The German Woman
I
LAST year, on one of the first days after I had arrived in Berlin, I took part in a large meeting devoted to the discussion of some problems of student life. A committee of leading professors had made a motion, and some of the most influential men of Berlin spoke warmly in its favor. Then a young woman stood up and opposed it. She spoke quietly but firmly. There was strong objection to her arguments; eloquent speakers fought in favor of the original motion. But the young woman almost alone held her own, and soon gained ground. When it finally came to a vote, the majority followed the banner of the young leader of the opposition. There were only a very few women in the whole assembly: it was distinctly the influence of woman’s oratory over a large group of important men. Twenty years ago that would have been entirely impossible in Germany. A young woman would never have dared to take the lead in such a momentous debate; and if she had ventured to oppose acknowledged leaders, her mere effort would have been resented, and this resentment would have swelled the other party. I felt that a new time for the influence of German women in public life had come.
A few weeks later I had to make a large number of appointments of secretaries, librarians, and so on, for the new Amerika-Institut of the German Government. To all with whom I consulted it seemed from the start most natural that I should appoint women, and, accordingly, I saw in my office scores of candidates who applied for the various positions. This gave me ample opportunity to become acquainted with the social standing of those young women who nowadays seek employment in Germany, and every hour added to my surprise at the greatness of the change. Most of them came from families which twenty years ago would have considered it impossible for their daughters to accept any paid positions or to seek an independent life-activity.
At about the same season I began my university lectures as Harvard Exchange Professor, and when I saw more than a hundred women students scattered among the men in my lecture-room, I could not help thinking of my student days when one solitary American woman was the spectacle and the sensation in the lecture courses which I attended in Leipzig. This revolution of affairs is most remarkable, and yet to every one the new order seems a matter of course.
Soon afterward I was present at a great banquet at the seventieth birthday of a leading jurist. The best-known professors of law made speeches, and the celebrated guest of honor told in enthusiastic words how he had devoted his life to the idea that one nation ought to have one law. Then a young woman arose with a champagne glass in her hand. She brilliantly chose to interpret the words of the speaker to mean that the nation ought indeed to have one law only, that is, the same law for men and women, and that the women must, therefore, have the same rights as the men in public life. In all my life in the Fatherland I had never before heard a woman making a toast at a public dinner.
A few weeks later I myself spoke in the leading woman’s club in Berlin. Who would have thought of women’s clubs in Germany twenty years ago! That night everything looked exactly like a club in New York or Boston. The whole attitude of the audience, the introduction, the questions after the lecture, the refreshments, the whole make-up, everything, reminded me of well-known sights, and I should have believed myself to be in a real American woman’s clubhouse, if the president had not finally led me to a beautiful little parlor, over the entrance of which the sign said ‘ smoking-room.’ It was a room of cosy lounging-places for the young ladies when they enjoy their cigarettes. I could not get rid of the question: Where is my Germany of yesterday?
There cannot be any doubt that America and the American woman have a large share in these changes of German public opinion. Of course such movements cannot come from without; mere imitation would be ineffective in questions which touch so deeply the inmost problems of the nation. The social organic conditions must be given in the inner life of the country, and it is not difficult to recognize the factors in Germany which necessarily led toward this change in woman’s life. Nevertheless the far-reaching emancipation of women in American life, and their important participation in the public functions of society, have given a remarkable impulse to the German movement.
The reasons why the American nation came so much earlier to an anticonservative view of women’s rights are evident. The American view of life since the puritan days has been individualistic: the aim of society is the development of the individual. It is true that puritanism in itself did not favor the participation of women in public tasks, but this individualistic spirit of puritanism and of all American philosophy of life necessarily forced American society to the acknowledgment of equal rights for women and men as personalities. The German view has been that the individual lives for the social good; the claims of the personality must therefore be subordinated to the claims of the community, and this devotion begins with the smallest community, the family. Man and woman must live not for their own sake, but for their family’s sake. The individual wishes of the woman must therefore be subordinated to her functions as member of the family.
But no less important than such a general philosophy of life was the difference in the practical conditions of the two countries. America was a pioneer land which had to be opened in a physical and in a social sense. This absorbed the energies of the men. Commercial, legal, and political life took hold of the male population so completely that the higher cultural interests had to go over into the care of women, and that secured to them an independence which was not seldom cultural superiority. Furthermore, America has still to-day one and a half million more men than women, while Germany has a million more women than men. This traditional scarcity of women necessarily created an over-estimation and a readiness to allow women an exalted place.
