have fought for, and the Church has fought against, the dignity, honor,
and welfare of women for centuries; and because fear, organization,
wealth, selfishness, and power have been on the side of the Church, and
she has kept women too ignorant to understand the situation, she has
succeeded for many generations in retarding the progress and shutting
out the light that slowly came in despite of her.

"_No society which preserves any tincture of Christian institutions is
ever_ likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred
on them by the middle Roman law; but the proprietary disabilities of
married females stand on quite a different basis from their personal
incapacities, and it is by keeping alive and consolidating the former
that _the canon law has so deeply injured civilization_. There are
many vestiges of a _struggle between the secular and ecclesiastical
principles; but the canon law nearly everywhere prevailed._"*

* Maine's "Ancient Law," 158.

It has always been uphill work fighting the Church. So long as it had
sword and fagot at its command, and the will to use them; so long as it
pretended to have, and people believed that it had, power to mete out
damnation to its opposers; just so long were science, justice, and
thought fatally crippled.

But when Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and the great encyclopedist circle
of France got their hands on the throat of the Church, and dipped their
pens in the fire of eloquence, wit, ridicule, reason, and justice,
then, and not till then, began to dawn a day of honor toward women, of
humanity and justice and truth. They drew back the curtain, the world
saw, the cloud lifted, and life began on a new plane. Under Pagan rule
woman had begun, as we have seen, to receive recognition apart from
sex. She was a human being. A general law of "persons" applied to
and shielded her. But from the first the Christian Church refused to
consider her apart from her capacity for reproduction; and this one
ground of consideration it pronounced a curse, a crime, and a shame to
her. Her only claim to recognition at all was a curse. She was not a
person, she was only a function.*

* See Lea's "Sacerdotal Celibacy."

Man it pronounced a person first, with rights, privileges, and
protection as such. Incidentally he might also be a husband, a father,
or a son. His welfare, duties, and rights as a person, as a human being,
were apart from and superior to those that w