"There will be no definitive law and morality until woman shall have spoken." (Id. p. 18.)
"In the name of God," exclaims M. Enfantin in his Appel à la Femme, "in the name of God and of all the sufferings which Humanity, his loved child, endures to-day in her flesh; in the name of the poorest and most numerous class whose daughters are sold to Indolence and whose sons are given up to War; in the name of all those men and of all those women, who cast the glittering veil of falsehood or the filthy rays of debauchery over their secret or public prostitution; in the name of St. Simon who came to announce to man and woman their moral, social and religious equality, I conjure woman to answer me!" (Entretien du 7 Décembre, 1831.)
On his side, Bazard concludes a pamphlet, published in January, 1832, with these words:
"And we too have hastened the coming of woman; we too summon her with all our might; but it is in the name of the pure love with which she has imbued the heart of man, and which man is now ready to give her in return; it is in the name of the dignity which is promised her in marriage; it is lastly and above all, in the name of the most numerous and poorest class, whose servitudes and humiliations she has hitherto shared, and whom her enchanting voice can alone to-day have power finally to release from the harsh imposition with which it is still weighed down by the wrecks of the past."
Ah! you are to a great extent right, Enfantin and Bazard! So long as woman is not free and the equal of man; so long as she is not everywhere at his side, sorrows, disorders, war, the exploitation of the weak, will be the sad lot of humanity.
Pierre Leroux, the gentlest, best and most simple man that I know, writes in turn in the fourth volume of his Encyclopédie Nouvelle, article Egalité, the following remarkable paragraphs:
"There are not two different beings, man and woman, there is but a single human being with two phases, which correspond and are united by love.
"Man and woman exist to form the couple; they are the two parts of it. Outside of the couple, outside of love and marriage, there is no longer any sex; there are human beings of a common origin and of like faculties. Man at every moment of his life is sensation, sentiment, knowledge; so is woman. The definition is therefore the same."
After having proved, according to his idea, that the type of woman differs from that of man, he continues:
"But this type does not separate them from the rest of humanity, and does not make of them a separate race which must be distinguished philosophically from man.... Love being absent, they manifest themselves to man as human beings, and are ranked, like man, under the various categories of civil society."