There was not a syllable in the law relating to the inheritance of a throne.  Nevertheless, centuries after the last Salian king was laid in his barbarous grave a French prince successfully contested with an English prince the crown of France, his claim resting on that obscure paragraph in the Salic code.  The Hundred Years’ War was fought on this issue, and the final outcome of the war established the Salic Law permanently in France, and with more or less rigor in most of the European states.

At the time of the French Revolution, when the “Rights of Man” were being declared with so much fervor and enthusiasm, when the old laws were being revised in favor of greater freedom of the individual, the “Rights of Woman” were actually revised downward.  Up to this time the application of the Salic Law was based on tradition and precedent.  Now a special statute was enacted forever barring women from the sovereignty of France.  “Founded on the pride of the French, who could not bear to be ruled by their own women folk,” as the records are careful to state.

The interpretation of the Salic Law did more, a great deal more, than exclude women from the throne.  It established the principle of the inherent inferiority of women.  The system of laws erected on that principle were necessarily deeply tinged with contempt for women, and with fear lest their influence in any way might affect the conduct of state affairs.  That explains why, at the present time, although in most European countries women are allowed to practice medicine, they are not allowed to practice law.  Medicine may be as learned a profession, but it affects only human beings.  The law, on the other hand, affects the state.  A woman advocate, you can readily imagine, might so influence a court of justice that the laws of the land might suffer feminization.  From the European point of view this would be most undesirable.

The apparently superior rights possessed by English women were also bestowed upon them by a vanished system of laws.  They have descended from Feudalism, in which social order the person did not exist.  The social order consisted of property alone, and the claims of property, that is to say, land, were paramount over the claims of the individual.  Those historic women sheriffs of counties, clerks of crown, chamberlains, and high constables held their high offices because the offices were hereditary property in certain titled families, and they had to belong to the entail, even when a woman was in possession.  The offices were purely titular.  No English woman ever acted as high constable.  No English woman ever attended a coronation as king’s champion.  The rights and duties of these offices were delegated to a male relative.  Every once in a while, during the Middle Ages, some strong-minded lady of title demanded the right to administer her office in person, but she was always sternly put down by a rebuking House of Lords, sometimes even by the king’s majesty himself.