Under the proviso that he inflict injury or disadvantage upon none, the individual shall oversee the satisfaction of his own instincts. The satisfaction of the sexual instinct is as much a private concern as the satisfaction of any other natural instinct. No one is accountable to others in this matter, and no unsolicited judge may interfere. How I shall eat, how I shall drink, how I shall sleep, how I shall clothe myself is my private affair – as is my intercourse with persons of the opposite sex. Intelligence and culture, perfect individual freedom – qualities that become normal through the education and the conditions of future society – will guard every individual against the commission of acts that will redound to his own injury. The men and women of future society will have a much higher degree of self-discipline and self-knowledge than those of the present. The simple fact that all bashful prudery and affectations of secrecy regarding natural matters will have vanished is a guarantee of a more natural intercourse between the sexes than that which prevails today. If incompatibility, disenchantment, or repulsion sets in between two persons who have come together, then morality commands that the unnatural, and therefore immoral, bond be dissolved. And seeing that all the circumstances and conditions that have hitherto condemned large numbers of women to celibacy and prostitution will have vanished, man will no longer be dominant. On the other hand, the completely altered social conditions will have removed the numerous inconveniences that affect married life today, often preventing its favorable unfolding, or even rendering it wholly impossible.
The constrictions, contradictions, and unnatural aspects of the present position of woman are being increasingly recognized in wide social circles. The sentiment finds lively utterance in the literature on the Social Question as well as in works of fiction – often, it must be confessed, in the wrong manner. That the present form of marriage corresponds ever less with its purpose is no longer denied by any thinking person; therefore, it is not surprising that the people who find it natural to want freedom of choice in love and the ability to freely dissolve the marital bond are precisely the same ones who fail to draw the necessary conclusions, in other areas of life, that our present social system must be changed. They believe that freedom of sexual intercourse may be asserted only by the privileged classes. In a polemic against Fanny Lewald’s* efforts on behalf of the emancipation of woman, Mathilde Reichhardt-Stromberg expresses herself as follows:
* “Frauenrecht und Frauenpflicht. Eine Antwort auf Fanny Lewalds Briefe: Für und wider die Frauen” [“Women’s Rights and Women’s Duties. A Response to Fanny’s Lewald’s Letter For and Against Women”], 2nd edition, Bonn, 1871.
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