t
Christendom. Something of shame and guilt gathered around conception and
birth, as representing a lower standard of life, even when sanctified by
the ceremonies of the Church. From the second century to the sixth, the
ablest of the Church Fathers, Greek and Latin alike, formulated
statements in which woman became the chief ally of the devil in dragging
men down to perdition. We still hear ancestral reverberations of these
teachings in all our discussions of woman's place in civilization.

But ideas can only for a time overcome or divert the primitive human
hungers, and slowly Mary, Mother of Jesus, won first place among the
saints. Celibate recluses who feared to walk the streets for fear of
meeting a woman, and who spent the nights fighting down their noblest
passions, starving them, flagellating and rolling their naked bodies in
thorny rose hedges or in snow-drifts to silence demands for wife and
children, threw themselves in an ecstacy of adoration before an image of
the Virgin with the Baby in her arms. So Maryolatry came to bless the
world.

But even this blessing was not without alloy, for it gave us an ideal of
woman, superhuman, immaculate, bowing in frightened awe before the angel
with the lily, standing mute with crossed hands and downcast eyes before
her Divine Son. She represented, not the institution of the family, but
the institution of the Church. Even when she appeared in representations
of the Holy Family, Joseph, her husband, was not the father of her
child, but his servant.

Chivalry took up this conception, and shaped for us the fantastic lady
who stands back of much of modern romantic love. Robbed of her simple,
human, pagan passions, she became often an anaemic and unfruitful, if
angelic, creature. For the direct and passionate assurances of a
virtuous and noble love she substituted sighs and tears, languishing
looks and weary renunciations. This sterile hybrid, bred of human
passions and theological negations, must be finally banished from our
literature and from our minds before we can have a healthy eugenic
conscience among us.[20]

[20] R. DE MAULDE LA CLAVIERE, _The Woman of the Renaissance. A Study in
Feminism_, translated by George H. Ely. New York: C.P. Putnam's Sons,
1900.

The Protestant Revolution went far to restore the special functions of
women to respect. Belief in her individual soul, and in its need of
salvation through individual choice, was supplemented by the belief that