THE IDEAL NEW WOMAN AFTER REAL OLD MODELS. FROM THE FRENCH OF THE COUNTESS ERNESTINE DE TRÉMAUDAN. By Permission of the Authoress. ST. LOUIS, MO. 1899. 17 South Broadway. INTRODUCTION. REACTION has set in against the philosophic and wordly ideas of the XVIII. century, which demanded of woman to be cheerful and genial, but ignorant and frivolous, unconscious of her duties and rights, and without religion and morals. This reaction is due to two opposing currents, one having its source in Free-thought and Masonry, the other, in the Gospel. Infidels, sectaries, and Christians rival with each other in the discussion of the very serious question of "Femininism"; journals, reviews, and books, preachers and legislators are busy about it. No one doubts any longer the intellectual aptitude of woman;*) and *) "As Christianity shows, and every one of us knows, woman is a being neither superior nor inferior to man, endowed with faculties not less ample but different from his and in harmony with her physical nature, answering the end for which she is created. She may vindicate for herself the same rights as we, though under the essential reserve that they correspond with her providential mission." Gabriel Alix, in La Réforme Sociale (Oct. 1896.) |