The Book of Women’s Rights.
1860.

LOVE, ITS FUNCTION IN HUMANITY.

THE FOURTH CHAPTER.

English translation copyrighted 2nd April 2023.

Part A.

You say to the child who is lying: it is bad to deceive: you would not like to be deceived.

You say to the child who steals: it's wrong to steal: you wouldn't want someone to steal from you.

You say to the child who abuses his strength, his intelligence to torment his younger companion: you would not want these things done to you; you are a villain and a coward.

These are good lessons. Why then, when the child has become a young man, do you say: it is necessary for young people to throw away the strangles of the heart?

To throw the strangles of the heart is to deceive young girls, to lose their future, to practice adultery, to maintain lorettes, to frequent the brothel.

And they are mothers, they are women, who thus consent to the profanation of their sex!

They are the same who forbade their sons to steal a toy, who allow them to steal the honor and peace of others!

They are the same ones who have shamed their sons of lies, who allow them to deceive poor girls!

They are the same who have made it a crime for their sons to oppress those weaker than themselves, who allow them to be oppressors and cowards towards women!

Then they complain that their sons behave badly towards them; let them dishonor and ruin themselves;

That they wish for the death of their parents, in order to enrich the usurers from whom they borrowed to maintain the luxury of their mistresses;

They complain that they destroy their health and only give their mothers etiolated little sons, for the existence of which they will be in continual anguish.

Hey! Ladies, you only have what you deserve: bear the weight of solidarity that you cannot run away from. You have authorized your sons to throw away the stranglehold of the heart and suffer the consequences.

But a mother cannot be her son's confidante, they say.

Why is that, Madame, if you have brought him up in such a way as not to make dishonoring confidences?

He wouldn't have to worry about you if you had accustomed him to conquering himself, to respecting every woman like his mother, every little girl like his sister; to treating others as he finds it fair to be treated; if everyone had instilled in him that there is only one morality, which both sexes are equally compelled to obey; if you had made him honor, Love and practice the work; if you had told him that we live to improve ourselves, to practice justice and Benevolence, and to give back to humanity what it does for us by protecting us, enlightening us, moralizing us, surrounding us with security and well-being, be; that finally, our glory is to submit ourselves to the great law of Duty.

If you had brought him up in this way, Madame, by noticing in your son the first signs of the keen attraction that man feels towards the other sex, far from abandoning the education of this instinct to the hazards of inexperience, you would do what you have done for others: you would teach the young man to subject him to wise discipline.

Instead of repeating this stupidly atrocious word: young people must throw away the gum of the heart, you would affectionately take your son's hands and, your eyes fixed on his, you would say to him: My child, nature wants that a woman now attracts you more than me, and maintains or destroys what I have so laboriously raised: I do not murmur about it: things have to be like this. But my tenderness and my duty demand that I enlighten you in this serious circumstance. Tell me, if a young man, to satisfy the instinct which awakens in you now, corrupted your sister, sacrificed his life, what would you think of him? What would you do?

Make Love longer and improve your love life.

The young man, accustomed from childhood to practice Justice, would not fail to reply: I would think that he is perverse and cowardly... Wouldn't he be punished, Mother?

No, my son, the seducer is not punished by law.

Hey! Well, I would kill him: for I return to my right of justice when the law has not provided.

Good, my child. So you will not be with respect to any young girl either perverse or cowardly; you will not deserve to suffer the judgment you have pronounced, that is to say, to be killed. You will therefore respect all the young girls as you want us to respect your sister, as you would like us to respect your daughter.

Another question: what would you think of a man who would have led me to betray your father; would have deprived him of my heart and my care; would have diverted me from the grave duties of motherhood? What would you think of someone who would behave like this towards your own companion?

I would judge him like the others and would not treat him better.

Good, again. So, you will respect all married women as you want us to respect your mother and your wife; and if you meet one for whom you feel an inclination, someone, disloyal enough to seek to please you, you will flee them: for the only remedy against passion is flight.

A multitude of women, innocent at first, have been diverted from the right path by men who do not think like you. Today they take revenge on your sex for the harm he has done them. They corrupt and ruin the men who, in their company, lose their moral sense, learn to laugh at what they believe and worship, compromise, and lose their health. Do you feel the sad courage to expose yourself to such risks?

The young man, trained from childhood to submit his inclinations to reason and Justice, will answer:

No, mother, I won't do what I wouldn't want my companion to do; I neither want to degrade myself morally, nor lose my health, nor contribute for my part to perpetuate a state of things which degrades the sex to which belong, my wife, my mother, my sister, and my daughters, if I have the happiness of to have some.

