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The first “woman movement” was Eve’s gesture when she reached for the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge—a movement symbolic of the entire subsequent woman’s movement of the world. For the will to pass beyond established bounds has constantly been the motive of her conscious as well as of her subconscious quest. Every generation has called this transgression, this passing beyond the bounds, a “fall of man,” the “original sin,” a crime against God’s express command, a crime against the nature of woman as prescribed for her for all time.

And yet from the beginning women have appeared who have passed far beyond the established boundaries set for their sex by their era and upheld by their own people. They have demonstrated that limitations thus prescribed do not always coincide with what is considered by the majority to be the “nature” of woman. At one time a woman has manifested the “masculine” characteristics of a ruler or has performed a “masculine” deed; at another time she has distinguished herself in “masculine” learning or art, or again has dared to love without the permission of law and custom. In a word the individual woman, when her head or her heart was strong enough, has always shown the possibilities of the development of personal power. But she has had in that effort only her own strength and her own will upon which to rely; she has neither been urged on by the spirit of her time (Zeitgeist) nor been emulated by the masses. Exceptional women have sometimes been glorified by their contemporaries and by posterity as “wonders of nature”; sometimes been cited as “warning examples.” Seen in connection with the world’s woman movement all these instances, where a bond was broken by woman’s power of mind or creative gift, by a heart or a conscience, are parts of what can be called the “prehistoric” woman movement. This movement for personal freedom formed no step in that phase of the development which possesses a conscious purpose, but was merely sporadic. Even so the participation was long nameless which women took in the great struggles for freedom where, without consideration for the “nature” of woman, they dared bleed upon the arena and scaffold, ascend the pyre, and be raised upon the gibbet. Very rarely did these women martyrs alter immediately men’s—or even women’s—conception of woman’s “being.” But just as many perfumes are dissipated only after centuries, so there are also deeds whose indirect results persist through centuries.

Most significant, however, upon the whole in the “prehistoric” woman movement, are innumerable women whose souls found expression only in the strong, quiet acts of every day life but yet remained living and growing. As a reason for the “enslavement” of woman by man, the primitive division of labour is still occasionally cited. This division of labour made war and the chase man’s task and so developed in him courage, energy, and daring, while the woman remained the “beast of burden.” But we forget that, in this labour arrangement, the handicraft and husbandry which woman practised at that time made her, to perhaps a higher degree than man, the conservator of civilisation and probably developed her psychic power in more comprehensive manner than his.

Even after this division of labour ceased there remained—and remain still in innumerable country households—in and through many of the important and difficult tasks of the mother of the house, numerous possibilities for spiritual development. And exactly in this respect industrial work robs the woman of much.

By the side of these innumerable nameless women who, century after century, in and through the material work of culture which they performed, increased their psychic power, we must remember all the unnamed women who with flower-like quiet mien turned their souls to the light.

Antique sepulchres and Tanagra figures tell us more about the harmonious, refined corporeality of the Hellenic woman than the famous statues of Aphrodite or Athena. In like manner it is not the illustrious but the nameless women who most clearly reveal the will of the woman soul, in antiquity, for light and life.

Numbers of Greek women were disciples of the philosophers, some even were their inspiration. Generally courtesans, these women represented the “emancipation” of that time from the servile condition of the legitimate married women and also showed that women already longed to share in the interests of men and to acquire their culture. History has preserved also words and deeds of wives and mothers of the past which show that these also at times attained “masculine” greatness of soul and civic virtue. Pythias and Sibyls, Vestals and Valas, are other witnesses that the power of woman’s soul was active and recognised long before Christianity. Even among the purely primitive races there were found—and are found—cases in which woman in power and rights was placed, not only on an equality with man, but even above him. And if, on the one hand, the rigid exactions which men from the earliest time have fixed upon the wife’s fidelity—while they themselves had full freedom for promiscuity—show that the wife was considered as the property of the husband, so, on the other hand, this very conception was a means of elevating and refining the soul life of woman. For the self-control which she had to impose upon herself deepened her feeling for a devotion which embraced only one, the man to whom she belonged. Nothing would be more superficial than to estimate the real position of woman, among any special people, only by what we know of their laws. It is as if one, in a few centuries from now, should judge the actual position of the modern European wife by referring it to the wretched marriage laws which now obtain. They forget the deep gulf between law and custom who declare that marriage devotion, veneration for the sanctity of the home, esteem for the spiritual being of the wife first arose as a result of Christianity.

