AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
TO MY READERS.
Readers, male and female, I am about to tell you the end of this book, and the motives which caused me to undertake it, that you may not waste your time in reading it, if its contents are not suited to your intellectual and moral temperament.
My end is to prove that woman has the same rights as man.
To claim, in consequence, her emancipation;
Lastly, to point out to the women who share my views, the principal measures that they must take to obtain justice.
The word emancipation giving room for equivocation, let us in the first place establish its meaning.
To emancipate woman is not to acknowledge her right to use and abuse love; such an emancipation is only the slavery of the passions; the use of the beauty and youth of woman by man; the use of man by woman for his fortune or credit.
To emancipate woman is to acknowledge and declare her free, the equal of man in the social and the moral law, and in labor.
At present, over the whole surface of the globe, woman, in certain respects, is not subjected to the same moral law as man; her chastity is given over almost without restriction to the brutal passions of the other sex, and she often endures alone the consequences of a fault committed by both.
In marriage, woman is a serf.