Many other elements of American life have worked in the same direction: America thus became in the last century the most progressive country on earth on the question of women’s rights. Slowly — in the eyes of many Germans and in the eyes of almost all Americans, far too slowly — Germany has followed. But here, as in many other movements it has proved that Germany is very reluctant to enter through a new way, but as soon as it has entered it rushes forward on that way with unexpected speed and energy. Certainly much still remains to be done, and he who listens to the radical speeches of certain revolutionary reformers would fancy that the greatest part is still to be done. But every sober spectator is bound to acknowledge that the change is simply astonishing, even if he does not sympathize with every feature of it.
Yet we ought not to forget that while this movement is something new for recent Germany, it is not at all new for the Germans as a historic people. The Germans of mediæval times were in the same situation in which the Americans were in their pioneer days. The men’s hard work absorbed their energies so completely that every cultural interest, especially education and learning, was left to the church and the women. They were the refined element as against the barbaric men, and their superiority was acknowledged and sung. To learn from books was considered unmanly, and only after the Renaissance did the hour arrive when the new scholarship became men’s work. In the sixteenth century the German woman was decidedly considered the equal of man; in the seventeenth century man alone enjoyed the higher education, and this scholarly education then became more and more the condition of professional life. The position of women steadily went down, entirely through the inferiority of her education. It needed concerted action at the end of the nineteenth century again to effect a fundamental change in the social possibilities of German women.
But it would be entirely misleading to fancy that this new German movement has a unified character. In reality it is a large number of movements, which to a certain degree even interfere with one another and which have very different tendencies. Common to all of them is only the desire to improve the position of the female members of the social organism.
II
The most conspicuous efforts of the women of the last decade were those which tried to secure open paths for the woman of unusual gifts. Such a movement was necessarily most conspicuous because it dealt with a prominent few, and not with the colorless masses. It was so easy to point out the injustice and the harm done to the community, if the genius of a talented woman had no chance for the highest development of its inborn energies. A woman with unusual talent, perhaps, for scholarship in a special field, had to remain intellectually sterile because the highest schools were closed to her and the universities forbidden. The scientific life of the whole nation had to lose from such a narrow policy. This was the argument which appealed most easily to the German mind, and steadily the hindrances were removed. There is to-day no longer any reason whatever why any woman of unusual gifts should not enter into full competition with any man and should not reach the highest point of which her powers are capable. Public opinion even favors her work.
And yet it can hardly be said that this particular movement which refers to the cultural aristocracy of women has brought any important change. We see efforts upon efforts, but the total outcome is, after all, disappointing. The German experience demonstrates again what the experience of more radical countries has shown before, that the creative work of women is fair and may represent highly estimable qualities and values, and certainly does not stand below the average of men’s, but nowhere reaches the highest mark.
Just as in America, so in Germany, no woman has as yet attained a scholarly achievement of striking character, still less of true greatness. We must not forget that fields like literature and painting and music have always stood open to women, and that there the same limitations are observable. Germany has some splendid women painters and some delightful authoresses, but no one feels impelled to connect with their names the hopes for a new great upward movement. There is no one among them whom the Germans would compare with Arnold Böcklin, the artist, with Gerhardt Hauptmann, the poet, or with Richard Strauss, the musician. All that the women have given here, as in America, are some best-sellers in fiction, and their like in painting and scholarship. The movement in favor of the exceptional woman is thus, after all, the least important and the least characteristic.
What has truly social significance and marks the change in the beginning of the twentieth century, are those reforms which concern the millions; but here we have the greatest diversity of needs. To distinguish the chief directions we may acknowledge the following needs which had to be satisfied. The average woman of to-day, rich or poor, feels a longing for a serious interest and a significant content for her existence. The reform aimed to overcome the emptiness of woman’s life. Second, millions of women have to earn their living. Their opportunities had been too limited and too little adjusted to modern society and to the technique of modern life. The reform aimed to secure a decent livelihood for the unsupported woman. Quite different circles are touched by a third effort. The women of the lower classes found their time and energies absorbed by hard work which kept them away from the house and encroached upon their home life. For them a disburdening had to be sought, in order again to give them an opportunity for dignified family life. The reform aimed to overcome the anti-domestic effect of woman’s labor. Fourthly, married life meant subordination for the German woman. The reform aimed to secure equality between husband and wife. Fifthly, the average German woman was confined to domestic influence. She had no chance to become a power in the community. The reform aimed to secure for her full influence in public life.
