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                          CHAPTER XVIII

                    The Degradation of Woman

       The Claim of the Churches -- Women Before Christ --
 The Greek and Roman Woman -- The Clergy and the Modern Struggle

                    THE CLAIM OF THE CHURCHES

     I AM what is called a Feminist. Thirty years ago I left a
monastery and began a sane human existence. Within two or three
years, I find, I was defending the rights of women. Twenty-five
years ago I sat in the lobby of the British Parliament with two of
the oldest women-fighters, awaiting the issue of a "Suffrage Bill."
The cause was not then respectable, and I was the only writer who
associated with them. Now it has the blessing of the church; and my
services are not required or mentioned. It is successful. Only a
few weeks ago I attended a great women's meeting in the central
park of London. There were a hundred orators, and half of them
introduced Jesus and the Bible. Church banners glittered on the
platforms. Pretty parsons evoked ripples of laughter and tears of
sentiment. And I hung, unknown, on the fringes of the great crowds
and smiled -- rather cynically.

     Some of us can remember the forty years' fight, or forty years
of the fight for the elementary rights of women. Why had this fight
to be undertaken at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth century? Had the age of Voltaire brought some worsening
of the position of women? Were these injustices which we fought a
creation of our "materialistic age"? What is the simple meaning of
the fact that during eighteen hundred and fifty years of the Era of
Redemption there was no struggle, and that the struggle began and
was carried to a successful conclusion in the Era of Skepticism? At
least there is no dispute about that fact; and nobody above the age
of twenty is ignorant of it.

     Yet the clergy and religious writers are able, unrebuked, to
tell women all over the world that Christianity has been the best
friend they ever had. The suffrage? That is a political matter,
they say: a detail in a necessarily slow political evolution. Very
few men had the suffrage in Europe a century ago. None had it a few
centuries earlier. (It does not occur to them or to the women to
wonder why no one had the suffrage.) The political sentiment of the
times was for despotic monarchy. Religion was not consulted. And so
on.

     The clergy are poor sociologists. You have to remind them that
it is not merely a question of the suffrage. Let me put the
position in the words of one of the most respected of American
women, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She is describing the wrongs of
woman in what was then, in 1850, the most enlightened city of the
United States, Boston:

          Woman could not hold any property, either earned or
     inherited. If unmarried, she was obliged to place it in the
     hands of a trustee, to whose will she was subject. if she
     contemplated marriage, and desired to call her property her
     own, she was forced by law to make a contract with her
     intended husband by which she gave up all title or claim to
     it. A woman, either married or unmarried, could hold no office

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     of trust or power. She was not a person. She was not
     recognized as a citizen. She was not a factor in the human
     family. She was not a unit, but a zero, in the sum of
     civilization. ... The status of a married woman was little
     better than that of a domestic servant. By the English Common
     Law [in force in Boston] her husband was her lord and master.
     He had the sole custody of her person and of her minor
     children. He could punish her "with a stick no bigger than his
     thumb," and she could not complain against him. ... The common
     law of the State held man and wife to be one person, but that
     person was the husband. He could by will deprive her of every
     part of his property, and also of what had been her own before
     marriage. He was the owner of all her real estate and her
     earnings. The wife could make no contract and no will, nor,
     without her husband's consent, dispose of the legal interest
     of her real estate. ... She did not own a rag of her clothing.
     She had no personal rights and could hardly call her soul her
     own. Her husband could steal her children, rob her of her
     clothing, neglect to support the family; she had no legal
     redress. If a wife earned money by her labor, the husband
     could claim the pay as his share of the proceeds. ("History of
     Women's Suffrage," vol. III, p. 290.)

     The comfortable matron who now listens to mellifluous
assurances from her Episcopal or Methodist pulpit ought to know
these things. Let her imagine herself in this position of her
grandmother. What a degradation, she will exclaim!

     The degradation was brought upon woman by Christianity.
Christianity found woman free and respected, and degraded her to
the position described by Mrs. Stanton; and the degradation was
lifted from her, mainly owing to the work of "infidels," in this
age which seems to you so materialistic and menacing to women.

     What, then, is the Christian claim? On what sort of evidence
is it based? Rhetorical claims are not, as a rule based upon
evidence. Evidence is "cold." Facts are rather boring, sometimes
actually disagreeable. What we love is sonorous phraseology,
delivered with eupeptic dogmatism or original bluntness, or
softened with a tender glow of sentiment which it has taken many
hours to make natural and spontaneous. What we love is the vague
insinuation of horrors in the pagan past or the pagan future which
religious delicacy forbids us to make more explicit. A sermon is
not a mere lecture. We go to church, not to learn, but to be
uplifted.

