"This is the truth that must be spoken to men and women; but it would be to pervert this truth and to transform it into error to say to women: You are a sex apart, a sex in the possession of love. Emancipate yourselves; that is, use and abuse love. Woman thus transformed into an unchaste Venus, loses at once her dignity as a human being and as a woman; that is, as a being capable of forming a human couple under the sacred law of love." The excellent Leroux asks who does not feel, who does not admit at the present day the equality of the sexes? Who would dare maintain that woman is an inferior being, of whom man is the guide and beacon light? That woman is elevated by man, who is elevated only by himself and by God? Who would dare maintain such absurdities to-day, brave and upright Leroux? P. J. Proudhon, the man who called you _Theopompe_ and _Pâlissier_--M. Michelet, who claims that woman was created to be the most tiresome doll of her loving husband. But to return to yourself. You affirm that God is androgynous; that in him coexist the male and female principles on the footing of equality: that consequently, man and woman are equal in God. I assent to this willingly, although I know absolutely nothing about it. But when you add that woman is deserving of quite as much as man, because she has shared in all the agonizing crises of the progressive education of the human race; That love, which cannot exist without the woman, has led us from the law of slavery to that of equality; That consequently woman represents half in the work of the ages; In this there is no mystery; I join you therefore with all my heart in repeating to men the invitations and the lessons which you give to these ungrateful and stubborn males: "If we are free, it is in part by woman; let her then be made free by us. "But is she so? Is she treated by us as an equal? "A wife--does she find equality in love and marriage? "A human being, does she find equality in the State? "This is the question. "On the subject of woman, our civil law is a model of absurd contradictions. According to the Roman law, woman lived perpetually under tutelage; in this system of legislation, everything was at least in perfect harmony; woman was always a minor. We, on our part, declare her in a multitude of cases to be free as man. She is no longer under general or fictitious tutelage; her age of majority is fixed; she is competent to inherit in her own right; she inherits in equal proportion; she controls and disposes of her property; more than this, in the system of communion of goods between husband and wife, we admit the separation of property. But let the marriage bond itself be in question, in which wealth is no longer at stake, but ourselves and our mothers, ourselves and our sisters, ourselves and our daughters; then we are found intractable in our laws; we no longer admit equality; we require woman to declare herself our inferior and servant, and to swear obedience to us.