It is significant enough for the freeing of woman that Jesus raised the personal worth of all mankind through His teaching that—whoever or whatever the person in outer respects may be—every soul possesses an eternal value comprised, as it were, in God’s love; significant enough that Jesus Himself, because of this point of view, treated every woman, even the sinner, with kindness and respect. Because of the increasing uncertainty concerning the real ideals of Jesus, one is compelled to assume that—just as Veronica’s handkerchief preserved the imprint of Jesus’ outer image—the manner of life of the oldest Christian communities has preserved the imprint of His teaching. It is significant of their doctrines that in these communities women and men stood side by side in the same faith, in the same hope, in the same exercise of love, and in the same martyrdom. Here was “neither man nor woman,” but all were one in the hope of the speedy second coming of Jesus to establish God’s Kingdom.

But the more this hope faded, the more the Pagan-Jewish conception of woman again made itself felt. It is true the Church sought to place man and woman on an equality in regard to certain marriage duties and rights; to uphold on both sides the sanctity of marriage; to protect women and children against despotism. It is true the Church strove to counteract crude sensuality, utilising, among other things, an emphasis of celibacy as the expression of the highest spirituality.

But, on the other hand, the doctrine of this Church became the greatest obstacle to the elevation of woman, because it lessened the reverence for her mission as a being of sex. Marriage, the only recognised ends of which were the prevention of unchastity and the propagation of the race, was looked upon as an inferior condition in comparison with pure virginity. And the more this ideal of chastity was extolled, the more woman was degraded and considered the most grievous temptation of man in his striving after higher sanctity. Before God, so man taught, man and woman were truly equal; but not in human relationships or qualities; yes, and man has gone in this direction even to the point of debating the question in church councils, as to whether woman really had a soul or not!

But when the Church revered pure virginity in the person of the Mother of Jesus, it was woman in highest form—as happy or suffering mother—that the Church unconsciously glorified. In the statues and altar pieces of the cathedral man worships, in the likeness of Mary, the purest and noblest womanhood. The virtues especially extolled by the Church were also those in which Mary in particular and woman in general had pre-eminence. By all these impressions a soul condition was created in which the heart penetrated by religious ecstasy, must, of psychological necessity, devote itself to the earthly manifestations of this same pure womanhood. Generally this devotion was only an ecstatic cult, an adoration from afar of an ideal, inspiring deeds or poetry. Sometimes this ecstasy fused the being of man and woman in the sensuous-soulful unity of great love. But when neither was the case, yet the adoration of knights and minnesingers increased the esteem of man for woman and the esteem of woman for herself. It also contributed to the esteem of man for woman that, as the men were always obliged to stand in arms, they could rarely acquire the learning which the priests—and through them the wives and daughters of the castles—acquired. The superiority of woman in this respect had a refining influence upon manners and customs and upon the general culture of the time. Often through a number of women auditors the poem of a minnesinger first became famous. When in Mainz one sees Heinrich Frauenlob’s tombstone, one comprehends, through the soulful noble lines, how mourning women bore him to the grave, as the little bas-relief at the base of the stone represents. Their sympathy made him their singer and his sympathy revealed, to their time and to themselves, their own being. Woman’s ideal of love became through poetry and courts of love the ideal also of the most cultured men. We see here a movement of the time which women already half consciously effected by their life of feeling and their culture. The authority which the wife exercised as lady of the manor during the absence, often of many years’ duration, of her husband gave her increased power to disseminate about her that finer culture which she herself had gained. But when the lords of the manor returned and again assumed power, then indeed at times strange thoughts might have come to their wives, while they fixed their glance, under the great arched eyelids, upon the missal or the romance of chivalry or, with long tapering fingers, moved the chessmen or played the harp, or while they bent the slender white neck over the embroidery frame or the lace-pillow upon which they wrought veritable marvels of handicraft. Perhaps even then there stirred under many a brow the presentiment of a time in which the relationship between man and woman would be different. Such thoughts must have arisen also in the manor-houses when the men began to arrogate to themselves one handicraft after another, occupations which in earlier times the daughters once learned from their fathers, at whose side they sometimes even entered the guild. Could even the nun’s veil prevent such thoughts from rising between the white temples of some of the women who—suffering or superfluous outside in the world—had found refuge in the cloister? Here was accomplished most peacefully the “emancipation,” of that time, of the intellectual and artistic gifts of woman, for whom religion and the life of the cloister had always employment. And if the soul of a nun was greater and richer than usual, then might it indeed have happened that she devoted herself to meditation, in a quandary as to whether all of God’s purposes for the gifts of her soul were truly fulfilled. And this the more intently since even then many women outside the cloister—women whose religious inspiration directed their genius to great ends—outside in the world, exercised a powerful influence upon the thought as upon the events of their time and, after death as saints, retained power over souls. Our Birgitta, for example, possessed herself of a great part of “woman’s rights.”