     Some years ago I was invited to write a book ("The Bible in
Europe") on the question of the precise contribution of the
Christian religion to the civilization of the world. Queen
Victoria, not a learned person, though not as stupid as most
members of the British royal family, had said that the Bible was
the source of England's greatness, and this authoritative assurance
still reverberates from the pulpits. Since I do not care to waste
either my own time or that of my readers, I asked a friend to ask
a relative who is a learned divine what the Church really claimed
to have done.



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                               293



     But my friend incautiously said that the information was for
me, and the answer was very guarded. They do not, it seems, claim
to have created civilization. There are specific contributions --
there is the general sentiment of charity and justice there is the
refinement of morals ... in short, I was referred to certain
standard Christian works, and I read them. Dr. Fairbairn, in
particular, was recommended, and I learned from him that early
Christianity put a "halo" about woman, "taught us reverence for
woman." Others contended that the pagan had regarded woman merely
as "an instrument of his lust," and Christianity changed all that.
Others felt sure that the apotheosis of Mary must have uplifted the
whole sex. Others, a little behind the times, ventured to quote the
heroic virtue of Agnes, Catherine, Cecilia, and all the other dead
myths.

     In short, no religious writer, in talking of the change or
improvement which Christianity is claimed to have effected,
accurately sets out the position of woman before 400 A.D. (when the
world was driven into the Church) and the position of woman, say,
in 800 A.D. I doubt if there is a religious writer capable of doing
it.

                       WOMEN BEFORE CHRIST

     A preacher first abuses the pagan Romans, then, when you prove
their greatness, he points out that Jesus was already in the world
and in some subtle way, by some imperceptible means ... But not
even the most ingenious apologist will attempt to prove that the
position of woman in ancient Egypt, Babylon, or Crete was lit by
the light and uplifted by the spiritual force of a gospel which did
not yet exist. Were these nations not notoriously in darkness and
the shadow of death?

     But, says the preacher, politely, do not forget that there was
already a foregleam of Christianity in the world. A partial
revelation had been communicated to the Hebrews. And the Hebrews
were brought into contact with the Babylonians and may, by their
superior ideals, have moderated the grossness of pagan conduct.
People really do say these things in the churches.

     In the year 586 B.C., King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed
Jerusalem and carried away most of the Jews of the better class to
his great city on the Euphrates. Let us imagine the dark-eyed maid
Rebecca or the portly matron Susannah blinking in the light of the
brilliant metropolis and then inquiring what the position of woman
was.

     We know well what the position of woman was in Judea. It is
pithily put in Leviticus xii, 1-5. This book had in the year 586
not yet been forged, it is true, but it clearly gives an old law:

          And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,
          Speak unto the children of Israel. saying, If a woman
     have conceived seed, and borne a man child; then she shall be
     unclean seven days; according to the days of the separation
     for her infirmity shall she be unclean.



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          And on the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be
     circumcised. And she shall then continue in the blood of her
     purifying three and thirty days; she shall touch no hallowed
     thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her
     purifying be fulfilled.
          But if she bear a maid child, then she shall be unclean
     two weeks, as in her separation; and she shall continue in the
     blood of her purifying three-score and six days.

     Pretty ironic to describe this bit of primitive tribal
barbarism and superstition as a special revelation from the Most
High! It just expresses woman's position under this "foregleam of
Christianity."

     The female was an inferior creature. She never had a lover or
chose a husband. Her parents handed her over to a youth who became
her very despotic lord and master. She was "unclean" about ten
times in twenty years, as a rule, to say nothing of shorter
periods. She had no property, no personality. Her husband could
divorce her when he willed; she could not divorce him when she
willed. Her husband could take a second wife or a concubine or
dally with painted ladies. Rebecca had to disguise herself as a
prostitute if she wanted a change (Genesis xxxviii, 14). And when
she had fulfilled the whole Law, she was peppered with spiteful
aphorisms (Proverbs, Ecclesiastics, etc.) about her malice and
odiousness.

