Johann Gottlieb Fichte

“ Has woman the same rights in the state which man has? This question may appear ridiculous to many. For if the only ground of all legal rights is reason and freedom, how can a distinction exist between two sexes which possess both the same reason and the same freedom?
Nevertheless, it seems that, so long as men have lived, this has been differently held, and the female sex seems not to have been placed on a par with the male sex in the exercise of its rights. Such a universal sentiment must have a ground, to discover which was never a more urgent problem than in our days. ”

“ Woman is compelled to observe all her duties by her inborn modesty. She can not act contrary to reason in any manner, because it would lead her to suspect herself of having acted so in the chief manner, and that she had chosen her husband, not from love—the most insupportable thought to woman—but merely as a means to satisfy her sexual impulse. The man in whom there still lingers generosity, and the woman in whom there still dwells modesty, are open to the utmost degree of culture ”

“ Only thus does the impulse which the woman feels to sacrifice receive that character of freedom and activity which it must have in order to be rational. Perhaps there does not exist a man who does not feel the absurdity to turn this around and to assume in man a similar impulse to satisfy a need of woman; a need, in fact, which he can neither presuppose in woman nor consider himself as its tool without feeling himself disgraced to the innermost depths of his soul. ”

“ Her own dignity requires that she should give herself up entirely as she is, and lives to her choice and should utterly lose herself in him. The least consequence is, that she should renounce to him all her property and all her rights. Henceforth she has life and activity only under his eyes and in his business. She has ceased to lead the life of an individual; her life has become a part of the life of her lover. ”

“ Whereas, therefore, the wife's adultery necessarily destroys the whole relation between husband and wife, the husband's adultery does not do so necessarily, but, nevertheless, may possibly destroy it. His guilt is as great as that of the faithless wife, perhaps even greater, for he evinces lack of generosity, that is, meanness. The wife may pardon; and a noble, worthy wife certainly will pardon. But it is painful for the husband to be pardoned, and still more painful for the wife that she should have something to pardon. The husband loses the courage and power to be the head of the family ”

“ Woman, in making herself the means to satisfy man, gives up her personality; and she receives this and her whole dignity back again only by thus making herself means to satisfy man from love for a particular one.
If this sentiment ever should cease; if woman ever should cease to regard in the man whom she satisfied the most lovable of all his sex, this thought alone would make her contemptible in her own eyes. ”

“ In consequence of this natural generosity, man, in his relation to his wife, is compelled, first of all, to be worthy of esteem, since her whole peace of mind depends upon his being held in esteem by her. Nothing so irrevocably kills the love of the wife as the meanness or infamy of her husband. Indeed, the female sex will pardon in our sex every thing but cowardice and weakness of character. The ground of this is by no means a selfish calculation upon our protection; but solely the impossibility to submit to such men, as woman's destiny nevertheless requires her to submit. ”

“ The reason why, nevertheless, it has been done, may be found, perhaps, in the consideration that marriage, like all that is determined by the conception of rights, is a living together of free beings. But it would be bad if this cohabitation had no higher ground, and no other regulative principle, than a law of compulsion. Marriage must exist before we can speak of any matrimonial rights, precisely as man must exist before we can speak of rights at all. ”

“ He, therefore, sees how an originally free being voluntarily submits itself to him with unlimited confidence, and that she makes not only her whole external fate, but also her internal peace of soul and moral character—at least her own faith in it—dependent upon him, since the faith of woman in herself and in her own innocence and virtue depends upon this, that she may never cease to esteem and love her husband above all others of his sex.
As the moral impulse of woman manifests itself as love, so in man that impulse manifests itself as generosity. ”

“ Even the man who makes glory the chief or but one of the ends of his life, loses the merit of his acts, and sooner or later, also, that very glory. Women ought to be grateful that their position precludes the very suspicion of such a motive. But what is far more: by such thirst for glory women sacrifice the amiable modesty of their sex, which nothing can more disgust than to be put up for a show. ”

“ Women are ineligible to public offices for the following simple reasons: public officers are responsible to the state; and hence must be perfectly free, and dependent always only upon their own will; otherwise such a responsibility would be unjust and contradictory. Woman, however, is free and independent only so long as she has no husband. Hence the exclusive condition under which a woman might become eligible to office, would be the promise not to marry. But no rational woman can give such a promise, nor can the state rationally accept it. ”

