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CHAPTER II.
Equality.
If men would only reason. They would very soon understand that the true position of women is always one of equality with themselves in all the relations of life. This is true, taken not only from the most just, humane and noble standpoints, but from the most interested and selfish ones, for not only are the children stronger, healthier, more intellectual and less irritable, having a stronger hold on life, but from the merest sensual motives, this is true: where the wife is simply a grown up governed child, always more or less under the dominant will of the husband, she can never give the strength and satisfaction to the husband in the sexual relation that she would if an individualized woman, with all the distinct magnetic power that only such women can impart.
The more of selfhood a woman possesses, the greater the ability to concentrate all of nerve power in the relation which she willingly engages in for reproduction in a pure monogamic love that is not robbed of the fineness of the relation by the degredation of partial or complete compulsion. While such a relation is not love , there must be love with it, or it is an injury to both parties in the trans-
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action; with love and respect there comes a peaceful satisfied condition of both body and mind. Excess, however, brings irritability and unrest. This would be avoided by sleeping separately. Much of the disgust that at times is so unbearable would be avoided if the matters of making and un-making toilets were done in separate rooms. Few people are so bound together in soul that there is not an ill-concealed disgust for private toilet matters, and even the ordinary arrangement of the clothes.
However pleased with the person when clothed, the dressing and undressing transition, after a little time, becomes an endured unpleasantness.
Several cases have come to our knowledge where women could not void fluids when their husbands were in the room, no matter how dark the night or how long they had been married. Women have suffered much, and made an effort to do so for an hour at a time, and although in severe pain because of the necessity, it was impossible to be relieved until they were entirely alone.
Men have had to partially dress and stand outside of their own rooms in hotels, before their wives were not able to get relief.
Children are often severely punished for not attending to the calls of nature before retiring, and invariably doing so as soon as put to bed and left alone. If they
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were tied in their toilet chairs and left alone for a few minutes the result would be accomplished.
This is a peculiar condition of the system that few grown people understand. They can understand their failure to respond to the calls of nature, when they enter a closet that is so disgusting that the inclination of nature immediately leaves them.
Fistulas often result where a person so disgusted is placed where there is no alternative but to visit such a closet. Every house however small in towns and cities ought to have closet plumbing where water flows abundantly, so that the calls of nature would not be so dreaded and postponed.
It is found that constipated bowels caused by postponement of the calls of nature so irritates the organs of sex, that much of immorality is the result. There must be an equality of rights of the organs of the human system.
All should know the evils of exciting influences on the organs of reproduction, and both boys and girls should be equal in such knowledge.
Men as well as women suffer from inequality of knowledge as well as of rights and privileges in the various relations of life. Men who deny any rights to women on account of their superior physical strength, sooner or later have their own rights as
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men interfered with, because the sentiment of tyranny is ever encroaching more and more; it is not safe to deny any one rights that belong to all.
In the middleages men were mutilated (castrated) so that they could sing like women in their choirs. They would not admit the women in the choirs at all, and the great injustice to women was visited upon the sons of men, because they must have the voices of women and could not get them without mutilating men when they would not acknowledge woman's right to sing.
Mutilated men are devoid of fine sensibilities, and are harsh and unfeeling and even cruel.
These cruel men were, and are to this day, the guardians of the women of the Harems. They accompany them whenever they are allowed to go out, and hold them under constant surveillance. Women herded in this way bear children that are tyrants from birth, being marked by those who tyrannized over them. Their failure to make advances in civilization, is owing to the manner in which the women are treated. But a few years will elapse before the men of this country will be able to see themselves reflected in the glass of as gross inconsistency as the men to whom we refer. Men may laugh at the idea of women singing in public, or ever uncovering their faces being "out of woman's sphere, and out of the delicate proprieties of life, and making women
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unfit to be wives or even good enough to be called women," but let men remember, that it is only a piece of the same barbarism that allows men to be the dictators of women in anything that related to existence.
Nothing less than perfect equality of rights will ever result in the greatest happiness, and the grandest possibilities.
Enlightened women look upon any interference with human rights of women, whether as regards a failure to pass a law to protect woman in her clearly expressed right of suffrage in the Constitution, or any human rights, as being as great a barbaric wrong, as men can possibly deem the mutilation wrongs of men. They differ only in degree but not in kind. For both stab in the same direction. Both seek to be the masters of the special functions of sex.
A marked instance of oppression to women, resulting in cruelty to boys is apparent in the Turkish Harem, where boys from 10 to 15 years of age are kept in large numbers for licentious acts in the rectum, which results in agonized death from inflammation.
Enlightened countries are becoming m ore just to women, but still we are shocked with facts like the following that will soon be obsolete in England, as they are already in America, owing to the advance of public sentiment beyond the codes:
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Not many years since an English court decided that a man might beat his wife with a stick not larger than his little finger, continuing to legalize this relic of barbarism.
If a woman was untrue to her husband in Athens, he could take away all her property, beat her, and sell her at auction, but he could do what he pleased.
Mohammed ordained that untrue wives should be buried alive, but afterwards decided that they should be stoned to death.
In Egypt an untrue wife's nose was cut off, while in Germany her hair was cut short.
In the Polynesian Islands the wives are not allowed to eat the same food as the husbands, or cook it at the same fire.
In China, the women have so many disadvantages that they are constantly praying that in the next world they may be men. Husband and wife may mutually agree to separate, but if the wife leaves without his consent, he may strangle her. Talkativeness, or a disregard to parents in law, are causes for a man's divorce.
All of these inequalities of sex have their penalties. But we have neither time or space to elaborate truths that need but a mention. It is because of the inequality of rights of sex, that so much of outrage is perpetrated by men of all ages. Rapes on little girls of but two or three years of age, are at-
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tempted by young men often giving them venereal disease. Boys from a dozen to eighteen years of age, are often found attempting to outrage little girls, and as boys commence so young to pursue the vices so well understood by the constant talk before them of hem hardened in crime, no boy is too young to read this book, and his special attention should be called to the chapters on Pure Manhood, and the language of the Nerves. Small boys should learn that vice so degrades the boy that the man is capable of outrages far worse than murders, and that by "slow degrees the tempter wins; then step by step they give up all," and become perfect demons; and as an illustration the following is related:
In the war with the Larmates, Emperor Proclus, in fifteen days, violated one hundred virgins who were his captives.
American men will violate their wives while menstruating, which even an American Indian is never guilty of doing. Perfect equality of men and women in all the relations of life would produce the best results to men as well as women.