So significant had the psychic power of woman shown itself to be in the Middle Ages that already in the early Renaissance it brought forth a number of “feminist” writers, both women and men. And in the height of the Renaissance there was quite an “emancipation” literature, about women and by women. This literature increased during the following centuries. Famous men emphasised the importance of a higher education of woman; some, as early as the beginning of the 16th century, claimed the absolute superiority of woman in all things. Greater freedom, education, and rights, in one or another respect, were demanded by men as well as women “feminists.” This literature purposed less, however, to alter some given conditions than, by means of examples of famous women of antiquity, to demonstrate the personal right and the social gain of what already obtained without hindrance, although with the disapproval of many:—that numbers of women had appeared who in classic culture, in the practice of learned professions, in political or religious, intellectual or æsthetic interests, stood beside the men of Humanism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation.

The ideal of the time, the fully developed human personality of marked individuality, determined the conduct of life of women exactly as that of men. Both sexes cherished the life value which the original, isolated, individual personality signified for other such personalities. Both sexes appropriated to themselves the right to choose that which was harmonious with their own natures, that which soul or sense, thought or feeling, desired. It followed from this conception that women sought to attain the highest degree of the beauty and grace of their own sex and at the same time to cultivate what “manly” courage or genius nature had given them—attributes which men valued in them next to their purely womanly qualities.

But at this time it was not the work of woman which had the great cultural significance, but the human essence of her being reflected in the works of men. In antiquity woman exhibited the manly qualities of greatness of soul and civic virtue; in the Middle Ages she revealed the same faculty as man for saintliness and exercise of love; in the Renaissance she manifested the same ability as man to mould her own personality into a living work of art. If the spirit of equality between the sexes, which prevailed in the Renaissance, had further directed the progress of development, a “woman movement” would never have arisen, because its ends, which are to-day still contended for, would have been attained one after another, at the appointed time, as natural fruits of the florescence of the Renaissance.

As it is, this florescence acquired only very slight immediate influence upon the emancipation of woman—and the farther North one goes the slighter it becomes. The periods of the Counter-Reformation, of the Religious Wars and of the new Orthodoxy, on the contrary, had as result an enormous retrogression in the position of woman.

The “Deliverance of the Flesh,” which was accomplished by the verdict of Protestantism upon the life of the cloister, and by its support of marriage, had little in common with the deep feeling for the right and beauty of corporeality by which the Renaissance, intoxicated with life, became the era of the great renascence of art. Luther’s conception of the sex life, as “sanctified” by marriage, was so crassly utilitarian that it again dragged woman down from that high level upon which the finest life of feeling and culture of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance had placed her.

As matron of the household, woman retained her authority. The rational, common-sense marriage was the one most conformable to this literal doctrine of Luther, and the most usual. To the man who had chosen her, the wife bore children by the dozen and threescore. The Church gave her soul nourishment. If a woman occasionally sought to exercise her spiritual gifts in a “worldly” direction, she needed powerful protection, else she ran the danger of being burned as a witch!

Yet in spite of all, even this period produced not a few women who procured for themselves the learning after which they thirsted, who succeeded in keeping their souls alive, in finding springs in the midst of the stony wastes of the desert. The more, however, the different branches of learning developed, and especially as Latin became the language of the learned, the more difficult it became for women to force their way to these springs, sealed for the majority of their sex. For a classical education became more and more infrequently extended to the daughter, for whom even the ability to read and write was considered a temptation to deviation from the path of virtue.^[1]

That women in time of persecution adhered to the new doctrine with warm belief and suffered for it with the whole strength of their souls, that in time of war they managed house and estate with power and understanding, altered in no respect, at the time, woman’s social or marriage position. Man was woman’s sovereign master and therefore a good bit nearer God than she. In marriage woman was considered, according to the bishop’s word, “man’s chattel,” outside of marriage as a tool of the devil. But however deeply the soul of woman was oppressed at this time, yet it still lived and endowed sons, in whom the strong but unexercised endowments of the mother became genius; it endowed daughters, who secretly procured sustenance for their souls and who in turn transmitted their rebellious spirit to a daughter or granddaughter.