“ Adultery on the part of the husband evinces either a low mode of thinking, when the woman with whom he commits it surrenders herself, not from love, but from other motives; or, when the woman gives herself up from love, it evinces the grossest injustice toward this woman; for by accepting her he obliges himself to fulfill all the duties of marriage, to be unlimitedly generous and careful of her peace of mind, while he knows that he can not be so. ”

“ The marriage relation is the true mode of existence of grown persons of both sexes, required even by nature. In this relation all man's faculties develop; but out of it many, and among them the most remarkable faculties of man, remain uncultivated. Precisely as the whole existence of man has no relation to any sensuous end, so neither has its necessary mode, marriage.
Marriage is a union between two persons—one man and one woman. A woman who has given herself up to one, can not give herself up to a second, for her whole dignity requires that she should belong only to this one. ”

“ The natural impulse in animals and plants impelled them to take care of a strange body as of their own. How is this impulse likely to manifest itself in human intelligence? Doubtless as a feeling of the needs of another body; precisely as the mother feels her own needs. Such a feeling is called sympathy. Sympathy, therefore, is the form in which the natural instinct of the mother for her child manifests itself; and this sympathy has the same end which the instinct of nature has—the physical preservation of the child. ”

“ Ambition and vanity are contemptible in a man; but in woman they are corrupting; for they root out that modesty and self-sacrificing love for her husband, upon which her whole dignity rests. A rational and virtuous woman can be proud only of her husband and children; not of herself, for she forgets herself in them. Add to this, that those women who seriously envy men their celebrity, are deceived concerning the true object of their wish. Woman necessarily desires the love of some man, and, in order to attract it, she is anxious to attract the attention of the male sex. ”

“ It is not merely mechanically necessary that she should generate the fruit out of herself, and form it in her womb, but her own consciousness forces upon her considerate care of its preservation.
In virtue of a law of nature, which is most assuredly universal, the child is not born without pain. The moment of the child's birth is for the mother a moment of relief from pain, and hence, necessarily, a joyful moment. Joy connects the mother with the existence of the child. ”

“ Their relation becomes reversed. The woman becomes the generous, and the husband the submissive party. This is, indeed, shown in common experiences. A wife who knows and tolerates the dissipations of her husband is not despised, but, on the contrary, is held all the more in esteem the gentler and wiser she bears it. The presupposition is, therefore, that she ought not to seek legal redress. Whence does this opinion rise, which is so deeply rooted in men's souls? From our legislation, or from our own sex? It seems not, since it exists also among the women, who complain about that legislation. ”

“ A woman can never confess this to be the case. She can only confess the motive to be love. Nor is the continuance of marriage in any way conditioned by the satisfaction of this impulse; for that end may vanish utterly, and the marriage relation may, nevertheless, continue in its whole intensity.
Philosophers have hitherto considered it necessary to assign some end to marriage, and have specified that end variously. But marriage has no other end than itself; it is its own end. ”

“ The only ground for the control of parents over their children is the need of education. When the ground ceases, so does the grounded. When the education is completed, the child becomes free. But only the parents can decide when it is completed, since only they have preestablished its final end. If they hold that the child is sufficiently educated, they voluntarily give it freedom. They should, indeed, increase the freedom of the child constantly during the progress of education, as one of the rules of such education, and not as a right which the child has ”

“ So far as her private and internal relation in the house is concerned, the tenderness of the husband necessarily restores to her all and more than she has lost. The husband will not relinquish her rights, because they are his own; and because, if he did so, he would dishonor himself and his wife before society. The wife has also rights in public affairs, for she is a citizen. I consider it the duty of the husband—in states which give to the citizen a vote on public matters—not to vote without having discussed the subject with his wife, and allowed her to modify his opinion through her own. ”

“ Mere sexual impulse should never be called love; to do so is a vulgar abuse of language, calculated to cause all that is noble in human nature to be forgotten. In fact, my opinion is that nothing should be called love but what we have just now described. Man originally does not feel love, but sexual impulse; and love in man is not an original, but a communicated, derived impulse, namely, an impulse developed through connection with a loving woman; and has, moreover, quite a different form in man to what it has in woman. ”

