Let me suggest to some of our idle women that they pay a visit to the Hausfrauenbund at Frankfort and the Frauenverein-Arbeitererinnenheim at Munich, before they pass judgment upon this chapter. For I should be sorry to leave the impression that all the women of Germany are listless, oppressed, and without any feeling of civic responsibility.
All these things have been accomplished by women in Germany with far less sympathy from the men than they receive in America or in England. Cato wrote of women's suffrage: "Pray what will they not assail, if they carry their point? Call to mind all the principles governing them by which your ancestors have held the presumption of women in check, and made them subject to their husbands. As soon as they have begun to be your equals they will be your superiors." It is an older story than the unread realize, this of the rights of women. The bulk of Germany's male population still hold to Cato's view. It is not so much that they are antagonistic, except in the case of the teachers, where the women have become active competitors; they are in their patient way impervious. Nor can it be said that any very large number of the women themselves are eager for more rights; rather are they becoming restless because they receive so little consideration.
Their pleasures are simple and restricted, regular attendance at the theatre, at concerts, an occasional dinner at a restaurant to celebrate an anniversary, excursions with the whole family to a beer restaurant of a Sunday, and the endless meeting together for reading, sewing, and gossip--no German woman apparently but what belongs to a verein or circle, meeting, say, once a week.
The women and the men are gregarious. Vae soli is the motto of the race. They love to take their pleasures in crowds, and I am not sure that this does not dull the enthusiasm for personal rights and gratifications, and for individual supremacy and dignity. It is rare to find a German who would subscribe to Andrew Marvell's misogynist lines:
"Two paradises are in one To live in Paradise alone."
It is typical of this love of being together that an independent member of the Reichstag, owing allegiance to no party, is called a Wilde, and this same word Wilde, or wild man, is applied to the student at the university who belongs to no corps or association of students. This love of being together, of touching elbows on all occasions, makes them more easily led and ruled. They hate the isolation necessary for independence and revolt.