I confess to you very sincerely that I foresee a violent struggle within me; but thanks to the moral gymnastics to which you have accustomed me, thanks to the ideal of destiny which you have given me, which I have accepted in the fullness of my reason and which outlines my Duty for me, I do not despair to defeat me.

This victory will be less difficult for you to obtain if you occupy yourself usefully and seriously: for then you will call up vitality in the higher regions of the brain. You will do wisely to add to this a lot of physical exercises; to abstain from too substantial food, and especially from exciting drinks: you know the reactions of the physical on the moral. Carefully avoids licentious readings, and inappropriate conversations; give place in your mind to the virgin who must unite with you: think and act as if you were in her presence, this will keep you and purify you. This sweet ideal will make you strong against temptation and will do much to make you cold with women to whom you must give no place in your heart.

Love, my child, is a very serious thing in its consequences; for the beings, it unites are modified one by the other: it leaves traces, however long it may have lasted.

Its goal is marriage, one of whose ends is the continuity of the species. Now you know the effects of the solidarity of blood; it is thus very important that you choose for a companion, only a woman whose character, manners, and principles, agree with yours; not only for your own happiness but for the very organization of your children, the unity of their nature and their conduct.

If passion does not leave you sufficiently free, come to me: I will see to it in your place, and if I say to you: my son, this woman will lower you, make you commit faults; because of him, your children will have such evil inclinations; she is not gifted to raise them in view of your ideal which she will never accept, because she is vain and selfish; if I tell you this, I know, my son, that, whatever your suffering, you will give up a woman you no longer Love after a few months of union, and that you will prefer a temporary pain to a lifetime of misfortune.

Part B.

This same mother who has just shown her son why Love must be submitted to reason, to Justice; who has just told him what he must do to overcome the bestial side of it, also notices the awakening of this instinct in his daughter. She grabs his attention, and wins his trust, by revealing to him what is going on inside her; telling her that at her age, she felt the same way.

So far, she continues, you have been only a child; now begins your career as a woman. You desire the affection of a man and your heart is moved by the sweet thought of being a mother. Do not be ashamed of it, my daughter: it is legitimate, provided that your desires are submitted to reason and to the law of Duty.

Many traps will be laid under your feet; for men of all ages address a thousand flattering words to a young girl, and surround her with homage which makes her vain and coquettish, if she has the weakness to allow herself to be intoxicated by them. Convince yourself that all this adoration is not addressed to you personally, but to your youth, to the brilliance of your eyes, to the smoothness of your skin, and that you were much better than you are, very superior in intelligence, these same men would be strictly and coldly polite, if you were thirty years older. This thought, present in your mind, will make you smile at their frivolous and banal jargon and will preserve you from several weaknesses, such as toilet rivalry, petty jealousies, and the ridiculous failure to play the little girl at fifty.

Only have to marry one man, so you just must be loved by one in the way you want. A woman who behaves voluntarily in such a way as to capture the hearts of several men, and leads them to believe that they are individually preferred, is an unworthy coquette who sins against justice and Benevolence: against Justice, in that she asks for a feeling that she does not repay; that she acts towards others as she would find it inequitable for others to act towards her; against Benevolence, in that it risks making sincere hearts suffer, and sacrifices their rest to the enjoyment of vanity: such a woman, my child, is contemptible: she is a dangerous enemy of her sex: first because that she gives a bad opinion of it, then because she is the enemy of other women's rest: I know you are too simple, too true, too dignified, to fear seeing you fall into such deviations.

You confessed to me that your young imagination dreamed of a man. Far from driving away this ideal, which is always present in your mind, much less in its physical aspect than in that of intelligence, morality, and work. This image will preserve you better than all my advice, than all the surveillance that I could, but would never want to exercise, because it would be unworthy of you and of me.

Don't forget, however, that an ideal is absolute; that reality is always defective: therefore, do not seek in the man to whom you will give your heart, a realized ideal; but the qualities and faculties that will allow him, with your help, to get closer to what you want to see him. You yourself are the ideal of a man, not as you are, but as he will help you to become.

I insist on this point, my daughter because nothing is more dangerous than pretending to find the ideal in reality: it makes us too difficult, not very indulgent; and if we have a lively imagination and little reason, it makes us unhappy and leads us into a thousand deviations.

