Character never joins forces with servility. And, indeed, men and women-especially the latter-who have an independent character are often regarded as… - Anna Kuliscioff

It is true that what has pushed public opinion increasingly against the Germans are excesses committed against the rules of international law that had been established as preventive measures to make war (as it were) less barbaric. But why would we want to punish the authors of such horrors by spreading further carnage? Do we not have a similar burden on our consciences? Who does not recall the ears of Arabs brought back from Libya as souvenirs by our soldiers?

It therefore seems to me that only when labor is equitably remunerated, or at least remunerated like man's, will woman take the first and most important step forward, since it is only by becoming economically independent that she will withdraw from moral parasitism and conquer her freedom, dignity, and the actual respect of the other sex. I believe it is only at that point that women will have the moral strength needed not to put up with the pressures of fathers, husbands, and brothers, and will themselves be able to create, among their sex, that powerful weapon of modern social struggles, namely, association, in order to acquire civil and political rights-which are now denied to them, as they are to men interdicted for imbecility, madness, or delinquency. The existing laws inflict this atrocious humiliation on woman, because not only men but also women themselves consider woman as an eternal minor, and she will be able to come of age only when she will be sufficient unto herself through her own intelligence, skills, and moral strengths.

For the triumph of the cause of my sex, I hope only that men will be slightly less intolerant and women slightly more supportive of each other. Perhaps, at that point, the prophecy of the greatest poet of our century, Victor Hugo, will be realized: he predicted of woman what William Ewart Gladstone predicted of the factory worker-that the nineteenth century would be the "Century of the Woman."