The non-emancipators, blinded by pride, perverted by a love of dominion as unbridled as unintelligent, desire liberty only for themselves. These egotists, so suspicious of those that menace their own freedom, wish half the human species to be in their chains.
The emancipators have enough heart and ideality to desire a companion with whom they can exchange sentiment and thought, and who can improve them in some respects and be improved by them in others; they love and respect woman.
The non-emancipators, without ideality, without love, chained to their senses and their pride, despise woman; and wish to have in her only a female, a servant, a machine to produce young ones. They are males, they are not yet men.
The emancipators desire perfection of the species, in a three-fold point of view: physical, moral, and intellectual. They know that races cannot be improved without selecting and perfecting the mothers.
The non-emancipators are bent upon something quite different from the improvement of the species: let their children be lacking in intelligence, malicious, ugly, or deformed; they think much less of this than of being masters. Do they know enough of physiology to have reflected that the faculties depend on organization, that organization is capable of modification, that modifications are transmitted, that woman has a great share in this transmission, a greater share, perhaps, than that of man? It is therefore essential to place her in a condition to perform this great function in the manner most useful to humanity.
The emancipators desire humanity to go forward, to vibrate no longer between the past and the future; they know the influence that women possess, first over children, then over men; they know that woman cannot serve progress unless she finds it to her interest to do so; that she will find it so only through liberty; that she will love it only if her intellect is elevated by study, and her heart purified from the petty selfishness of home by the predominating love of the great human family. As they desire the end sincerely, they sincerely desire the means; so long as half the human race shall labor as it is doing to destroy the edifice constructed by a few members of the other half; so long as half the human race, the one that secretly governs the other, shall have its face turned towards the past, the landmarks that point to the future will be threatened with being torn up. Do you consider it a crime in the emancipators to comprehend this, to seek to conjure down the peril; and do you consider a virtue in the non-emancipators the foolish pride that places a cataract over their eyes?
A few words more, and I shall have done. You would rather, you say, that I should not assume castigating airs with you. But have you really the right to complain of it, you who have constituted yourself the chief whipper-in of the economists and the socialists? I shall never go so far towards you as you have gone towards them. You must resign yourself to my abrupt, sometimes harsh style. I am implacable towards whatever appears to me false and unjust; and were you my brother, I should not war against you less sharply; before all ties of affection and family, should come the love of justice and humanity.
I owe now to my readers and to you, sir, the exposition of the thesis that I undertake to sustain; for the phrase, the emancipation of women has been, and is, quite variously interpreted.
With respect to right, man and woman are equal, whether the equality of faculties be admitted or rejected.
But for a truth to be useful, it must be adapted to the surroundings into which we seek to introduce it.