Gage.

"Wives in England were bought from the fifth to the
eleventh century" [The dates are significant; let the Church
respond.]--Herbert Spencer.

"In England, as late as the seventeenth century, husbands of
decent station were not ashamed to beat their wives.
Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasure for the purpose of
seeing wretched women whipped at Bridewell. It was not until
1817 that the public whipping of women was abolished in
England."--Spencer.

** See Appendix E.

Thus was the forced degradation of woman made a source of revenue to
the Church, and a means of crushing her self-respect and destroying her
sense of personal responsibility as to her own acts in the matter of
chastity, the legitimate outcome of which is to be found in the vast
army of women who are named only to be reviled. _In them the Church can
look on her own work_. The fruit is the natural outcome of the training
woman received that taught and compelled her _always_ to submit to
the dictates of some man, no matter what her own judgment, modesty, or
desires might be. She was not supposed to have an opinion or to know
right from wrong; and from Paul's injunction, "If you want to know
anything ask your husband at home," down to the decisions of the last
General Conference of the Methodist Church, the teaching that woman must
subordinate her own sense of right and her own judgment to the dictates
of someone else--_any_ one else of the opposite sex--from first to last
has been as ingenious a method as could have been devised to fill the
world with libertines and their victims.* It is time for the followers
of St. Paul to nice the results of their own work.

* See Appendix F, 2.

Under the provisions of the law which held that all "persons" could
recover damages for injury--have legal redress for a wrong inflicted
upon them--woman again was held as _not a 'person._

If she were assaulted and beaten, or if she were subjected to the
greatest indignity that it is possible to inflict upon her, she had
no redress. She could not complain. The law gave her no protection
whatever. Her father or husband could, if he saw fit, bring suit to
recover damages for the loss of _her services as a servant and wholly
upon the ground that it was an injury to him and to his feelings_. She
was no more recognized as a "person" in the matter, nor was she more
highly considered than if she were an inmate of a z