You know and feel that the goal of Love is marriage: yet one of your duties as a lover and as a wife is the perfection of the one to whom you will be bound. You will be with him in two different relationships: first his fiancée, then his wife. Your modifying power, in the first case, will be exercised in direct proportion to the desire he will have to please you and to deserve you; in the second, in proportion to his confidence, his esteem, and his affection for you. In the first case, he will want to modify himself; in the second, he will change without knowing it.

How, my mother, will he not always Love me the same!

Love, my daughter, undergoes transformations to which we must expect and submit: at first it is a fever of the soul, but fever is a state which could not last without harming the whole of life. Your husband, while loving you perhaps more deeply, will Love you less keenly than before the marriage. Your Love will change, why wouldn't he do the same?

You cannot imagine that disorders are the consequence of the ignorance of women on this point, and of the vain pursuit of the ideal in Love. Thus many women, believing that their husband no longer loves them, because he loves them otherwise, detach themselves from him, suffer, and betray their duties; others dream of perfection in the man they love, believing they find it there, and become disillusioned after the fever, distance themselves from him, accusing him of having deceived them: they Love others with the same illusion, followed by of the same disillusion, until old age arrives which does not cure them of their chimera.

Finally, there are others who, understanding only the first period of Love, stop loving the man who has passed through it and runs after another Love which brings them the same fever: those, you understand, have no idea of ​​the grave duties of woman in Love.

What I have just told you about women is also true of men. You will avoid these pitfalls, you, my daughter, who have been accustomed from childhood to submit to reason; who knows that all reality is imperfect; that habit deadens feelings. You will therefore take the man who suits you, as he is, proposing to improve him, to make him happy; knowing in advance that his Love will be transformed without being extinguished, if you know so well how to seize his tenderness, his confidence, and his esteem, that he finds in you good advice, peace, help, and security.

You are too pure, my daughter, to foresee all the traps that will be set for you. It is therefore up to me to arm your young prudence: you will perhaps find on your way men married or engaged to other women who, according to the consecrated expression, will court you, and will spout a thousand sophisms to you to justify their conduct..

Their sophisms, my mother, failed against this simple answer: Sir, how desperate I would be if a woman took away the one, I Love from me, that I would despise and hate her, all your compliments will not be able to persuade me that I should do what I would not like to be done to me. If you come back to it, I'll let the person concerned know.

That's good, my child: but what if a free young man spoke to you of tenderness, and wrote to you in secret?

Couldn't he have good reasons for doing so, my mother?

None, my child. You must know that today men are very corrupt; let a crowd of them shun marriage, flit from woman to woman, abuse our credulity, and use the most impassioned language to throw us into a path of shame and perdition. Now, my child, you should know again, it is we who bear the weight of man's faults and our own: a man's verbal and written promises do not bind him. If letting yourself be carried away, you became a mother, the child would remain in your charge: there would be no more marriage for you: I am not speaking to you of our pain and our shame, nor of the terrible risks to which you would expose your brother, who could perish by punishing the vile seducer whom the law does not punish.

So, if a man was looking for you while hiding from us, it's because his intentions are bad, be sure of it; it's that he considers you like a rattle that he proposes to break when he no longer pleases him. Now, my daughter, you know that woman is created to be man's worthy companion, his equal; that she was not born to be sacrificed to him as an object of pleasure. So far from letting yourself be seduced, take advantage of the influence that your youth and your grace give you over men to remind them of their duties: you will perhaps save several women in this way; you will give a better opinion of your sex, and you will prepare a good example for your daughter by giving it to your companions, many of whom will follow it in order to share the esteem that will surround you: always remember that none of our acts harm not only to ourselves; but that we stand together; that consequently no one can be lost or saved alone.

One more word, my child. In your uncertainties, don't hesitate to tell me what's troubling you: don't say: my mother is too reasonable for me to share this with her. Isn't it by making myself a child again to understand you, that I was able to fulfill my holy task of an educator? Be convinced that it won't be more difficult for me to become a young girl again in order to understand you while remaining a tender and experienced mother to advise you.

You are free: I am not your censor, but your elder sister who loves you with devotion, and wants your happiness above all else. To reward me for my Love and my long care, I only ask you to be your best friend, the one in front of whom we think and feel aloud. Is it asking too much of you, who are my joy and my crown?

This lady is how the adult woman works to educate Love.

English translation copyrighted 2nd April 2023.

The Fourth Chapter continued>

English translation copyrighted 2nd April 2023.

The Book of Women’s Rights. Love, Its Function In Humanity.