When at the end of the period of Orthodoxy and Absolutism, the great fundamental principle of Protestantism, the principle of personality, once more made headway, one of the most characteristic expressions of this reaction is that, in England, Milton wrote upon the right of divorce and Defoe upon the right of woman to the development and exercise of her mental powers. Among others who demanded greater education for women were Comenius in Germany and Fénelon in France. It was not in the former country that woman, so long oppressed, first won her great cultural influence. That happened in the land where women had never wholly lost it. In France, in the age of enlightenment, it was the salons created by women that determined the European spirit of the time. Letters and memoirs indicate sufficiently the influence of woman—in good as well as in bad sense—in politics and literature, manners, customs, and taste. Women transform indirectly the political, philosophic, and scientific style. For they demand that every subject be treated in a manner easily comprehensible and agreeable to them. A number of writings appeared which aimed to make it easy for “women folk” also “to be freed through the reason.”

Since it was the approval of women which determined fame, men were only too eager to fulfil their expressed demands. Women disseminated the ideas of men in wide circles, partly by buying their writings in great numbers and distributing them, partly also by social life. Never has woman more perfectly accomplished the important task of adjusting culture values. The art of conversation, developed to the highest perfection, was, it is true, often only a game of battledore and shuttlecock with ideas. But it performed at the same time, and in more elegant and more effective manner, a great part of the office of to-day’s Press. The political leader, art and literary criticism, gossip (causerie), the “portrait gallery” of contemporaries—all this was gathered from clever discourse. Through their art of conversation the women became—next to the philosophers and statesmen who in this or that salon were the leading spirits—the intellectual leaders of the time; they created “enlightened opinion,” they co-operated finally in the Revolution. The mistresses of these salons scarcely felt the need of an emancipation of woman; for they had for themselves as many possibilities of culture, of development of their powers, of the exercise of their faculties, as even they themselves could wish. The intellectual curiosity, which coveted learning, and the cultural interest of these women penetrated in wider circles, and a result of this general awakening was the Woman’s Lyceum founded in Paris in 1786, among the students of which were found, some years later, enthusiastic supporters of the Revolution.

Also among the German peoples there appeared, in the age of enlightenment, women with literary and scientific interest; some with extraordinary gifts which they also exercised. But for the most part women and men under more clumsy social forms, so-called “Academies” and “Societies,” engaged in their “learned pastime”; and nowhere, except in the person of some ruler, did woman attain in Europe, in the age of enlightenment, an influence which can be compared to that of the French women.

In the midst of the period of rococo elegance and gallantry, of reason and esprit, came the great regeneration, the second Renaissance—the Revival of Feeling. This occurred first in the field of religion, through the pietistic movement of the time. Later it was Rousseau who, in connection with religion, nature, love, motherhood, became the liberator of feeling, and together with him were the English “sentimental” poets and the German poetry, which reached its culminating point in Goethe. Literature, the Theatre, and Art came more and more to the front and, by that means, women acquired greater possibilities of becoming acquainted with, understanding, and loving the richest culture of the time.

And with this Revival of Feeling, personal freedom, individual character, became again the great life value. Women who wish to give expression to their feeling in their life now become more numerous: women who are conscious that their being buries many unsatisfied demands, not only in connection with the right of culture of their natural character, but also in connection with the right, in private life and in society, to give expression to this natural character. Men are continually in intellectual interchange with women, giving as well as receiving; woman nature is esteemed with ever finer comprehension.

Since feelings determine thoughts—for the thought always goes in the direction in which the feeling says happiness is to be found—so it is natural that, in the second half of the 18th century, the idea of freedom is the ideal which kindles the soul of increasing numbers of women. The emancipation of the individual is the tale within the tale, from the Renaissance up to the struggles of the Reformation for freedom of conscience, freedom of learning, freedom of investigation, and freedom of thought. Then finally came the struggle for constitutionally protected civic freedom. In America as early as 1776 the demand for the enfranchisement of women was raised, because they had taken part in the struggle for freedom with such great enthusiasm and constancy. With the same passion they threw themselves into the struggle in France for the “Rights of Man.” But both times they had to learn to their sorrow that “fellow-citizen” and “man” were terms which as yet referred only to men. That a woman during the French Revolution proclaimed “Women’s Rights,” that women discussed these questions as well as questions of education and other vital questions, with ardour, had as little immediate effect as the attempt at that time to enforce the right of the fourth estate. These sorely oppressed movements, of women and of working men, dominate the 19th century and now at the beginning of the 20th have every reason for assurance of victory.

