ient nations, was not a primitive one of the Christian
Church.[181] Taught as one of the most sacred mysteries of religion,
which to doubt or to question was to hazard eternal damnation, it at
once exerted a most powerful and repressing influence upon woman,
fastening upon her a bondage which the civilization of the nineteenth
century has not been able to cast off.

To this doctrine of woman's created inferiority we can trace those
irregularities which for many centuries filled the Church with shame,
for practices more obscene than the orgies of Babylon or Corinth, and
which dragged Christendom to a darkness blacker than the night of
heathendom in pagan countries--a darkness upon which the most
searching efforts of historians cast scarcely one ray of light--a
darkness so profound that from the seventh to the eleventh century no
individual thought can be traced. All was sunk in superstition; men
were bound by Church dogmas, and looked only to aggrandizement through
her. The priesthood, which alone possessed a knowledge of letters,
prostituted their learning to the basest uses; the nobility spent
their lives in warring upon each other; the peasantry were the sport
and victim by turns of priest and noble, while woman was the prey of
all; her person and her rights possessing no consideration only as
they could be made to advance the interest or serve the pleasure of
noble, husband, father, or priest--some man-god to whose lightest
desire all her wishes were made to bend. The most pronounced doctrine
of the Church during this period was, that through woman sin had been
introduced into the world; that woman's whole tendency was toward
evil, and that had it not been for the unfortunate oversight of her
creation, man would be dwelling in the paradisical innocence and
happiness of Eden blessed with immortality. The Church looking upon
woman as under a curse, considered man as God's divinely appointed
agent for its enforcement, and that the restrictions she suffered
under Christianity were but parts of a just punishment for having
caused the fall of man. Christian theology thus at once struck a blow
at these old beliefs in woman's equality, broadly inculcating the
doctrine that woman was created for man, was subordinate to him and
under obedience to him. It bade woman stand aside from sacerdotal
offices, forbidding her to speak in the church, commanding her to ask
her husband at home for all she wished to know, at once repressing