The preface to the work concludes with the following remarks:
"Not one of the conclusions drawn from the history and examination of woman can justify the tyranny of which she has been and is still a victim, from the laws of savage peoples, which forbade her to eat meat and the flesh of the cocoanut, to those modern restrictions, which shut her out from the advantages of higher education and prevent her from exercising certain professions for which she is qualified. These ridiculous, cruel, and tyrannical prohibitions have certainly been largely instrumental in maintaining or, worse still, increasing her present state of inferiority and permitting her exploitation by the other sex. The very praises, not always sincere, alas, heaped on the docile victim, are often intended more as a preparation for further sacrifices than as an honour or reward."
IV
Political Crime (Delitto Politico)
(In Collaboration with Rodolfo Laschi)
The law of inertia governs nature. Every organism tends to adhere indefinitely to the same mode of life and will not change unless forced to do so.
In the depths of the ocean, where existence, comparatively speaking, is uniform and undisturbed, we still find organisms allied to the species of pre-historic epochs. Those stars and suns, which are outside the sphere of action of other worlds, continue eternally their vertiginous gyrations in the trajectories assigned to them at the beginning of all things.
Every progress in nature is the result of a struggle between the tendency to immobility, manifested by misoneism, or the hatred of novelty, and a foreign force which seeks to conquer this tendency.
As in nature, misoneism dominates every human community. It is most invincible in children and neuropathic and insane individuals, very powerful among barbarous peoples, and more or less disguised among civilised nations. But the world progresses: every day new conditions and new interests arise to combat the law of inertia and render impossible the realisation of the much-desired invariability; and progress, unwelcome yet inevitable, prevails.
By political crime we understand every action which attacks the laws, the historical, economical, political and social traditions of a nation or, in fact, any part of the existing social fabric, and which comes into collision with the law of inertia.