On the Continent, with the exception of a few places like Finland, the movement for equal suffrage, while earnestly pressed by a few, is not yet concentrated.  Women have won their rights to higher education and are admitted to the universities.  They can usually enter business and most of the professions.  Inequities of civil rights are gradually being swept away.  For example, in Germany a married woman has complete control of her property, but only if she specifically provided for it in the marriage contract; many German women are ignorant that they possess such a right.  The Germans may be divided into two classes:  the caste which rules, largely Prussian, militaristic, and bureaucratic; and that which, although desirous of more republican institutions and potentially capable of liberal views, is constrained to obey the first or ruling class.  This upper class is not friendly to the modern women’s-rights movement.  Perhaps it has read too much Schopenhauer.  This amiable philosopher, whose own mother could not endure living with him, has this to say of women[431]: 

“A woman who is perfectly truthful and does not dissemble, is perhaps an impossibility.  In a court of justice women are more often found guilty of perjury than men....  Women are directly adapted to act as the nurses and educators of our early childhood, for the simple reason that they themselves are childish, foolish, and shortsighted....  Women are and remain, taken altogether, the most thorough and incurable Philistines; and because of the extremely absurd arrangement which allows them to share the position and title of their husbands they are a constant stimulus to his ignoble ambitions....  Where are there any real monogamists?  We all live, at any rate for a time, and the majority of us always, in polygamy....  It is men who make the money, and not women; therefore women are neither justified in having unconditional possession of it nor capable of administering it....  That woman is by nature intended to obey, is shown by the fact that every woman who is placed in the unnatural position of absolute independence at once attaches herself to some kind of man, by whom she is controlled and governed; that is because she requires a master.  If she is young, the man is a lover; if she is old, a priest.”

Essentially the opinion of Schopenhauer is that of the Prussian ruling class to-day.  It is indisputable that in Germany, as elsewhere on the Continent, chastity in men outside of marriage is not expected, nor is the wife allowed to inquire into her husband’s past.  The bureaucratic German expects his wife to attend to his domestic comforts; he does not consult her in politics.  The natural result when the masculine element has not counterchecks is bullying and coarseness.  To find the coarseness, the reader can consult the stories in papers like the Berliner Tageblatt and much of the current drama; to observe the bullying, he will have to see it for himself, if he doubts it.