“ Each party wishes to give up its personality, so that the other one may rule alone. Each finds content only in the satisfaction of the other; the exchange of hearts and wills becomes perfect. It is only in connection with a loving woman that the heart of the man opens to love, to the love which confidingly surrenders and loses itself in the beloved object; it is only in the tie which connects the wife with the husband that she learns generosity and conscious self-sacrifice ”

“ Or if it is his intention to become a teacher of future students in schools or universities, it is also his intention to communicate again what he now learns, and to increase the stock of his knowledge by discoveries of his own, so that culture may not come to a stand-still. Hence he must know how to make these discoveries, and' how to develop them out of the human soul. But this acquiring a knowledge of the form of science is precisely what they, women, can not make use of, since they are to become neither teachers, preachers, doctors, or lawyers. ”

“ The original relation between parents and children is not merely determined through the conception of rights, but chiefly through nature and morality, precisely as the relation between husband and wife. ”

“ It can not be maintained that woman is inferior to man in regard to talents of mind; but it can certainly be maintained that the minds of man and woman have, by nature, a very different character. Man reduces all that is in and for him to clear conceptions, and discovers it only through reasoning—provided, of course, his knowledge is a true conviction, and not a mere historical knowledge. Woman, on the other hand, has a natural sentiment of what is good, true, and proper. ”

“ The father of a family, who represents not only his own but also the interests of his wife and children, ought indeed to have a greater influence and a more decisive vote in a commonwealth, than the citizen who represents only his own interests. ”

“ This dignity she maintains, although she becomes means, because she voluntarily makes herself means in virtue of a noble natural impulse—love!
Love, therefore, is the form in which the sexual impulse appears to woman. But love is, to sacrifice one's self for the sake of another not in consequence of a reasoning, but in consequence of a feeling. ”

“ But each woman has also the right to sacrifice her personality, that is to say, there is no external legal ground against her doing so. Precisely as each person has an unlimited external—not internal, or moral—right to take away his own life, the state having no right to make laws against suicide, so also has woman unlimited external right over her own honor. She is externally free to lower herself to a brute, as the man is also externally free to think meanly and low. ”

“ The peace of the wife depends upon her being utterly submitted to her husband, and having no other will than his own. Now, since he knows this to be so, his character of manly generosity, which he can not deny without denying his own nature and dignity, requires that he should make it as light as possible for her to do so. This he can not do by allowing his wife to rule him; for the pride of her love consists in being and seeming to be submitted and not knowing otherwise. ”

“ My views on laws concerning adultery, in so far as those laws are intended, or appear intended, to secure a property, the property of a man to his wife and of a wife to her husband, I shall express hereafter. Precisely as the state regards husband and wife as only one legal person, externally represented by the husband, and their property as one property, so each citizen also must regard them and their property. In law disputes citizens must deal with the husband; none have a right to immediately appeal to the wife. ”

“ For woman sees no further, and her nature goes no further, than love; hence woman is only love. It does not matter to woman whether man—who does not possess that female innocence, nor is intended to possess it, and who may become conscious of all that is within him—proceeds to analyze that impulse or not; it suffices to woman that the sexual impulse is to a woman only love. ”

“ Cohabitation is the real actualization of marriage; for only through it does the woman submit her whole personality to the husband, and shows him her love, from which the whole described relation between married people emanates. Where this cohabitation has occurred, marriage is always to be presupposed; where it has not occurred, any other union than a union of marriage has taken place. Hence, a mere engagement to be married, whether public or private, does not constitute a marriage; and the breaking off thereof is not to be considered as a divorce. ”

“ It may be said, that man must first make himself rational; whereas, woman is already rational by nature. This is, indeed, clearly to be deduced from the fundamental distinction between woman and man. Her fundamental impulse originally unites with reason, because it would cancel reason unless it did so unite; it becomes a rational impulse. And this is the reason why woman's whole system of feeling is rational, and made to correspond to reason, as it were. Man, on the contrary, must first subordinate all his impulses to reason, through exertion and activity. ”

“ It is certainly to be expected in the case of the man, provided he marries a worthy woman; but in the case of the woman it is very uncertain; and it is terrible to sacrifice and degrade a whole human life upon the risk of this bare possibility.
The result of our argument is, that marriage must be an absolutely free act; and the state, as the protector of the rights of each individual, and particularly of the female sex, has the right and the duty to watch over this freedom of all matrimonial alliances. ”