[53] Léopold Lacour has given a full and reliable account of Olympe de Gouges (who was born at Montauban in 1755) in his Trois Femmes de la Révolution, 1900.
[54] It is noteworthy that the Empire had even a depressing effect on the physical activities of women. The eighteenth-century woman in France, although she was not athletic in the modern sense, enjoyed a free life in the open air and was fond of physical exercises. During the Directoire this tendency became very pronounced; women wore the scantiest of garments, were out of doors in all weathers, cultivated healthy appetites, and enjoyed the best of health. But with the establishment of the Empire these wholesome fashions were discarded, and women cultivated new ideals of fragile refinement indoors. (This evolution has been traced by Dr. Lucien Nars, L'Hygiène, September, 1911.)
[55] Concerning the rise and progress of this movement in England much information is sympathetically and vivaciously set forth in W. Lyon Blease's Emancipation of English Women (1910), a book, however, which makes no claim to be judicial or impartial; the author regards "unregulated male egoism" as the source of the difficulties in the way of women's suffrage.
[56] Thus, in 1911 the National League for Opposing Women's Suffrage took an impartial poll of the women voters on the municipal register in several large constituencies, by sending a reply-paid postcard to ask whether or not they favoured the extension to women of the Parliamentary franchise. Only 5579 were in favour of it; 18,850 were against; 12,621 did not take the trouble to answer, and it was claimed, probably with reason, that a majority of these were not in favour of the vote.
[57] It must not be too hastily assumed. Unless we go back to ancient plots of the Guy Fawkes type (now only imitated by self-styled anarchists), the leaders of movements of political reform have rarely, if ever, organized outbursts of violence; such violence, when it occurred, has been the spontaneous and unpremeditated act of a mob.
[58] Revue de l'Ecole d'Anthropologie, February, 1909, p. 50.
[59] O. Schrader, Reallexicon, Art. "Keuschheit." He considers that Tacitus merely shows that German women were usually chaste after marriage. A few centuries later, Lea points out, Salvianus, while praising the barbarians generally for their chastity, makes an exception in the case of the Alemanni. (See also Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. VI, "Sex in Relation to Society," pp. 382-4.)
[60] Thus Kaan, anticipating Krafft-Ebing, published a Psychopathia Sexualis, in 1844, and Casper, in 1852, was the first medical authority to point out that sexual inversion is sometimes due to a congenital psychic condition.
[61] Both Forel's and Bloch's books have become well known through translations in England and America. Dr. Bloch is also the author of an extremely erudite and thorough history of syphilis, which has gone far to demonstrate that this disease was introduced into Europe from America on the first discovery of the New World at the end of the fifteenth century.
[62] This attitude is plainly reflected even in many books written by men; I may mention, for instance, Frenssen's well-known novel Hilligenlei (Holyland).