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. In public instruction, she is sacrificed. In labor, she is made inferior. Civilly, she is _a_ minor. Politically, she has no existence. _She is the equal of man only when punishment and the payment of taxes are in question._ I claim the rights of woman, because it is time to make the nineteenth century ashamed of its culpable denial of justice to half the human species; Because the state of inferiority in which we are held corrupts morals, dissolves society, deteriorates and enfeebles the race; Because the progress of enlightenment, in which woman participates, has transformed her in social power, and because this new power produces evil in default of the good which it is not permitted to do; Because the time for according reforms has come, since women are protesting against the order which oppresses them; some by disdain of laws and prejudices; others by taking possession of contested positions, and by organizing themselves into societies to claim their share of human rights, as is done in America; Lastly, because it seems to me useful to reply, _no longer with sentimentality_, but with vigor, to those men who, terrified by the emancipating movement, call to their aid false science to prove that woman is outside the pale of right; and carry indecorum and the opposite of courage, even to insult, even to the most revolting outrages.