conclusively by the aid of competent witnesses, that he had bound
her naked to a stake during the cold weather, on the street, and
asked the passers-by to strike her; and whenever they refused, he
struck her himself. He fastened her, moreover, to the ground, put
heavy stones and weights on her and broke one of her arms. The
court declared the husband "not guilty." "It cannot afford," it
said, "to teach woman to disobey the commands of her husband."
This is by no means an extreme or isolated case. Few, indeed,
become known to the public through the courts or through the
press.[205]

Canon law made its greatest encroachments at the period that chivalry
was at its height; the outward show of respect and honor to woman
keeping pace in its false pretense with the destruction of her legal
rights. Woman's moral degradation was at this time so great that a
community of women was even proposed, and was sustained by Jean de
Meung, the "Poet of Chivalry," in his Roman de la Rose. Christine of
Pisa, the first strictly literary woman of Western Europe, took up her
pen in defense of her sex against the general libidinous spirit of the
age, writing in opposition to Meung.

Under Feudalism, under Celibacy, under Chivalry, under the
Reformation, under the principles of new sects of the nineteenth
century--the Perfectionists and Mormons alike--we find this one idea
of woman's inferiority, and her creation as a subject of man's
passions openly or covertly promulgated.

The Salic law not only denied to women the right to reign, but to the
inheritance of houses and lands. One of its famous articles was:
"Salic land shall not fall to women; the inheritance shall devolve
exclusively on the males." The fact of sex not only prohibited woman's
inheritance of thrones and of lands, but there were forms in this law
by which a man might "separate himself from his family, getting free
from all obligations of relationship and entering upon an entire
independence." History does not tell us to what depths of degradation
this disseverance of all family ties reduced the women of his
household, who could neither inherit house or land. The formation of
the Salic code is still buried in the mists of antiquity; it is,
however, variously regarded as having originated in the fourth and in
the seventh century, many laws of its code being, like English common
law, unwritten, and others showing "double origin." But