nment developed, and man's power over woman was sanctioned by
custom and law. The woman was stolen, or bought; and while sexual
attraction did not play the continuous part which it plays in developed
society, it must have done much to protect women from abuse and neglect,
at least during the years of girlhood and child-bearing. It is at this
point that our historical records begin.

In the pages of Homer, or of the Old Testament, in Tacitus's "Germania,"
or in the writings of Livy, we find woman's position well defined. True,
she stands second to the man, but she is his assistant, not his slave.
She must be courted, and while marriage presents are exchanged, she is
not bought. In times of emergency, she steps to the front and
legislates, judges, or fights. It is possible in the pages of the Old
Testament to find women doing everything which men can do. Even where
the power is not nominally in her own hands, she often, as in the cases
of Penelope or Esther, rules by indirection. Her body and her offspring
are protected; and the Hebrew woman of the Proverbs shows us a
singularly free and secure industrial position.[16] Such was the
condition in primitive Judea, in early Greece, in republican Rome, or
among the Germans who invaded southern Europe in the third and fourth
centuries of our era.

[16] _Proverbs_ xxxi, 10.

Man's jealousy of his woman as a source of pleasure and honor to
himself, and to his family, must have always acted to limit woman's
freedom, even while it gave her protection and a secure position in
society. With the development of settled government in city states, like
Athens or early Rome, the necessity for defining citizenship made the
family increasingly a political institution. A man's offspring through
slave women, concubines, or "strangers" lived outside the citizen group,
and so were negligible; but the citizen woman's children were citizens,
and so she became a jealously guarded political institution. The
established family became the test of civic, military, and property
rights. The regulations limiting the freedom of girls and women were
jealously enforced, since mismating might open the treasures of
citizenship to any low born or foreign adventurer.[17]

[17] T.G. TUCKER, _Life in Ancient Athens_, Chapter VIII, Macmillan Co.,
1906.

In the ancient Orient, in Greece, Rome, and in later Europe, these
stages have been repeated again and again. Woman is first a slave,
stolen or bought, prote