In no European country has the woman's rights movement been confronted with more unfavorable conditions; nowhere has it been more persistently opposed. In recent times the women of no other country have lived through conditions of war such as the German women underwent during the Thirty Years' War and from 1807 to 1812. Such violence leaves a deep imprint on the character of a nation. Moreover, it has been the fate of no other civilized nation to owe its political existence to a war triumphantly fought out in less than one generation. Every war, every accentuation and promotion of militarism is a weakening of the forces of civilization and of woman's influence. "German masculinity is still so young," I once heard somebody say. A reinforcement of the woman's rights movement by a large Liberal majority in the national assemblies, such as we find in England, France, and Italy, is not to be thought of in Germany. The theories of the rights of man and of citizens were never applied by German Liberalism to woman in a broad sense, and the Socialist party is not yet in the majority. The political training of the German man has in many respects not yet been extended to include the principles of the American Declaration of Independence or the French Declaration of the Rights of Man; his respect for individual liberty has not yet been developed as in England; therefore he is much harder to win over to the cause of "woman's rights." Hence the struggle against the official regulation of prostitution has been left chiefly to the German women; whereas in England and in France the physicians, lawyers, and members of Parliament have been the chief supporters of abolition. I am reminded also of the inexpressibly long and difficult struggle that we women had to carry on in order to secure the admission of women to the universities; the establishment of high schools for girls; and the improvement of the opportunities given to women teachers. In no other country were women teachers for girls wronged to such an extent as in Germany. The results of the last industrial census (1907) give to the demands of the woman's rights movement an invaluable support: _Germany has nine and a half million married women, i.e._ only one half of all adult women (over 18 years of age) are married. In Germany, too, marriage is not a lifelong "means of support" for woman, or a "means of support" for the whole number of women. Therefore the demands of woman for a complete professional and industrial training and freedom to choose her calling appear in the history of our time with a tremendous weight, a weight that the founders of the movement hardly anticipated.