There are many other partial tendencies in that great forward movement of recent years, but even the few which we have pointed out show with sufficient clearness the antagonism involved: the emptiness of the life of the upper classes demanded a change which would take the woman away from the home, and the overburdening of the lower classes demanded a change which would bring the woman back to the home. Yet we can instinctively feel that there is a certain inner relation between all these movements, and that it is by no mere chance that they came into the foreground at the same time.
We spoke first of the emptiness of woman’s life. It has often been pointed out how this was a necessary result of the great changes in the technical conditions of modern life. Domestic activity could really fill a busy woman’s time in the past; it can no longer do so since weaving and knitting and baking and a hundred other good works of the German housewife of the past have long been taken out of the German woman’s hands. Factory methods control the life of our time. Even the rearing of children has been simplified through the modern division of work for the German mother: her energies lack fit objects. Far from any question of money-earning, the desire for a useful, regulated, systematic activity in life was the necessary result of these changed conditions. Of course the talents and inclinations show every possible variation, and any single reform would not have been sufficient to satisfy this millionfold need. But it was increasingly clear that more than superficial dilettantism was needed, that a more thorough achievement was sought than the traditional playing of the piano or reading of French novels. The essential basis for a new arrangement of woman’s life was improved education.
The girls’ school of Germany in the rather recent past stood immeasurably below the boys’ school. It was, measured by German standards, superficial, and led nowhere. The school career of a well-educated girl was completed at sixteen years, while her brothers went on with their much sharper work to the nineteenth year in school, from which they might go on to the university. All that led beyond the typical girls’ school had a professional, normal-school character. This has been fundamentally changed by the new institutions which the laws of a few years ago have established.
The old schools have been greatly improved; and, above all, they have been supplemented by a complex system of upper grade schools through which any possible goal of an intelligent girl can be reached. She may go on to the same examination which the boys have to pass in order to enter the university, or she may seek a higher humanistic education without any university end in view, or she may enter higher schools for special professional preparation: in short, she can secure in regular channels, without any difficulties and without finding any prejudices, an independent serious lifework, and may develop her personality and prepare herself for her rôle in the community as well as in a refined and stimulating home. Any one who examines carefully these new regulations must acknowledge that they are almost radical, and that the German governments, after a too long period of neglect, under the influence of the new demands have gone almost to an extreme, offering especially in those so-called ‘ lyceum ’ schools a course more complex and more thoroughly modern than the energies of young women are likely to be able to carry through. Certainly, their chances are now not inferior to those of boys, and yet in a careful, deliberate way the whole work is adjusted to the special interests and special spheres of womanhood.
Public opinion has completely adjusted itself to this new order. In every family, in the large cities especially, — but, slowly, the change has entered the small towns, too, — it seems beyond discussion that the daughter shall prepare for a definite line of activity. The girl who does a little embroidery and otherwise waits for the fiancé to come, is dying out. The German experience seems to confirm the American one, that under this new rule the fiancé may come a little later, but not less certainly. It is true that many a girl with a serious interest in life now refuses a husband whom her mother at her time would have accepted because she would have dreaded the emptiness of an unmarried life; but just for that reason, the marriage which she finally prefers is on a higher level.
III
The problem of a girl’s life interest cannot be separated from the question of life support. The girl of the well-todo family who pursues university courses or devotes herself to the activities of the social worker, may follow certain lines of interest which would never yield an earning sufficient to pay for her gloves. But, on the whole, even those women who are well supported are encouraged in their serious devotion to earnest work by the thought that in possible days of need their training may make them independent. For by far the larger part of the German population the practical side of the question stands in the foreground from the start.
Two economic conditions force this on Germany much more than on America. The great excess of the female over the male population, giving to the adult women a lead of a million, makes it necessary that there remain more unmarried women by far in Germany than in the United States, the more so as a tenth of the adult men prefer to remain bachelors. Most of these unmarried women are obliged to seek their livelihood. On the other hand, the wages of the laboring classes are low, and make it in a higher degree than in America necessary that wives and daughters contribute by their labor to the earnings of the family. Hence the number of female breadwinners in Germany is exceedingly large.
