Woman under socialism. Bebel August
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or wholly burnt down; many of them have since disappeared forever from the face of the earth. In other places the population had sunk to a third, a fourth, a fifth, even to an eighth and tenth part. Such was the case, for instance, with cities like Neurenberg, and with the whole of Franconia. And now, at the hour of extreme need, and with the end in view of providing the depopulated cities and villages as quickly as possible with an increased number of people, the drastic measure was resorted to of "raising the law," and allowing a man two wives. The wars had carried off the men; of women there was an excess. On February 14, 1650, the Congress of Franconia, held in Nuerenberg, adopted the resolution that "men under sixty years of age shall not be admitted to the monasteries;" furthermore, it ordered "the priests and curates, if not ordained, and the canons of religious establishments, shall marry;" "moreover every male shall be allowed to marry two wives; and all and each males are earnestly reminded, and shall be often warned, from the pulpit also, to so comport themselves in this matter; and care shall be taken that he shall fully and with becoming discretion diligently endeavor, so that, as a married man, to whom is granted that he take two wives, he not only take proper care of both wives, but avoid all misunderstanding among them." At that time, we see, matters that are to-day kept under strictest secrecy, were often discussed as of course from the pulpit itself.
But not commerce alone was at a standstill. Traffic and industry had been extensively ruined during this protracted period; they could recover only by little and little. A large part of the population had become wild and demoralized, disused to all orderly occupations. During the wars, it was the robbing, plundering, despoiling and murdering armies of mercenaries, which crossed Germany from one end to the other, that burned and knocked down friend and foe alike; after the wars, it was countless robbers, beggars and swarms of vagabonds that threw the population into fear and terror, and impeded and destroyed commerce and traffic. For the female sex, in particular, a period of deep suffering had broken. Contempt for woman had made great progress during the times of license. The general lack of work weighed heaviest on their shoulders; by the thousands did these women, like the male vagabonds, infest the roads and woods, and filled the poorhouses and prisons of the Princes and the cities. On top of all these sufferings came the forcible ejectment of numerous peasant families by a land-hungry nobility.
Compelled, since the Reformation, ever more to bend before the might of the Princes, and rendered ever more dependent upon these through court offices and military posts, the nobility now sought to recoup itself double and threefold with the robbery of peasant estates for the injury it had sustained at the hand of the Princes. The Reformation offered the Princes the desired pretext to appropriate the rich Church estates, which they swallowed in innumerable acres of land. The Elector August of Saxony, for instance, had turned not less than three hundred clergy estates from their original purpose, up to the close of the sixteenth century.54 Similarly did his brothers and cousins, the other Protestant Princes, and, above all, the Princes of Brandenburg. The nobility only imitated the example by bagging peasant estates, that had lost their owners, by ejecting free as well as serf peasants from house and home, and enriching themselves with the goods of these. To this particular end, the miscarried peasant revolts of the sixteenth century furnished the best pretext. After the first attempts had succeeded, never after were reasons wanting to proceed further in equally violent style. With the aid of all manner of chicaneries, vexations and twistings of the law – whereto the in-the-meantime naturalized Roman law lent a convenient handle – the peasants were bought out at the lowest prices, or they were driven from their property in order to round up the estates of noblemen. Whole villages, the peasant homes of as much as half a province, were in this way wiped out. Thus – so as to give a few illustrations – out of 12,543 peasant homestead appanages of knightly houses, which Mecklenburg still possessed at the time of the Thirty Years' War, there were, in 1848, only 1,213 left. In Pommerania, since 1628, not less than 12,000 peasant homesteads disappeared. The change in peasant economy, that took place in the course of the seventeenth century, was a further incentive for the expropriation of the peasant homesteads, especially to turn the last rests of the commons into the property of the nobility. The system of rotation of crops was introduced. It provided for a rotation in cultivation within given spaces of time. Corn lands were periodically turned into meadows. This favored the raising of cattle, and made possible the reduction of the number of farm-hands. The crowd of beggars and tramps grew ever larger, and thus one decree followed close upon the heels of another to reduce, by the application of the severest punishments, the number of beggars and vagabonds.
