A young girl who was married under the law of community of property (and this constitutes the general rule) to a man without means whom she enriches may fall victim to indigence, if her husband is miserly. Perhaps she will be forced to obtain her own money for bare essentials bit by bit by begging from her husband, and thus practically live on alms despite her wealth.
She is also unable to act independently on her own account with respect to the last will and testament. Whereas the husband encumbers the common property with any debts he accrues, the wife’s debts are not paid back from that property. The wife may not purchase anything without her husband’s permission, and whatever she does acquire belongs to the husband. Her head and fingers belong to him. She is not even allowed to pawn her jewelry without his consent; she cannot obtain a passport without his written authorization. If an abused wife seeks shelter in the home of a family with whom she is friendly, the husband can force her, repeatedly, to return; he can starve her to death and she will have no legal grounds for urging him to provide the necessary food and water. In Hamburg, a woman still needs a guardian to undertake any legal action. [ . . . ]
Since time immemorial, the power and grandeur of motherly love has inspired words to pour forth from the human mouth in writing and speech, in prose and verse, but after the father’s death, the mother is not regarded as the natural and rightful guardian of the child. The father’s consent is replaced with that of the legal guardian. The father is primarily entrusted with arranging the child’s education. Only he is invested by law with rights regarding the children’s wealth. [ . . . ]
The unpunished crimes committed against women in the area of sexual relations are incredible (just imagine for a moment the statistics on seductions and their horrible history) and shameful for human society. One only has to think of the fact that prostitution is the basis for the morality of our society. This is the monstrous product of a corrupted society that imposes vice on the female proletariat for the benefit of well-to-do and sheltered women; it makes the female proletariat the pariah of the moral world and condemns the members of this class to pay the price for the virtuous ornamentation of the prosperous classes of women. Indeed, that constitutes moral swindling of the most brazen sort. [ . . . ]
The man seduces the woman, he plunges her into misery – and the laws make her the seducer’s accomplice and finish her off. In the history of humanity, woman has always played the role of special redeemer of man. She, nature’s lamb, takes his sins upon her – though she may collapse beneath the cross.
The laws men have made are the pure and unadulterated expression of their attitudes toward women; everything else is a pack of lies, empty phrases, and affectation. These laws, however, seem to exist only for one purpose, namely to prove the civil inaptitude of woman; they assume that woman is bad, weak, and unreasonable, whereas man is strong, intelligent, and a paragon of virtue. If men regarded women only as weak and not bad and unreasonable at the same time, laws like the ones mentioned would be reprehensible twice and three times over, for is it not the obligation and responsibility of the state to protect the weak against the strong? Such laws as exist, though, give to the strong the sharpest and most cutting weapons against the weak and defenseless.
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