In America not more than 14.3 per cent of the whole female population is engaged in gainful occupations as against 61.3 per cent of the male. Moreover, even this 14.3 per cent becomes much smaller when only the native whites of native parentage are considered, as the average for the whole country results from the participation of the negro women. In Germany the percentage of workingmen is the same as in America, 61.1 per cent, but the percentage of workingwomen is 30.4 per cent. Almost ten million women are breadwinners in Germany. There are three and a half million women engaged in industrial work and business, as against ten and four-fifths million men; and especially characteristic of the German situation seems the fact that 738,000 women are independent owners and heads of establishments. One and three-tenths millions are laborers in factories. In the textile industries, for instance, the women are in the majority, — 400,000 women as against 371,000 men. In the clothing industry, 228,000 women stand against. 97,000 men.
If the intensity of the woman movement were to be measured simply by the amount of participation of women in the work of the nation, the German women would have had for a long while no reason whatever for complaint. It could always have been shown to them that even in America the women had a much smaller part in the labor. But the true progress of woman’s rights demands, of course, a very different standard. The aim must be to disburden woman from the labor which injures her home life; and, on the other side, to open for her the fields of higher activity. In both respects the last years have shown a decided improvement, and all the more characteristic efforts of systematic reform are concentrated on these points. The higher professions, like those of the physician, the high-school teacher, and similar engagements, which in Germany demand four years and more of graduate university work, are open to women under the same conditions as to men. The number of such women students at the university this year is about twenty-four hundred.
But, in a way, still more important is the great variety of occupations fit and favorable for women which do not demand university graduate work, and which have been conquered by women in recent years. All German states nowadays, for instance, allow the appointment of female factory inspectors and industrial inspectors, a calling in which, on account of the great number of female workers, women can be most beneficial. A much favored career for women is also that of librarian, which only a few years ago was still unknown as an occupation for them; while to-day in Berlin alone two large library schools supply Germany with more female librarians than the public libraries can possibly use. The important position of professional nurse, with long systematic training in the hospitals, has become another much-sought function for the daughters of educated families. Literary and artistic work, especially arts and crafts, high-class gardening and fancy farming, interior decoration and artistic photography, management of bureaus for typewriting and translating, and a hundred similar half-professional activities for intelligent and energetic young women, are eagerly sought to-day.
How far this new type of female breadwinners is successful, it may be too early to judge. Public opinion is still somewhat undecided. In former times, when the better educated women in cases of need had practically no other resources than working as elementary teachers in girls’ schools or as pianoteachers, as housekeepers or as governesses, or in small business enterprises, there was no criticism and no doubt as to their fitness. They undertook the characteristically feminine work in the community, and no competition with men stirred up the discussion.
Now it is decidedly different. Almost all the new callings have been taken away from men, and in this economic struggle of the sexes the characteristic qualities have come to sharper expression. These deciding qualities are, of course, not only the personal ones but also the social, especially the woman’s freedom from financial obligation for the support of a family. Woman is everywhere able to underbid man.
The dangerous consequences which have resulted from this social condition in the United States in the teachers’ profession, where teaching had entirely gone over into the hands of the women as lowest bidders, have not shown themselves in the school situation of Germany. This is made impossible by the fact that with the exception of the rural primary schools there is hardly any coeducation in Germany, and Germany stands out against womenteachers in the boys’ schools and, at the same time, insists on a strong participation of male teachers in girls’ schools. All this is settled by state law, and the mere underbidding of salaries can have no influence on this general principle. But in every other field the competition is strongly felt. The girl who lives in the house of her parents and wants to earn only a little spending money, and, moreover, expects to get married, may easily do secretarial or library or artistic work for a salary which a man would feel to be inadequate.
So far as the character of the work itself is concerned, it is only natural that there should be widespread complaint about a certain lack of physical strength which brings quick fatigue and too frequent interruptions by little ailments in times of hard work. But it is more surprising that complaint is so often heard about carelessness, lack of accuracy and thoroughness, even of disorderliness, — the same type of objection which the university professors make as to the female students in the laboratories and hospitals.
There is no doubt that the practical success has not been complete, and the outcome has been even to many friends of the woman movement a distinct disappointment. Some claim that this is necessary; that in a land which makes such high demands on the accuracy and thoroughness of man, woman will never be perfectly an equal, and that a reaction against the present onrush of women toward the higher callings will soon set in. Others insist that the period of readjustment has so far been too short, that too little experience existed for every woman to find the really fitting place, and that all the complaint will disappear as soon as a still greater expansion of her professional activity has been developed.