     Women were as free and respected in Babylon in 586 B.C. as
they are in Boston today. The deciphering of the literature of
ancient Babylon has completely discredited those picturesque ideas
of the vice of the great city which are still used to give purple
patches to sermons. So far were the Babylonians from enjoying a
remarkable looseness in sexual relations that they incurred
sentence of death by adultery. We will hope that their practice was
not as savage as their law. And there was not one law for the man
and one for the woman (as in Christendom). The man and woman were
bound together and thrown into the Euphrates. A man was burned
alive for rape. A mother and son were burned alive for incest. A
man was drowned for intercourse with his daughter-in-law. A retired
priestess was burned alive if she went to a wine-shop for a drink.
No woman was forced to prostitute herself at the temple, and there
was probably no temple of that kind in Babylon. The marriage-
contracts, of which we have a large number, commonly guarantee that
the bride is a virgin.

     In other words, if we were to return tomorrow to the "morals
of ancient Babylon," as preachers somberly announce that we may if
their income is cut off, a woman would find herself protected from
man's "lust" by a series of drastic laws which no section of
Christendom ever knew! Such is the imbecility of these dismal
prophecies about the future of the race. When at last the truth,
which has been known to scholars for decades, breaks through the
dense mists of the religious world, we shall have the Christian
Matrons of America demanding a return to pagan morals and the
wicked people of America (secretly supported by the clergy)
violently resisting the proposal.



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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               295



     The beginning of civilization is dated by different
authorities at various periods between 3000 and 4000 B.C. This
means that the stretch of time during which Egypt and Babylon were
the chief representatives of civilization is far greater than the
whole of subsequent history; and during all that time woman was
free, independent and the equal of man. She was "treated with
justice and respect."

     Looking back, in the light of what I have said, upon that
evolution, and taking the position of woman as a test of
civilization, we should have to divide the whole into two eras, the
era of light and justice and the era of darkness and injustice; and
it is an elementary historical truth to say that the era of light
is the period before Christ and the era of darkness the time which
we proudly call the Christian Era.

     It is an elementary and uncontroverted historical truth that
the recovery of woman, the removal of her wrongs, did not begin
until the Christian domination of the world was profoundly shaken
and reduced; it made progress in proportion as the Churches grew
weaker; it received no assistance whatever from Christianity; and
it was brought to a triumphant issue only when the majority of men
in the cities of the world had thrown off their allegiance to
Christianity.

                    THE GREEK AND ROMAN WOMAN

     Let us say at once that in the Greek and Roman civilizations
woman had not the position of equality and freedom which she had
had in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and, apparently, Crete. In different
strains of the human family a different attitude was adopted toward
woman. In the Semitic race, to which the Hebrews belonged, a harsh
and masterful attitude was evolved, whereas amongst the Egyptians
and Mesopotamians woman seems to have been treated from the first
as a normal member of the community; not because she was the
mother, but because her personality was as justly recognized as
that of the man.

     In the Indo-Persian-European family the attitude was totally
different in different branches. The slavery of the Hindu woman of
recent times is not, perhaps, her original situation; but there
must from the first have been a domineering attitude toward women.
In the Teutonic branch of the family, on the contrary, woman was
highly respected. The Greeks and Romans come between these two
extremes. Amongst the early Romans, especially, the man had a quite
despotic power over the woman; though it was not abused, as one
finds it abused amongst the Hebrews or Hindus, and it soon
disappeared.

     When the full light of history falls upon the Greek community
we find woman in a position that certainly would not accord with
modern standards. A special and secluded part of the home was set
apart for the women, and, while their excursions from the home were
restricted, the men had full liberty. Athens and most of the Greek
city-states were democracies, yet woman had no part whatever in the
political life. Her place was the home.



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     Girls, it is true, had a life of comparative freedom and, one
feels that they would say, happiness. They had excellent athletic
training, music, games, and graceful dancing. The old idea, that a
woman was a man's property, to be carefully guarded from a
defilement that lowered her value, persisted; but there was no note
of contempt, no insinuation, as in Judea, that she was unclean and
useful only as a breeder of men. She was the companion of man; but
it was understood that politics and war were not her concern. She
was excluded from public life.

     Quite early in Greek life, however, a movement began for the
removal of whatever wrongs and disabilities she had. The "Medea" of
the great tragedian Euripides is one of the most poignant
presentments of the case for woman that was ever given to the
world. Its exaggeration is so great, yet so sincerely and
profoundly felt, that no woman-genius could have penned a more
formidable complaint. Already, also, the Greeks had the poetry of
Sappho. For three or four thousand years, in Crete, Egypt, and
Mesopotamia, woman had been free and respected. Then for a few
centuries we find her in Greece, not degraded or vilely used, for
nearly every great Greek writer treats her with respect, but
certainly in a position of dependence and inferiority. But at the
very dawn of the Golden Age of Athens a movement for her
emancipation begins, and it has the support of all the best
elements of Greek life.

