tions, she
frequently had to work in the field or garden and to attend to the
poultry and cattle. In short, she was a veritable Cinderella, and her
solitary recreation was going to church on Sunday. Marriages only took
place within the same social circles; the most rigid and absurd spirit
of caste ruled everything, and brooked no transgression of its law. The
daughters were educated on the same principles; they were kept in
strict home seclusion; their mental development was of the lowest order,
and did not extend beyond the narrowest limits of household life. And
all this was crowned by an empty and meaningless etiquette, whose part
it was to replace mind and culture, and which made life altogether, and
especially that of a woman, a perfect treadmill of labor."

How was it possible that a condition as joyless and fruitless as this
should be the accepted ideal of womanhood? Already the question is
answered. For ages her identity had been merged in that of the man by
whose side she worked with no thought of recompense. She toiled early
and late, filling the office of general helper on the same terms; and
even to-day, under our own eyes, the wife of many a farmer goes through
her married life often not touching five dollars in cash in an entire
year.

Submissiveness, clinging affection, humility, all the traits accounted
distinctively feminine, and the natural and ever-increasing result of
steady suppression of all stronger ones stood in the way of any
resistance. Intellectual qualities, forever at a discount, repressed
development save in rarest cases. The mass of women had neither power
nor wish to protest; and thus the few traces we find of their earliest
connection with labor show us that they accepted bare subsistence as all
to which they were entitled, and were grateful if they escaped the
beating which the lower order of Englishman still regards it as his
right to give. Even in our own country and our own time this theory is
not altogether extinct. The papers only recently contained an account of
the brutal beating of a woman by a man. The woman in remonstrating
cried, "You have no right to beat me! I am not your wife!"

During the Middle Ages, and indeed well into the nineteenth century,
possession of property by women was confined to the unmarried, the
entire control and practical ownership passing to the husband upon
marriage.

Change comes at last to even the most fossilized thought. One by one,
social ins