Certainly one anti-professional feature cannot and ought not to be removed. Just this type of active intelligent women who create an important lifework are marrying like others: they marry late, but finally their marriage, too, closes their career. The number of female physicians who are really practicing in Germany is very small compared with the number of those who are prepared for it. The others have generally married, and have given up their medical ambition. There is no doubt that this interferes greatly with the enthusiasm of the teachers who are to prepare women for a higher calling. The country cannot fully overcome the feeling that there is a certain want of seriousness, almost an element of play and of dilettantism, in the work; because neither the women themselves nor the spectators really believe that it will be their calling to their life’s end.
But it would be unfair to deny that there is also no lack of praise for the positive qualities of the woman’s contribution to the nation’s higher tasks. All agree that the women are industrious and eager, that they bring an element of freshness,humanity,and moral inspiration into the business of the day, and that they do their work with patience and discretion and serenity. The chief success, which is beyond dispute, is that they have eliminated the prejudices of their parents’ times. Even those who are skeptical as to the objective results have long ago given up repeating the old-fashioned arguments that the daughter of an educated family ought to confine herself to the sphere of the home.
This, however, does not touch that circle of thoughts which appear to some as prejudices, too, but which are entitled to demand more consideration. Is this public life-work in harmony with the functions of woman as a wife and mother? Again, it may be said that Germany has not come to inner clearness on this point. Many German physicians argue seriously that the strenuous occupation makes too many tender girls unfit or less fit for later motherhood. A woman’s physical energies are exhausted and she enters into married life less strong. Sympathizers reply that the burdens of the old-fashioned housewife and house-daughter were often more exacting and exhausting than any position as librarian or secretary. Moreover they insist that the discipline and the intellectual training which the welleducated breadwinner gains through her calling is a perfect training for her true duties as wife and mother, and that it is, as preparation, far superior to the idleness to which nowadays most girls of that social standing would be confined.
IV
It is evident that almost no one of these arguments holds for the work of the lower classes. To a certain degree the situation is almost the reverse. The physical injury to the organism by the constant exhausting labor, the lack of free time for any inner development and even for the cultivation of her home activities, the paralyzing monotony of her factory work, all these are surely antagonistic to the desirable status of individual and family life. Here, therefore, the reform has taken the opposite character. The aim has been, not to expand the woman’s work, but to reduce it, and to protect the workingwoman against injurious demands. This element of the woman movement was at first somewhat in the background, or, rather, it was at first left to the Social Democratic political party.
The real so-called woman movement in Germany started with refined women who were more touched by the inner misery of empty lives of women in their own layer of society than by the suffering of the lower classes, — sufferings of which they knew little, and which seemed, to them more or less inevitable. The cries for help in these lower social regions naturally appealed more to those who were not interested in the position of woman and man, but in the position of poor and rich. The socialistic war-cry in the interest of the women-workers was therefore, ‘Down with capital!’
The tremendous growth of Social Democracy in political Germany was to a high degree due to its effective and sincere fight for the laboring woman. But, meanwhile, the social conscience of all Germany has been stirred up, sympathy for the laboring population has led to those unparalleled measures of state insurance and factory legislation by which the women have profited as much as the men. At the same time the trade-unions have grown rapidly, and are dominating industrial life as perhaps in no other country; and here again the women have their full share.
More and more has the non-socialistic public movement in the interest of women turned to this field, and through the efforts of brilliant womenleaders recent years have witnessed reforms of really organic character. It has become increasingly clear that the characteristic difficulties of women at work are untouched by the problem of socialism. It has been felt that the real difficulty was to be found in the fundamental fact that, through the changes in the modern home life and technique, woman has been forced into an industrial life which has been shaped in adjustment to the energies of men. This has involved a misuse of the female organism, and the great demand of the women reformers to-day insists on a better adjustment between woman and work. Under their influence the reforming tendencies have turned no less to those who were entirely helpless because they were entirely scattered: the servant-girls, the waitresses, even the agricultural workers, and, on a higher level, the business employees. Organized associations have been formed for all of them, with and without political or religious background; and almost all of them aim toward social and cultural improvements as well as the strictly economic and legal ones.