     Unfortunately, Athens was ruined before the movement could
reach a successful issue. Yet its ideals continued. The chief Greek
writer about the time of Christ, Plutarch, maintained that woman
was mentally and morally equal to man, and ought to have, as Plato
had said, the same education. He denied that the moral law should
be interpreted more liberally in the case of man than of woman. And
the last glimpse that we have in history of Greek culture, before
it is entirely lost in a Christianized and barbarized world, is a
picture of the philosopher Hypatia taking a leading part in the
life of the great city of Alexandria and by her culture and
personality rising high above all her contemporaries.

     The murder of Hypatia by a Christian mob is a fitting allegory
of the murder of the new hope of women by the new religion. That
may seem a harsh sentence, but even the broad historical facts must
give the modern Christian woman ground for reflection. A movement
for the emancipation of woman from grievances far lighter than
those of a century ago began in Greece nearly two thousand three
hundred years ago. It gathered force and was endorsed by the most
influential Greek writers. But it completely disappeared when
Christianity became the religion of Europe, and it did not reappear
until skepticism about Christianity spread through the civilized
world.

     It is usual in religious literature to divide Roman history
into two parts: a first part, until a century or two before the
birth of Christ, in which woman was very virtuous but a slave, and
a later part in which she was free but very wicked.





                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               297



     This generalization is as false as most of the other
"historical" statements upon which the supposed service to the race
of the new religion is based. The women of the Roman Republic (in
its earlier centuries) were assuredly very chaste and virtuous. The
names of some of them rank with the names of Christian saints. But,
just as the chastity of the saint is a kind of commercial venture,
the price of a colossal reward in heaven, so the virtue of the
early Roman maid or matron may be attributed to fear of the lash or
the knife. The women were the property of the men. They ranked with
the children. The law did not enter a Roman's house. He had power
of life and death over his wife, his children, and his slaves.
Small wonder that the wife and daughters were very "virtuous."

     Yet even here woman was far better treated than she was in
Judea. One of the Roman historians, Valerius Maximus, makes the
almost incredible claim that there was no divorce in the Roman
Republic for five hundred and twenty years after its foundation!
The Jewish civilization -- the real, not the legendary,
civilization of the Hebrews -- was practically a contemporary of
the Roman, and a record of woman's experience in the two would be
an instructive document. Roman women were not confined in special
quarters of the house, were not forbidden to go out to dine or to
the theater, and had no separate places in the temple. They were
treated with the greatest respect at home and abroad.

     Moreover, the tyranny of the older Roman custom broke down
long before the time of Christ. Greece had been civilized only a
few centuries -- not fifteen hundred years, like Christian Europe
when it started a movement for the emancipation of woman. Rome,
similarly, was civilized only some three or four centuries when its
women began a formidable movement for emancipation and admission to
political life.

     In the second century before Christ scenes curiously like
those of the suffrage-struggle of modern times were witnessed in
Rome. Crowds of women obstructed the way of the reactionary senator
and loudly demanded their rights. And I may add that their greatest
opponent, Cato the Elder, the personification of the old Roman
discipline, is nevertheless reported to have said: "A man who beats
his wife or his children lays impious hands on that which is most
holy and most sacred in the world."

     The Christian scholars who claim that at least the new
religion taught men a "reverence" for woman are almost completely
ignorant of the facts. They rely only on the usual rhetoric about
the vices of the pagans and the virtues of the Christians.

     All this rhetoric is based upon the most scandalously loose
quotation of particular instances. Even the best Christian writers
ask us to blush at the crimes of Nero or Elogabalus, and never
mention that during three-fourths of the empire its rulers were
good men. They say dark and vague things about the vices of
Messalina and Faustine (which are grossly exaggerated), and they
never tell that there were ten good pagan empresses for every bad
one. They quote St. Jerome about the virtue of his score of
Christian pupils, and they entirely ignore his assurance, in the
same letters, that the Christian world generally was vicious and
corrupt.

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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               298



     There was no such general contrast of pagan vice and Christian
virtue; and the notion that at the adoption of Christianity the
world passed from an era of vice to one of virtue, from a period in
which woman was the toy of "brutal lusts" to a period in which she
was respected because of her Christian virtues, is one of the most
fantastic and unjustifiable beliefs that zeal ever engendered.

