THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 593
given the right to vote, except that the votes for all previous parties doubled. Reactionary thinking was even rather more than doubled; no explosive or even just
particularly humane impact of the political woman is discernible on bourgeois life. The senior female office clerk thus triumphed over what the lover not unreasonably
saw in the first fictional, varied women created by this emancipation, in Ibsen's Nora, Hauptmann's Anna Mahr (‘Lonely People’), Wedekind's Franziska. Thus in the
bourgeois women's movement the contents of the sex certainly did not become manifest: and yet from the beginning they were intended as never before, and yet they
were rejected by the opponents of emancipation, as if the movement was not heading for the office hours in which it died, but as if it was a recollection of Carmen on
the one hand, and of Antigone on the other, in fact a utopian conjuring up of the hetairan age on the one hand, and of matriarchy on the other; and above all as if the
women's movement were that of a specific human totality and fullness, which for this very reason, in its remotely possible contents, is inconsistent with soulless capitalist
enterprise, as the mortal enemy of art and woman. The bourgeois male hatred of the women's movement announces all these themes again and again e contrario,
devaluing them; and the devaluation of woman here into a hetaira seemed the cheapest and most ambivalent of all, with simultaneous reduction to no more than this, and
stabilization within it. Weininger proceeded in this direction with total obsession (Sex and Character, 1903): W, the essence of woman, is accordingly downright
lechery, without ego, memory, or loyalty, the totally opposite spirit to Jesus in man or to purity. Carmen thus appears as a genuine woman who has had no voice in
civilization and is not at home in accepted morality: ‘The need to be engaged in coition herself is woman's intensest need, but it is only a special case of her deepest, her
only vital interest, which is in coition in general: of the wish that there should be as much coition as possible, by whomsoever, wherever, whenever it may be … And this
characteristic of woman to be the envoy and agent of the idea of coition is also the only one which is present at all ages and even survives the menopause: the old
woman goes on prostituting, no longer herself, but others’ (l.c., p. 351ff.). And even more wildly: ‘The education of woman must be taken away from woman, and the
education of the whole of mankind must be taken away from the mother’ (l.c., p. 471); for only woman as hetaira is the truth, woman as madonna is a creation of man,
there is nothing that corresponds to her in reality. So much for the most vehement misogyny known to history, a single anti­utopia of woman, in