This touches one point merely, and only applies to married women. In all that concerns “free” women, by what right are they condemned to abstain from making full use of their independence, as most men do? “Woman’s life, like man’s,” says Miramont, “is a harmonious evolution, by which every phase is developed, and which thus brings into play a succession of forms and aspects of existence. Daughter, mother and grandmother; dreamer, fighter, thinker--woman, like man, passes through many transformations in the course of life, and is always progressive.” By the same fact of social evolution, thanks to her participation in the battle of life, and also to a rational education, it has long been proved that woman is not an inferior creature, of no use save for the propagation of the species. We are far removed, happily, from the theories of Schopenhauer, who declared that woman was afflicted with intellectual shortness of sight, that she was childish, futile and narrow, inferior to man in everything concerning rectitude and scrupulous honesty; that she was lacking in sense and reflection, incapable of taking any unbiased view, etc. etc. If woman’s characteristic feature be that nature has destined her for motherhood, it is none the less true that, just as she has a fine skin and quick sensibilities, her intellect is prompt to seize details, and that she possesses a brain as well furnished as that of man. Her apparent inferiority comes from the fact that woman is oppressed by the law and ill-treated by the moralist, whence result her native timidity and diffidence. The truth is that man, desiring to keep the supremacy attributed to him, does not care to see in woman the qualities of courage and independence. He will not admit the immanent struggle between two beings inspired by the same needs and the same desires. Men would like women to remain tied down to household cares, while thinking women who have ceased to resign themselves to this wish their sex to profit by all the rights of men. The partisans of absolute feminism desire that there should be no difference between men and women, in the name of biological equality which incites them to claim social equality. Without going so far as this, it is certain that women should now enjoy more independence and be authorised, without losing caste in the eyes of moralists, to prove the strength of their personal faculties.