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Show MOVEMENT FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS AND GREAT WAR Economist Foresees Gentler Sex With Full Political Po-litical Rights; Men Will Be Scarce, but Polygamy Not Tolerated. By MAX NORDAU. CHAPTER n. j THE voluntary war work of the ladies of society, as well as of the humble women of the mass, is equally admirable. They are the real instruments of the national solidarity, soli-darity, which they transform from a theory into a warm, blessed, helpful practice. They represent civilization amidst unfettered barbarism They incarnate in-carnate not only humanity in the sense of charity, but humankind itself in the face of the primeval bestiality to which the war necessarily degrades man. - It must be admitted she does not yet directly participate in the direction of state affairs. But this will come. Political Po-litical majority will drop in her lap like a ripe fruit without necessitating a new exertion on her part. In France some writers, the most rigidly conservative, too, propose to grant the fallen soldiers the continued enjovment of their voting vot-ing capacity beyond death. Their nearest near-est female relative, the wife, the mother, moth-er, the sister, shall inherit it as a sacred sa-cred legacy and exercise it during her whole lifetime. If the proposition is carried, woman in France would enter the political list by this mystic door, but surely it would not last long ere her sisters who have no cherished war victim to mourn for would follow her through the wide-open gate of a general gen-eral law. Polygamy Impossible. But how will it all be after the war? Cynics pretend: Woman will have other oth-er business to mind than to throw herself her-self into polities. The war works frightful fright-ful havoc, among the male youth. Healthv men with all their limbs preserved and of marriageable age will be scanty and, therefore, eagerly sought for. Already before the war " the "epouscnr" has been in western Europe a rare article on the market. Afterward no offer at all will meet the demand. The luckiest woman only will succeed in procuring a husband. The struggle for man will become the one great occupation of the tender sex. Tt will assume new, surprising, sur-prising, bewildering forms. Crazy reformers re-formers already see' polygamy legally introduced, the home of the respectable citizen turned into a legitimate harem, female wooers clubbing together to acquire ac-quire and to entertain in common a man. How foolish! What a grotesque incomprehension in-comprehension of the feminine psychology psycholo-gy ! Woman has the rich and supple capacity for adaptation which belongs to'primitive nature when it has not yet become rigid in too far carried differentiation, differen-tiation, when its powers of evolution are not spent. If man is scarce and unattainable un-attainable she will learn to do without him. fhe will find for herself a new content of life which will fill her out. satisfy her, open to her possibilities of happiness. For she is an irrepressible afrirmer of life and, with her almost inexhaustible in-exhaustible organic energies, she tends, in spite of all hostile destinies, toward self -f-atisf act ion. Should her yearning after the child become so overpowering as to tyrannize her whole bring and to insist imperatively impera-tively upon being satisfied, she will know how to conquer the right of maternity ma-ternity in a form which will respect her delicai'v. true morality and all her noblest no-blest virtues, and will not hurt her self-esteem. self-esteem. She will never c oud cseenil to become the slave of masculine concupis cence, but will dictate the man-duties the modalities of which she will determine deter-mine herself. She will never put up with the conditions of a harem. She will have to herself exclusively the man she desires as the permanent companion of her life. But ner new ethical philosophy philoso-phy will permit her episodic renouncements renounce-ments and sacrifice of herself which the opinion of the eutire community, in consideration con-sideration of the supreme interest of national na-tional preservation, will recognize as justified and respectable. All conquests achieved by woman during dur-ing the war will be maintained and enlarged en-larged after it. Where she stands she will remain; in the administrations, in industry, in commerce, and where she has not yet se her foot, there she will arrive, in the polling premises, in parliament, par-liament, in offices, in universities, in academies, in cabinets. A guide-post in that direction is the recent appointment ; of a woman as an adjoint to the new food dictator in ultra-conservative Prus-' Prus-' sia. During the absence of man woman Jhad to learn how to minister to all the i requirements of state and society and how to keep the intricate machinery of the collectivity going by her own effort. She will continue to apply the acquired knowledge. Till now woman was the finer sex. She is about to become the stronger sex and the determining principle prin-ciple in public, as well as in domestic, life. May Reverse Places. After one generation, or perhaps somewhat later, through the working of 1 that self-adjusting capacity of the species which in the case of individual j organism is called entelechy in modern ; biology, the breaches wrought by the j war will gradually fill up and the disturbed dis-turbed equilibrium between the sexes be ; re-established anew. Man will then per-i per-i haps try to push himself again into the i foremost place of which in the meantime mean-time woman will have got hold. Our grandchildren will possibly witness a i parody of the present woman's rights ! movement, with reversed roles, a league for man's rights, a struggle for prepon-, prepon-, derance of man in state and society, j frantic efforts toward the expropriation j of woman. Stump orators will appropriately appro-priately chango the word Sieyes applied to the Tiers-etat and exclaim: "What is man? Nothing. What ought he to be? Everything. " But man will find it difficult, dif-ficult, and perhaps impossible, to oust woman. It is easier to defend a place tjian to conquer it. Her new functions will equip woman with all the power man has hitherto enjoyed and made use , of to keep her out of them. And she iwill, moreover, possess a particularly ef-; ef-; fieient trump the recognition bv the i collectivity that in government, in the : framing and administering of the law, in administration, in education, she does her work well. Slie will probablv do it better than man. She will certainly not do it worse. This lowering of the status of man will be his just punishment. He has misused his preponderance in the state for bringing bring-ing about the most terrible historical cataclysms, or, at any rate, he has shown himself incapable of preventing them. |