The girl and the woman, in
their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male
behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the
uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going
through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just
so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming
influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more
immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become
riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not
pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and
who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of
woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come
to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the
transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it
approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the
countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and
shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean
the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes
one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the
female human being.