               THE CLERGY AND THE MODERN STRUGGLE

     After about the year 500 "human life was suspended for a
thousand years," says a brilliant French writer. Something like
that certainly will be the unanimous verdict of historians when our
scholars have shed the last trace of subservience to the clergy. At
present some of them have an affectation of showing that the Middle
Ages were not quite so bad as the older historians had said. It is
wrong, it appears, to call the early Middle Ages "the Dark Ages,"
because, by diligent search, we can find a lamp in it here and
there!

     As far as our present subject, the degradation of woman, is
concerned, no one is quite so foolish as to try to defend the
Church. By the year 300 A.D. woman was in a position of freedom and
respect. She had enjoyed that position throughout nearly the whole
four thousand years of civilization. After the year 500 A.D. --
allowing two centuries for the application of the principles of the
new religion -- woman fell to a state of degradation which has no
parallel in the history of any pagan nation. For more than a
thousand years, during which Christianity absolutely dominated the
life of man, she remained in that condition of degradation. That
requires a good deal of explaining if you are reluctant to admit
the obvious fact -- Christianity degraded woman.

     And there is no room here for the familiar quibble that it was
not Christianity, but the men who professed it, that injured woman.
It was quite plainly the doctrine. It was the morbid puritanism
about love and the legends of Genesis. The men who most drastically
relegated woman to an inferior position were the men whom the
Churches regarded as their religious heroes and oracles. The
perfectly attired modern preacher in a "Fifth Avenue Chapel"
somewhere will scarcely venture to say that he knows more about
Christianity than did St. Gregory, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, or
St. Bernard.

     Nor is there any room for the further familiar quibble, that
it took the world a long time to realize the true implications of
the Christian spirit. Modern Christianity, wherever it makes this
claim, has not discovered a new meaning in the words of Jesus, but
has disowned his teaching. The medieval and Catholic doctrine of
monasticism is a perfectly sound implication of Christ's teaching.
Jerome and Athanasius, and all genuine monks and nuns, did exactly
what Christ advised. The Fundamentalist is in this respect a
Modernist. He rejects whole chunks of the teaching of Jesus and
Paul just as cheerfully as he rejects the prediction of the end of
the world. Christian teaching -- the teaching of Jesus and Paul --
implied that woman was inferior, that her moral weakness handed the
race over to the devil and lost us paradise, and that her sweetest
charms are so many baits on the devil's hooks.


                         BANK of WISDOM
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                               299



     The emancipation of woman was impossible as long as people
really believed the teaching of Jesus and Paul. A well-known
preacher once showed me, with some pride, a sermon of his on the
woman question. The text was one of St. Paul's consecrated bits of
rudeness to woman, and the sermon then began: "That is where Paul
and I differ." Precisely.

     The true story of woman's recovery of the position she had
held under paganism can be told in a few lines, and it is actually
more significant and instructive when it is so told. From the fifth
to the fifteenth century, from the death of Hypatia to the time of
Petrarch at least, no one had a good word to say for woman. Not a
scholar in Christendom, not a priest or writer, was inspired to
make a syllable of protest against the disgraceful injustice of the
system. It was the literary men of the Renaissance who began to
raise woman -- the woman of their class -- to a position of
equality; and the Renaissance was, notoriously, the rebirth of
paganism and skepticism.

     Then came the Reformation and what Catholics humorously call
"the Christian Renaissance," or a half-hearted attempt to reform
the morals of Rome under the lash of Protestantism. Europe became
again intensely interested in religion. Many millions of people cut
each other's throats in the name of religion. The civilization of
Europe was put back a hundred years by the zeal for religion. And
the attempt to emancipate woman was at once crushed.

     The opinions of feminist writers about the effect of the
Reformation vary remarkably. Out of six which lie before me Mrs.
Stanton regards the Reformation "one of the most important steps,"
and Mrs. Gage thinks that the anti-Christian bias against woman
"took new force after the rise of Melanchthon, Huss and Luther."
Lecky believes that, in restoring the credit of marriage, the
Reformers rendered a great service, and Professor Karl Pearson
finds that they caused a material increase of prostitution -- which
is impossible in the opinion of anybody who knows the Catholic
Middle Ages -- and darkened the prospect for woman.