In the cities matters lay no better than in the country districts. Before then, women were active in very many trades in the capacity of working women as well as of employers. There were, for instance, female furriers in Frankfurt and in the cities of Sleswig; bakers, in the cities of the middle Rhine; embroiderers of coats of arms and beltmakers, in Cologne and Strassburg; strap-cutters, in Bremen; clothing-cutters in Frankfurt; tanners in Nuerenberg; gold spinners and beaters in Cologne.55 Women were now crowded back. The abandonment of the pompous Roman Catholic worship alone, due to the Protestantizing of a large portion of Germany, either injured severely a number of trades, especially the artistic ones, or destroyed them altogether; and it was in just these trades that many working women were occupied. As, moreover, it ever happens when a social state of things is moving to its downfall, the wrongest methods are resorted to, and the evil is thereby aggravated. The sad economic condition of most of the German nations caused the decimated population to appear as overpopulation, and contributed greatly towards rendering a livelihood harder to earn, and towards prohibitions of marriage.
Not until the eighteenth century did a slow improvement of matters set in. The absolute Princes had the liveliest interest, with the view of raising the standard abroad of their rule, to increase the population of their territories. They needed this, partly in order to obtain soldiers for their wars, partly also to gain taxpayers, who were to raise the sums needed either for the army, or for the extravagant indulgences of the court, or for both. Following the example of Louis XIV of France, the majority of the then extraordinarily numerous princely courts of Germany displayed great lavishness in all manner of show and tinsel. This was especially the case in the matter of the keeping of mistresses, which stood in inverse ratio to the size and capabilities of the realms and realmlets. The history of these courts during the eighteenth century belongs to the ugliest chapters of history. Libraries are filled with the chronicles of the scandals of that era. One potentate sought to surpass the other in hollow pretentiousness, insane lavishness and expensive military fooleries. Above all, the most incredible was achieved in the way of female excesses. It is hard to determine which of the many German courts the palm should be assigned to for extravagance and for a life that vitiated public morals. To-day it was this, to-morrow that court; no German State escaped the plague. The nobility aped the Princes, and the citizens in the residence cities aped the nobility. If the daughter of a citizen's family had the luck to please a gentleman high at court, perchance the Serenissimus himself, in nineteen cases out of twenty she felt highly blessed by such favor, and her family was ready to hand her over for a mistress to the nobleman or the Prince. The same was the case with most of the noble families if one of their daughters found favor with the Prince. Characterlessness and shamelessness ruled over wide circles. As bad as the worst stood matters in the two German capitals, Vienna and Berlin. In the Capua of Germany, Vienna, true enough, the strict Maria Theresa reigned through a large portion of the century, but she was impotent against the doings of a rich nobility, steeped in sensuous pleasures, and of the citizen circles that emulated the nobility. With the Chastity Commissions that she established, and in the aid of which an extensive spy-system was organized, she partly provoked bitterness, and partly made herself laughable. The success was zero. In frivolous Vienna, sayings like these made the rounds during the second half of the eighteenth century: "You must love your neighbor like yourself, that is to say, you must love your neighbor's wife as much as your own;" or "If the wife goes to the right, the husband may go to the left: if she takes an attendant, he takes a lady friend." In how frivolous a vein marriage and adultery were then taken, transpires from a letter of the poet Ew. Chr. von Kleist, addressed in 1751 to his friend Gleim. Among other things he there says: "You are already informed on the adventure of the Mark-Graf Heinrich. He sent his wife to his country seat and intends to divorce her because he found the Prince of Holstein in bed with her… The Mark-Graf might have done better had
Johann Janssen. Vol. III.
Dr. Karl Buecher, "Die Frauenfrage im Mittelalter."