Let us return to Fourier. It is known that he admits several social periods. According to him, the pivot of each of them hinges on love and the degree of liberty of woman.
"As a general rule," he says, "social progress and changes of the period will be wrought in proportion to the progress of women towards liberty, and the decay of the social order will be wrought in proportion to the decline of the liberty of women."
In another place, he adds in speaking of philosophers:
"If they treat of morals, they forget to recognize and to claim the rights of the weaker sex, the oppression of which destroys the basis of justice."
He says again, elsewhere:
"Now, God recognizes as liberty only that which is extended to both sexes, and not to one alone; so he has prescribed that all the germs of social evils, as the savage state, barbarism, civilization, should have no other pivot than the enthrallment of women; and that all the germs of social good, as the sixth, seventh and eighth period, should have no other pivot, no other compass, than the progressive affranchisement of the weaker sex."
Fourier is reproached with having desired the emancipation of woman in love; nothing is more true. But to impute this to him as immorality, men must censure their own morals. Now, these gentlemen considering themselves as wholly pure, though themselves representing the butterfly in love, infidelity and the simultaneous possession of several women being only a pastime to them, I do not really see what they can blame in Fourier.
Either what they do is right, and therefore cannot be wrong in woman;
Or what they do is wrong; then why do they do it?
Fourier believed in the unity of the moral law and in the equality of the sexes; he believed in the lawfulness of the morals of these gentlemen, minus perfidy and hypocrisy; this is the reason that he claims emancipation in love for woman: he is logical.