IN AMERICA 159
Weitling's most extensive contribution on the subject of
women's rights appeared in the issue of August 28, 1852, and was
entitled "Concerning the emancipation of women." Reviewing
the problem, with many references to literature from Solomon
to Proudhon and Heinzen and to the comments of medical experts
on the physical deterioration of women, he expressed a willing-
ness to give women all rights "to which they are entitled, and
capable, by nature" of exercising. But he made it clear that he
would not have his over-all program of reform modified or re-
strained by the desires and views of women, for he believed that
they were more individualistic than men and not likely by nature
to espouse communism. Therefore he tried merely to demon-
strate that they would benefit, especially in matters of marriage
and parenthood, from a communist regime, and argued that the
state of the future must provide equal treatment for men and
women as far as wages, social legislation, education, and other
rights and responsibilities were concerned. The demand for the
vote he dismissed as nonsensical, largely because he considered the
whole existing democratic process as "political frippery." In the
truly communist state women would have the honor and respect
and equal opportunity which was due all human beings, and he
agreed with Fourier that "l'extension des privileges des femmes
est le principe general de tous les progrès sociaux." Weitling saw
his first woman in bloomers in Cleveland in 1851 and ever after
wrote sympathetically about dress reform.
Weitling's position on abolitionism fitted logically into his gen-
eral pattern of reform. He disapproved of slavery. He had made
that clear, with some very uncomplimentary references to the
"model republic" across the sea, in the Garantieen. In 1850, he
specifically denounced the new Fugitive Slave Law. A year later,
in a strong editorial "On the Slave Question," he denounced slave
auctions, the horrors and indecencies of the master-slave relation-
ship, and the intolerable position of the freed Negro in the South
and tried to arouse his fellow German immigrants so that they