In the 17th and 18th centuries men and women writers appeared in different countries to demonstrate and establish the worth and right of woman as “man.” Indirectly inspired by the great women of the earlier centuries, they were immediately influenced by woman’s political and cultural exercise of power in the 18th century. Especially notable are the arguments which were advanced in the 90’s of the 18th century by writers manifestly uninfluenced by one another—the Swede, Thorild, in The Natural Nobility of Womankind; the German, Hippel; the Frenchman, Condorcet; the English woman, Mary Wollstonecraft. All insist that difference in sex can form no obstacle to placing woman on an equality with man in the family and in society; that she shall have the same right as man to education and free agency. The men writers emphasised more her individual human right, as “man,” and the advantage to society; the women writers more the mother’s need of culture and her right to it, in order to be able to rear and protect her children better. But all four ideas are, at heart, determined by the same point of view which the great philosopher of evolution thus formulated later: the fundamental condition for social equilibrium is the same as for human happiness and lies in the law of equal freedom. And this means that every one—without regard to difference between sex and sex, man and man—must have the right and the opportunity to develop and exercise his own capacities. For no one to-day can undertake so certain a valuation of talents that this valuation could justify society in restricting, a priori, the right of a single one of its members to develop his capacities, even though these capacities might take such a direction, later, that society would be compelled to limit their exercise.

Spencer arrived by the deductive method at the same demand Romanticism reached earlier by the intuitive method. Romanticism recognised that in the measure in which the individual is unusual he must be also unintelligible, for he shows to the majority only his surface; his innermost soul only to those in harmony with him. Even in the family circle the individual often remains therefore undiscovered. How much more then must society, composed for the most part of Philistines, outrage the individual if it concedes rights to one category, to one sex, to one class, and not to the other!

And from this point of view the Romanticists drew for women also the logical conclusion of individualism. They pointed out that the sex character, carried to the extreme, furnished neither the highest masculine nor the highest feminine type; that each sex must develop in itself both noble human universality and individual peculiarity. And this the great woman personalities did who shared the destiny of the Romanticists. They were thereby fully and wholly able to share also the intellectual life of their husbands. Love became thus a unity of souls. The romantic ideal of love was expressed in La Nouvelle Héloise, in Goethe’s letters to Charlotte von Stein, in Rahel, in Mme. de Staël. It was found in the first half of the 19th century in many great women; for example, George Sand, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Camilla Collett. It appeared in Shelley and in the Swedish poet Almquist, in Stuart Mill and Robert Browning, also in certain French and German poets and thinkers. This ideal has now been for some centuries the ideal of most women and of not a few men of feeling.

But since a truly psychic unity is possible only between two beings who are, in outer as in inner sense, free, exactly for this reason, “romantic love” has as consequence the demand for the emancipation of woman.

The love of Romanticism, which has been caricatured to the extent that it signified only moonshine, ecstasy, sonnets, and wife barter, had its real essence in the desire for completeness of soul in love. This was, in a new form, the ideal of the courts of love. But since completeness of soul means that all the powers of the soul can freely and fully penetrate and elevate one another, so the first requisite for that soulful love was that woman’s thinking as well as her feeling, her imagination as well as her will, her desire for power, as well as her conscience, be freed from the shackles imposed upon them from without, in order to be strengthened and purified. The second stipulation was that man’s inner, spiritual life be freed from the deteriorating results of the prerogatives and prejudices accorded to and maintained by his sex.

A new ideal in the relationship between husband and wife, between mother and child; the demand of the feminine individuality for the right to free cultivation of her powers and to self-direction; the need of new fields for this exercise of her power after industrialism began to usurp one branch of domestic work after another—these are the fundamental reasons for what is called the middle-class woman movement. The middle-class woman—because of the increasing surplus of women, because of the continually greater variety of economic conditions and the decrease in marriage for this and other reasons—was to an ever greater extent constrained to self-maintenance. Thus the economic reason for the woman movement, not only in the labouring class but also in the middle class, became the most effective influence operating in the widest circles, although the reasons mentioned previously were the first and deepest causes.

And herewith we stand at the beginning of the woman movement, become conscious of its purpose.

But this movement would be a stream without sources if the “anonymous” movements indicated here with the greatest brevity had not preceded, if in the grey morning of time the endless procession had not begun in which women now nameless for us walked at the head, each with an amphoræ upon her shoulder—amphoræ which they filled at any fountain of life. Before these nameless women vanished on the horizon, each, like a water nymph of antiquity, lowered the brim of her urn to the earth, which thus was traversed by innumerable interlacing rills. And all these—even if by the most circuitous route—have augmented by some drops the mighty stream now called the woman movement.