THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 590
living was different in this connection from poorer and bolder women. The latter had mostly broken with the family completely and bore the consequences; they
adopted the masculine course, that of the professional person, entirely. The young ladies who no longer wanted to be so merely got over­excited, but the masculine
woman acted differently, the leading woman of the time, the incipient suffragette. The intention of this female protester was, unconsciously and very often consciously, to
go her own way, to attain masculine superiority. An undeniable hatred of men was a strange mixture here of hatred by those who were oppressed and of reluctant
recognition at the same time; hence their envy, their emulation, indeed their grotesque will to outdo men. Suffering from their own sex made them prone to this, and in
turn their own sex was to be led to victory, against itself. This broken wish did not prevent the female protester of the time from providing and sustaining the boldness of
the call for the new woman. The free girl also blazed up now, as only young boys would do as a rule, and the masculine woman, in her new haircut, thoroughly
sharpened the dream of being a woman in a different way.
But it turned out that the rebellious life did not remain fresh for long. The more workers were needed, the less room there was for the so­called free girl, the less reason
the female protester had to be one. The bourgeois young woman who was capable of working for a living came to stand on her own two feet, but this only made her
seemingly more independent. Instead of the right to self­chosen love and a free life there arose the tedium of the office, mostly with a subordinate position as well.
Hardly had she gained the right to vote, than parliament had less say than ever before; hardly were the lecture halls opened up to women, than the crisis of bourgeois
science began. At the same time capital, when it ‘opened up jobs’ for women, was interested in removing everything that smacked of the desire for freedom, and
especially everything neighbouring on thorough emancipation, on socialist emancipation. The tamer female leaders now arose: Helene Lange, Marie Stritt, and finally
Gertrud Bäumer, all for a movement without ‘aberrations’. Around 1900 the aberrations had been secessionist, the hatred of the juste milieu. At that time the new
woman had her utopia of water­lilies and sunflowers together with the Art Nouveau man; it was a bohemian literary one, but for this very reason not a tame one. The
background of the future dreamed up for women was filled with festive­Dionysian images of revolution, of which little more remained a generation later than the
liberation from the corset and the right to smoke, to vote and to study. When Bebel wrote ‘Woman and