In this book of a purely historical, literary, and cultural character must be excluded all that refers to the physiological and ethnographical characteristics of the Teutonic woman and of her Slavic sister. Nor are we concerned with the theory of their evolution, _i. e._, the search of the physical principles according to which the consequences of their existence are true to the laws of their antecedents. Many eminent scientists have tried their great faculties on this subject of universal interest and importance. Standard works of a scientific character, like Floss's _Das Weib in der Natur und Volherhunde_, abound in scientific and medical bibliography. Our limited task is merely to deal succinctly with the most general evolution of the social position and the cultural status of the Teutonic and, even more briefly, of the Slavic woman at the various epochs of their respective histories, and how far the history of civilization among those races was influenced by them, how far the symptoms of national morality and the degree of culture were shaped by feminine achievements, proclivities, virtues, and vices. Two thousand years of the richest, almost unfathomable, history had to be traversed in the attempt to glean the essential red thread from the enormous masses of facts which in their entirety would be inaccessible even to the most universal historical scholar. Most difficult of all the periods is perhaps the question of the present and actual women's movement, which is now in its liveliest flux and in a most variable condition both in the German and in the Slavic world. It is impossible as yet to systematize the entirety of the problems and the requirements which have resulted in recent times from the transformation of society with regard to the position of woman among the two modern peoples. Many of the questions belong to the domain of private and public law, of political economy, of sociology, of education in all its phases. The leaders of state and church and society, the higher schools and universities, are signally undecided concerning the final solution, though the mist of the conflict of opinion begins slowly to clear away. Even under the changed conditions of modern society, one party still clings to the old tradition of the family ideal of wifehood and motherhood, which is no longer possible in all cases, as of yore, and considers extra-domestic activity as abnormal, unhealthy, transient; the other extremists desire to wipe out the natural differences and the limitations prescribed by sex to human activity and capacity. A middle ground and a rational solution will certainly be found during this century.