The progress of women in that conquest of the professions, and in the improvement of legislation regarding female work, can be demonstrated by figures and paragraphs, but much of the best which these movements have brought to modern Germany cannot be demonstrated or measured, and does not show on the surface at all. Nevertheless, the careful observer, who knew the Germany of a quarter of a century ago and who now comes in contact with a great variety of homes, must notice a thorough change which for the national life is perhaps more important than any question of woman-study and of woman-labor. The essential point is that the position of woman in the structure of the family has become more dignified by the development of a stronger sense of comradeship between husband and wife. The German family life has always been healthy and sound: in the home has always lain the strength of the community. There has never been lack of love in the typical German house, but all the feelings of affection went together with a sincere belief in inequality. The woman did not feel that as unfair or unjust, inasmuch as it had been a German tradition since the seventeenth century that the wife, in all intellectual and non-domestic questions, naturally had to subordinate herself to her master. She was accustomed to being guided; and while, of course, her personality gave warmth and meaning to the home, she herself felt it as her ideal duty to devote her energies to the building up of a home which received its stamp from the husband.
This attitude has passed. The better education of women, their greater importance in public life, the disappearance of old-fashioned prejudices, the greater leisure of present-day women for intellectual interests, and the constant airing of the problems of women, have quietly worked together to convince man that the place of woman in the home is a place on an equality with his own, and that true comradeship can intertwine with real love. The frequent commanding tone in which the cheaper kind of men so long indulged in their intercourse with their wives would to-day simply be considered as rudeness and would not be tolerated by any one. Nor would the right kind of woman, however ready she might be in her love to make the greatest sacrifice for her husband, any longer think of that selfeffacement which to previous generations so often appeared as woman’s natural duty.
The German woman of to-day would not be afraid of the hardship in it, but she would shrink from the indignity. This new group of ideas does not begin to work on the wedding-day. It determines no less the choice of the companion for life. The ideal of the young man is no longer the girl without thoughts of her own. Certainly the immature marriages of the very young seem to decrease. To-day the age at which the greatest number of girls marry is twenty-three. Only 25,000 girls marry at the age of nineteen or twenty, 39,000 at the age of twenty to twenty-one, 52,000 at twenty-one to twenty-two, 55,000 at twenty-two to twenty-three, 53,000 at twenty-three to twenty-four, and 47,000 at twentyfour to twenty-five. For men the age at which the largest number of marriages occur is twenty-six.
Of course Germany, too, shows one effect of the new order of things which seems necessarily to belong to this more liberal view of woman’s position, — an increase of divorces. In the years 1903 to 1907 the average among 100,000 inhabitants was still only 18.8 divorces, in 1908 it had already grown to 21.2, and the statistics show clearly that the figures are lowest in the least developed parts of Germany, in the eastern provinces in which the old order of ideas prevails, and greatest in the most progressive parts, especially in the large cities. In Berlin there are 87 divorces among 100,000 inhabitants, in Hamburg, 76.
One other figure may raise still more doubt as to the degree of happiness which the change has brought to womanhood. The increase of divorces may still be interpreted as not meaning subjective unhappiness. On the contrary, it may indicate that in earlier times women had to suffer lifelong misery in marriages which they are now more ready to give up in order to gain their freedom. But there cannot be two interpretations of the other figure which indicates that the number of female suicides has also relatively increased. And not only is this increase characteristic of the general tendency to suicide, which may be the result of the more complicated conditions of present-day life, but the number of female suicides in relation to the male suicides has grown as well. The percentage of female suicides in relation to male suicides has grown in the last ten years from 26 to 29 per cent. But there is no progress without its cruelties. The new freedom and the new responsibility, although they will grow steadily and beneficially, will demand their victims and will unbalance many a weak personality.
The movement toward equal rights and emancipation from her obedience was from the beginning not limited to the circle of the home. The new influence was more modestly, and yet persistently, claimed in public life. The demand for equal suffrage, to be sure, has remained entirely in the background. Those elements which give to the suffrage movement in America its greatest strength, the desire for purification of politics and for the elimination of corruption and graft, and, on the other hand, the need of women in the legislature in order to secure industrial legislation favorable to women, are both inapplicable and negligible for the German situation. The women themselves feel that their suffrage would simply duplicate the number of votes, without changing anything in the character of the parties or of the legislature. But all the more are the reformers eager to secure for the women an influential share in public functions: in municipal offices, in the schools’ administration, in the public care for the poor, in the inspection of factories and domiciles, in police positions, and many similar activities. The number of such positions is growing from year to year with the enlarged supply of well-trained women.
The German women who seek advance in any public lines know well that there cannot be rights without duties. They know that the real demand of the hour for the progressive woman is the study of social problems and an earnest training in social activities. Excellent schools for the social education of women have been established, and a corps of well-trained helpers and reformers is growing up to-day and will do more for the spreading of progressive ideas than will the mere declamations of radical orators, whose time has on the whole passed away in so far as the woman movement of Germany is concerned.