Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 3.djvu/988

CHAPTER LVII.

CONTINENTAL EUROPE.^[1]

BY THEODORE STANTON.

If you would know the political and moral status of a people, demand what place its women occupy.-[L. Aimé Martin.

There is nothing, I think, which marks more decidedly the character of men or of nations, than the manner in which they treat women.-[Herder.

 

The Woman Question in the Back-ground—In France the Agitation Dates from the Upheaval of 1789--International Women's Rights Convention in Paris, 1878—Mlle. Hubertine Auclert Leads the Demand for Suffrage—Agitation began in Italy with the Kingdom—Concepcion Arenal in Spain—Coëducation in Portugal—Germany: Leipsic and Berlin—Austria in Advance of Germany—Caroline Svetlá of Bohemia—Austria Unsurpassed in contradictions—Marriage Emancipates from Tutelage in Hungary—Dr. Henrietta Jacobs of Holland—Dr Isala van Diest of Belgium—In Switzerland the Catholic Cantons Lag Behind—Marie Gægg, the Leader—Sweden Stands First—Universities Open to Women in Norway—Associations in Denmark—Liberality of Russia toward Women—Poland—The Orient—Turkey—Jewish Wives—The Greek Woman in Turkey—The Greek Woman in Greece—An Unique Episode—Woman's Rights in the American Sense not known.

The reader of the preceding pages will be sorely disappointed if he expects to find in this brief chapter a similar record of progress and reform. If, however, he looks simply for an earnest of the future, for a humble beginning of that wonderful revolution in favor of women which has occurred in the United States, and to a less degree in England, during the past quarter of a century, his expectations will be fully realized. More than this; he will close this long account of woman's emancipation in the new world convinced that in due season a similar blessing is to be enjoyed by the women of the old world.

For the moment, the woman question in Europe is pushed into the background by the all-absorbing struggle still going on in various forms between the republican and monarchical principle, between the vital present and the moribund past; but the most

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1. This chapter is, in large part, a résumé of Mr. Stanton's valuable work "The Woman Question in Europe," published in 1884 by the Putnams of New York, to which we refer the reader who desires to study more in detail the European movement for women.—[The Editor.