The love of Romanticism, which has been caricatured to the extent that it signified only moonshine, ecstasy, sonnets, and wife barter, had its real essence in the desire for completeness of soul in love. This was, in a new form, the ideal of the courts of love. But since completeness of soul means that all the powers of the soul can freely and fully penetrate and elevate one another, so the first requisite for that soulful love was that _woman’s_ thinking as well as her feeling, her imagination as well as her will, her desire for power, as well as her conscience, be freed from the shackles imposed upon them from without, in order to be strengthened and purified. The second stipulation was that _man’s_ inner, spiritual life be freed from the deteriorating results of the prerogatives and prejudices accorded to and maintained by his sex. A new ideal in the relationship between husband and wife, between mother and child; the demand of the feminine individuality for the right to free cultivation of her powers and to self-direction; the need of new fields for this exercise of her power after industrialism began to usurp one branch of domestic work after another—these are the fundamental reasons for what is called the middle-class woman movement. The middle-class woman—because of the increasing surplus of women, because of the continually greater variety of economic conditions and the decrease in marriage for this and other reasons—was to an ever greater extent constrained to self-maintenance. Thus the _economic_ reason for the woman movement, not only in the labouring class but also in the middle class, became the most effective influence operating in the _widest_ circles, although the reasons mentioned previously were the first and deepest causes. And herewith we stand at the beginning of the woman movement, become _conscious of its purpose_. But this movement would be a stream without sources if the “anonymous” movements indicated here with the greatest brevity had not preceded, if in the grey morning of time the endless procession had not begun in which women now nameless for us walked at the head, each with an amphoræ upon her shoulder—amphoræ which they filled at any fountain of life. Before these nameless women vanished on the horizon, each, like a water nymph of antiquity, lowered the brim of her urn to the earth, which thus was traversed by innumerable interlacing rills. And all these—even if by the most circuitous route—have augmented by some drops the mighty stream now called the woman movement. CHAPTER I THE EXTERNAL RESULTS OF THE WOMAN MOVEMENT