Women of the Teutonic Nations

by Hermann Schoenfeld

THIS VOLUME IS RESPECTFULLY

Dedicated to

MADAME CHRISTIAN HEURICH
NEE KEYSER

PREFACE

Adequately to write the history of the woman of any race would mean the writing of the history of the nation itself. There is no phase of the cultural life of any people that is not founded upon the physical and moral nature of its women. On the other hand, mental and moral heredity, both through paternity and maternity, determines the character and innermost being of woman. If we knew all the preponderating influences of heredity for ages, we could with almost mathematical accuracy compute the traits of human biology in every case. The forces of environment, tremendous though they are, modify, but do not alter in any way the original nature of man, which is established and standardized "by eternal and immutable laws." Anthropology is continuously progressing toward a firm scientific foundation, and is beginning to organize even the vast domain of psychology into a well-defined system. The interdependence between physical, mental, and moral traits is well recognized, but its exact determination is impossible, owing to the infinite complexity of the endless ancestral potencies.

So much is established, however: Teutonic woman, as she appears in history, is the product of two groups of influences, the one group, inherited nature; the other, environment; she is the exact sum of these antecedent causes. And only so far as these causes differ does the Teutonic woman differ from her sister of any other race of other times and climes.

In this book of a purely historical, literary, and cultural character must be excluded all that refers to the physiological and ethnographical characteristics of the Teutonic woman and of her Slavic sister. Nor are we concerned with the theory of their evolution, i. e., the search of the physical principles according to which the consequences of their existence are true to the laws of their antecedents. Many eminent scientists have tried their great faculties on this subject of universal interest and importance. Standard works of a scientific character, like Floss's Das Weib in der Natur und Volherhunde, abound in scientific and medical bibliography.

Our limited task is merely to deal succinctly with the most general evolution of the social position and the cultural status of the Teutonic and, even more briefly, of the Slavic woman at the various epochs of their respective histories, and how far the history of civilization among those races was influenced by them, how far the symptoms of national morality and the degree of culture were shaped by feminine achievements, proclivities, virtues, and vices. Two thousand years of the richest, almost unfathomable, history had to be traversed in the attempt to glean the essential red thread from the enormous masses of facts which in their entirety would be inaccessible even to the most universal historical scholar. Most difficult of all the periods is perhaps the question of the present and actual women's movement, which is now in its liveliest flux and in a most variable condition both in the German and in the Slavic world. It is impossible as yet to systematize the entirety of the problems and the requirements which have resulted in recent times from the transformation of society with regard to the position of woman among the two modern peoples. Many of the questions belong to the domain of private and public law, of political economy, of sociology, of education in all its phases. The leaders of state and church and society, the higher schools and universities, are signally undecided concerning the final solution, though the mist of the conflict of opinion begins slowly to clear away. Even under the changed conditions of modern society, one party still clings to the old tradition of the family ideal of wifehood and motherhood, which is no longer possible in all cases, as of yore, and considers extra-domestic activity as abnormal, unhealthy, transient; the other extremists desire to wipe out the natural differences and the limitations prescribed by sex to human activity and capacity. A middle ground and a rational solution will certainly be found during this century.