly to man, for such a course would simply plunge her more deeply into womanliness. It is only too likely that the efforts to emancipate women will result not in giving her real freedom, in letting her reach free-will, but merely in enlarging the range of her caprices.
It seems to me that if we look the facts of the case in the face there are only two possible courses open for women: either to pretend to accept man’s ideas, and to think that they believe what is really opposed to their whole, unchanged nature, to assume a horror of immorality (as if they were moral themselves), of sexuality (as if they desired platonic love); or to openly admit that they are wrapped up in husband and children, without being conscious of all that such an admission implies, of the shamelessness and self-immolation of it.
Unconscious hypocrisy, or cynical identification with their natural instincts; nothing else seems possible for woman.
But it is neither agreement nor disagreement with, but rather the denial and overcoming of her womanishness that a woman should aim at. If a woman really were to wish, for instance, for man’s chastity, it would mean that she had conquered the woman in her, it would mean that pairing was no longer of supreme importance to her and that her aim was no longer to further it. But here is the trouble: such pretensions must not be accepted as genuine, even although here and there they are actually put forward. For a woman who longed for man’s purity is, apart from her hysteria, so stupid and so incapable of truthfulness that she is unable to perceive that she is in this way negating herself, making herself absolutely worthless, without existence!
It is difficult to decide which is preferable: the unlimited hypocrisy which can appropriate the thing that is most foreign to it, i.e., the ascetic ideal, or the ingenuous admiration for the reformed rake, the complacent devotion to him. The principal problem of the woman question lies in the fact that in each case woman’s one desire is to put all responsibility on man, and in this it is identical with the problem of mankind.
Friedrich Nietzsche says in one of his books: “To underestimate the real difficulties of the man and woman problem, to fail to admit the abysmal antagonism and the inevitable nature of the constant strain between the two, to dream of equal rights, education, responsibilities and duties, is the mark of the superficial observer, and any thinker who has been found shallow in these difficult places—shallow by nature—should be looked upon as untrustworthy, as a useless and treacherous guide; he will, no doubt, be one of those who ‘briefly deal with’ all the real problems of life, death and eternity—who never gets to the bottom of things. But the man who is not superficial, who has depth of thought as well as of purpose, the depth which not only makes him desire right but endows him with determination and strength to do right, must always look on woman from the oriental standpoint:—as a possession, as private property, as something born to serve and be dependent on him—he must see the marvellous reasonableness of the Asiatic instinct of superiority over women, as the Greeks of old saw it, those worthy successors and disciples of the Eastern school. It was an attitude towards woman which, as is well known, from Homer’s time till that of Pericles, grew with the growth of culture, and increased in strength step by step, and gradually became quite oriental. What a necessary, logical, desirable growth for mankind! if we could only attain to it ourselves!”
The great individualist is here thinking in the terms of social ethics, and the autonomy of his moral doctrine is overshadowed by the ideas of caste, groups, and divisions. And so, for the benefit of society, to preserve the place of men, he would place woman in subjection, so that the voice of the wish for emancipation could no longer be heard, and so that we might be freed from the false and foolish cry of the existing advocates of women’s rights, advocates who have no suspicion of the real source of woman bondage. But I quoted Nietzsche, not to convict him of want of logic, but to lead to the point that the solution of the problem of humanity is bound up with the solution of the woman problem. If any one should think it a high-flown idea that man should respect woman as an entity, a real existence, and not use her merely as a means to an end, that he should recognise in her the same rights and the same duties (those of building up one’s own moral personality) as his own, then he must reflect that man cannot solve the ethical problem in his own case, if he continues to lower the idea of humanity in the women by using her simply for his own purposes.
Coitus is the price man has to pay to women, under the Asiatic system, for their oppression. And although it is true that women may be more than content with such recompence for the worst form of slavery, man has no right to take part in such conduct, simply because he also is morally damaged by it.
Even technically the problem of humanity is not soluble for man alone; he has to consider woman even if he only wishes to redeem himself; he must endeavour to get her to abandon her immoral designs on him. Women must really and truly and spontaneously relinquish coitus. That undoubtedly means that woman, as woman, must disappear, and until that has come to pass there is no possibility of establishing the kingdom of God on earth. Pythagoras, Plato, Christianity (as opposed to Judaism), Tertullian, Swift, Wagner, Ibsen, all these have urged the freedom of woman, not the emancipation of woman from man, but rather the emancipation of woman from herself.
It is easy to bear Nietzsche’s anathema in such company! But it is very hard for woman to reach such a goal by her own strength. The spark in
