“_O Nazaréen incorrigible!_” she exclaims, when her adversary falls a prey to the ancient myth that woman is ever the source of evil and the mother of impurity. “Men who, like M. Proudhon,” she continues, “desire to restore the patriarchate by imprisoning women in the family are _des abstractions de quintessence_ who are blind to all that is going on around them, who misjudge the collective life which is daily developing new needs, engendering new forces, and giving rise to social institutions responding to these needs and organising these forces. They mean well, doubtless, and they think they are serving the cause of progress, or at least of morality, which always comes to be that of progress. By compelling woman to shut herself up in her family, by limiting her to the rôle of wife and mother, they hope to put an end to her growing passion for luxury and dissipation.... But they are mistaken. It is not by limiting the scope of her activity that they will arrest this disorder, but rather by opening up new channels for the wholesome play of her energy. Women must be educated thoroughly, and, wherever it is possible, professionally. They must be made productive. Work alone has emancipated man. Work alone can emancipate woman. Let woman provide herself by honest work with clothes which will adorn and become her. Then, instead of dragging in the dust of the pavement her lace shawls and her silk skirts, she will walk free and proud in the modesty of clothes which will reveal her beauty, without tarnishing her virtue or selling her honour.... “But do not let me be accused of undervaluing woman’s rôle in the family: I, like Proudhon, believe that a woman’s first duty is to be wife and mother. But I maintain that family life need not absorb all woman’s activities, physical, moral and intellectual. The part of a broody hen is honourable without doubt, but it is not suited to every one, neither is it so absorbing as it is represented.” In Juliette’s childhood her father had given her a catechism embodying the principles of democratic socialism. Now in the last pages of this book she expressed in another catechism her views of society and of women’s rôle in it. The question of the parliamentary franchise Mme. Lamessine did not discuss in this volume. It is obvious that so ardent an advocate of sex equality must have believed in woman’s right to vote. Woman’s suffrage, we remember, was one of the reforms demanded by the Mlles. André’s pupils when, in 1848, Juliette marshalled them in the playground at Chauny beneath the banner of her father’s social democratic handkerchief. But the so-called universal, in reality manhood, suffrage of 1851 had led to the Empire, and Mme. Lamessine abhorred the Empire: henceforth therefore she placed no great faith in the people’s vote, not even if, as she believed, in all justice it should do, the people included women. FOOTNOTES: