There are those who object to the word service, and claim that those who take the Bible as authority wish to reduce woman to slavery.  No charge could be more absurd; and God’s care for woman is manifest, both in the teachings of the Bible and in the constitution of the race.  Woman owes to Christianity all she enjoys.  Leave her to be subject to the conditions imposed on her by unregenerated manhood or womanhood, and you leave her to become either a thing in society, or else reduce her to a level with the beasts of burden.  In old savage and pagan tribes the severest burdens of physical toil were laid upon her.  She was valued for the same reason that men prize their most useful animals, or as a means of gratifying sensual and selfish desires.  Even in the learned and dignified forms of modern paganism, the wife is the slave rather than the companion of her husband.  She is kept apart from him.  The education of her mental faculties is neglected.  She is not allowed to walk with him; she must walk behind him.  She must not eat with him, but eat after he has done, and eat what he leaves.  She must not sleep until he is asleep, nor remain asleep after he is awake.  If she is sitting down, and he comes into the room, she must rise up.  She must bow to no other god on the earth besides her husband.  She must worship him while he lives, and when he dies she must be burned with him.  In case she is not burned, she is not allowed to marry, and is considered an outcast.  There is little social intercourse between the sexes, little or no acquaintance of the parties before marriage, and, consequently, little mutual attachment.  Women are not allowed to learn to read, because there can be no solid foundation laid for future influence.

Under the Crescent the condition of woman is worse rather than better, for in pagan India she is permitted to share in the hope of religion; but in Mohammedan countries it is a popular tradition that women are forbidden paradise; and it requires some effort for the imagination to conceive how debased and wretched must be the condition of the female sex to originate and sustain such a horrible and blasphemous tradition.

Even in the refined and shining ages of Greece and Rome, where the cultivation of letters and the graces of polished style, the charms of poetry and eloquence, the elegances of architecture, sculpture, painting, and embroidery, the glory of conquest and the pride of national distinction, were unsurpassed,—­even then and there, woman was but the abject slave of man, the object of his ambition, avarice, lust, and power.

Truly has it been said that nothing more surely distinguishes the savage state from the civilized, the East from the West, Paganism from Christianity, antiquity from the middle ages, the middle ages from modern times, than the condition of woman.

In China, she is used as a beast of burden.  The Chinese peasant woman goes to the field with her male infant on her back, and ploughs, sows, and reaps, exposed to all the changes of the weather.  In Calcutta, women are the masons, and maybe seen daily conveying their hods of cement, and spreading it on the tops of their houses.