



Produced by Renald Levesque






WOMAN

VOLUME VIII

WOMEN OF THE TEUTONIC NATIONS



HERMANN SCHOENFELD, PH.D., LL. D.
PROFESSOR OF GERMANIC LITERATURE IN THE GEORGE
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY


[Illustration 1:
EMMA CARRYING HER LOVER
After the painting by G. L. P. Saint-Ange
Charlemagne had so great an affection for his children, legitimate and
natural, that he prevented his daughters, of whom Emma was one, from
marrying, in order not to lose their company. They were reputed to be
very beautiful. Being debarred from marriage, they sought unlawful love
adventures, and gave birth to illegitimate children. The romantic story
of Emma's nightly meetings with Eginhard, and of her carrying her
learned lover through the freshly fallen snow to conceal his footprints,
is an unauthenticated legend.]



_Woman_

In all ages and in all countries

VOLUME VIII


WOMEN OF THE TEUTONIC
NATIONS

BY

HERMANN SCHOENFELD, PH.D., LL.D.
Professor of Germanic Literature in the
George Washington University

ILLUSTRATED

PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE BARRIE & SONS, PUBLISHERS



THIS VOLUME IS RESPECTFULLY
Dedicated to
MADAME CHRISTIAN HEURICH NEE KEYSER




PREFACE


Adequately to write the history of the woman of any race would mean the
writing of the history of the nation itself. There is no phase of the
cultural life of any people that is not founded upon the physical and
moral nature of its women. On the other hand, mental and moral heredity,
both through paternity and maternity, determines the character and
innermost being of woman. If we knew all the preponderating influences
of heredity for ages, we could with almost mathematical accuracy compute
the traits of human biology in every case. The forces of environment,
tremendous though they are, modify, but do not alter in any way the
original nature of man, which is established and standardized "by
eternal and immutable laws." Anthropology is continuously progressing
toward a firm scientific foundation, and is beginning to organize even
the vast domain of psychology into a well-defined system. The
interdependence between physical, mental, and moral traits is well
recognized, but its exact determination is impossible, owing to the
infinite complexity of the endless ancestral potencies.

So much is established, however: Teutonic woman, as she appears in
history, is the product of two groups of influences, the one group,
inherited nature; the other, environment; she is the exact sum of these
antecedent causes. And only so far as these causes differ does the
Teutonic woman differ from her sister of any other race of other times
and climes.

In this book of a purely historical, literary, and cultural character
must be excluded all that refers to the physiological and ethnographical
characteristics of the Teutonic woman and of her Slavic sister. Nor are
we concerned with the theory of their evolution, _i. e._, the search of
the physical principles according to which the consequences of their
existence are true to the laws of their antecedents. Many eminent
scientists have tried their great faculties on this subject of universal
interest and importance. Standard works of a scientific character, like
Floss's _Das Weib in der Natur und Volherhunde_, abound in scientific
and medical bibliography.

Our limited task is merely to deal succinctly with the most general
evolution of the social position and the cultural status of the Teutonic
and, even more briefly, of the Slavic woman at the various epochs of
their respective histories, and how far the history of civilization
among those races was influenced by them, how far the symptoms of
national morality and the degree of culture were shaped by feminine
achievements, proclivities, virtues, and vices. Two thousand years of
the richest, almost unfathomable, history had to be traversed in the
attempt to glean the essential red thread from the enormous masses of
facts which in their entirety would be inaccessible even to the most
universal historical scholar. Most difficult of all the periods is
perhaps the question of the present and actual women's movement, which
is now in its liveliest flux and in a most variable condition both in
the German and in the Slavic world. It is impossible as yet to
systematize the entirety of the problems and the requirements