     Most of these writers argue from a theoretical point of view.
Luther gave a shrewd and healthy blow at the Catholic glorification
of virginity and all the hypocrisy caused by it -- but he also said
such things as: "No gown worse becomes a woman than the desire to
be wise." To say that he robbed women (how many?) of opportunities
by suppressing nunneries is fatuous; but he certainly provided no
other opportunities for them. The "three K's" (Kirche, Kuche,
Kinder -- church, kitchen, and children) were stereotyped as the
ideal of the German woman.

     The Reformation did nothing for women on the continent of
Europe. In England, in the Elizabethan age, educated women (a tiny
minority) had more freedom, socially, though they lost their last
hold on public life. But their new freedom was plainly due to the
fact that in England the Reformation and the Renaissance occurred
together. The Reformers, through a statute of Henry VIII, forbade
"women and others of low condition" to read the Bible. The
Humanists invited them to read.



                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               300



     But the historical facts are clear enough. Protestantism, of
a pure or Puritanical type, was as deadly to woman as Catholicism.
What did she get from the Puritans of England or New England? From
the Calvinists of Switzerland? From the Lutherans of Germany and
Scandinavia? Nothing whatever. Protestant divines were as blind to
the injustice of the system as Catholic divines were. The service
of Protestantism was indirect; and I would stress that in this
sense it was mighty. It smashed the tyranny of Rome and could not
set up a lasting tyranny of its own. Yet to use a phrase of
Emerson's in a different connection, Luther would, if he had
foreseen the revolt of the women, have cut off his right hand
rather than nail his theses to the door of the cathedral.

     This is the stark truth about the redemption of woman from all
the injustices which Christianity had brought upon her. Not one
single Christian clergyman the world over raised a finger in the
work until it had so far succeeded that the clergy had to save
their faces by joining it. No amount of pulpit rhetoric, no amount
of strained apology from Christian feminist writers, can lessen the
significance of that fact. And to it you must add another of equal
significance: The men and women who started the revolt against the
injustice and carried it to the stage of invincibility were non-
Christian in the proportion of at least five to one.

     Take the movement in America. Three of its greatest leaders,
Mrs. Cady Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Miss Susan B. Anthony have
described it minutely and conscientiously in their monumental
"History of Woman Suffrage." It began in 1820, when Frances Wright,
a Deist, a pupil of the British Agnostic Robert Owen, invaded the
States. She was joined by the brilliant Ernestine L. Rose, a Polish
Jewess who had cast off all theology: by Lucretia Mott, a Quaker
whose views were regarded as "heresy" even in the Society of
Friends; by Abby Kelly, another Rationalistic Quaker: and by the
sisters Grimke, also Quakers. I have shown in my "Biographical
Dictionary of Distinguished Rationalists" that Mrs. Cady Stanton,
Mrs. Gage, and Miss Anthony, who led the fight in the next
generation, were all Agnostics. And for fifty years, as this
detailed history shows, the clergy of America were the most deadly
enemies of the movement, basing their opposition expressly upon the
Bible.

     I smiled when, in 1917, I was invited to speak for the
movement in New York. It was then respectable. Parsons were
available by the score. Few women in the movement had ever heard of
Fanny Wright or Abby Kelly or Ernestine Rose and the other splendid
pioneers. None knew of the time when pastoral letters had
circulated amongst the American clergy calling their attention to
"the dangers which at present seem to threaten the female character
with widespread and permanent injury." That was all over. Preachers
were now assuring them that Christianity was the best friend, the
only friend, that woman had ever bad!

     It was the same everywhere. In Britain the pioneers were Mary
Wollstonecraft, Fanny Wright, George Eliot, Harriet Martineau --
all Rationalists -- supported by Godwin, Robert Owen, Jeremy
Bentham, G.J. Holyoake, and J.S. Mill -- all Agnostics or Atheists.
In Germany the work was done by Max Stirner, Karl Marx, Buchner,


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Engels, Bebel, and Liebknecht -- all Atheists. In France it was
Sieyes and Condorcet -- Atheists -- who first pleaded for the
emancipation of woman, and George Sand, Michelet, Saint-Simon, and
Fourier -- all deep-dyed heretics -- who raised the plea again in
the nineteenth century. In Scandinavia Ibsen and Bjornson and Ellen
Key -- all Rationalists -- lead the protest.

     Let the women of the world read their remarkable story once
more, with open eyes. They will ... No, not yet. But a time will
come when the women of America -- and it may be this generation in
your high schools today -- will put away forever, not ungently, the
figure of Christ: will burn Paul in effigy: and will raise a superb
monument to Voltaire.



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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
                               by
                          Joseph McCabe

                              1929





















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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               302