y demands. Granted that woman is weak
because she has been systematically degraded: but why was she degraded?
This is a far deeper question,--one to be met only by a profounder
philosophy and a positive solution. We are coming on ground almost wholly
untrod, and must do the best we can.

I venture to assert, then, that woman's social inferiority has been, to a
great extent, in the past a legitimate thing. To all appearance, history
would have been impossible without it, just as it would have been
impossible without an epoch of war and slavery. It is simply a matter of
social progress,--a part of the succession of civilizations. The past has
been inevitably a period of ignorance, of engrossing physical necessities,
and of brute force,--not of freedom, of philanthropy, and of culture.
During that lower epoch, woman was necessarily an inferior, degraded by
abject labor, even in time of peace,--degraded uniformly by war, chivalry
to the contrary notwithstanding. Behind all the courtesies of Amadis and
the Cid lay the stern fact,--woman a child or a toy. The flattering
troubadours chanted her into a poet's paradise; but alas! that kingdom of
heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force. The truth
simply was, that her time had not come. Physical strength must rule for a
time, and she was the weaker. She was very properly refused a feudal grant,
by reason, say "Les Coustumes de Normandie," of her unfitness for war or
policy: _C'est l'homme ki se bast et ki conseille_. Other authorities put
it still more plainly: "A woman cannot serve the emperor or feudal lord in
war, on account of the decorum of her sex; nor assist him with advice,
because of her limited intellect; nor keep his counsel, owing to the
infirmity of her disposition." All which was, no doubt, in the majority of
cases, true; and the degradation of woman was simply a part of a system
which has, indeed, had its day, but has bequeathed its associations.

From this reign of force, woman never freed herself by force. She could not
fight, or would not. Bohemian annals, to be sure, record the legend of a
literal war between the sexes, in which the women's army was led by Libussa
and Wlasla, and which finally ended with the capture, by the army of men,
of Castle Dziewin, Maiden's Tower, whose ruins are still visible near
Prague. The armor of Libussa is still shown at Vienna; and the guide calls
attention to the long-peaked toes of steel, with which, he avers,