Christian religion were unfavorable to the equality of women with men.  Teutonic custom in this matter was determined by two decisive factors:  (1) the existence of marriage by purchase which although, as Crawley has pointed out, it by no means necessarily involves the degradation of women, certainly tends to place them in an inferior position, and (2) pre-occupation with war which is always accompanied by a depreciation of peaceful and feminine occupations and an indifference to love.  Christianity was at its origin favorable to women because it liberated and glorified the most essentially feminine emotions, but when it became an established and organized religion with definitely ascetic ideals, its whole emotional tone grew unfavorable to women.  It had from the first excluded them from any priestly function.  It now regarded them as the special representatives of the despised element of sex in life.[290] The eccentric Tertullian had once declared that woman was janua Diaboli; nearly seven hundred years later, even the gentle and philosophic Anselm wrote:  Femina fax est Satanae.[291]

Thus among the Franks, with whom the practice of monogamy prevailed, a woman was never free; she could not buy or sell or inherit without the permission of those to whom she belonged.  She passed into the possession of her husband by acquisition, and when he fixed the wedding day he gave her parents coins of small money as arrha, and the day after the wedding she received from him a present, the morgengabe.  A widow belonged to her parents again (Bedolliere, Histoire de Moeurs des Francais, vol. i, p. 180).  It is true that the Salic law ordained a pecuniary fine for touching a woman, even for squeezing her finger, but it is clear that the offence thus committed was an offence against property, and by no means against the sanctity of a woman’s personality.  The primitive German husband could sell his children, and sometimes his wife, even into slavery.  In the eleventh century cases of wife-selling are still heard of, though no longer recognized by law.

The traditions of Christianity were more favorable to sexual equality than were Teutonic customs, but in becoming amalgamated with those customs they added their own special contribution as to woman’s impurity.  This spiritual inferiority of woman was significantly shown by the restrictions sometimes placed on women in church, and even in the right to enter a church; in some places they were compelled to remain in the narthex, even in non-monastic churches (see for these rules, Smith and Cheetham, Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, art.  “Sexes, Separation of").

By attempting to desexualize the idea of man and to oversexualize the idea of woman, Christianity necessarily degraded the position of woman and the conception of womanhood.  As Donaldson well remarks, in pointing this out (op. cit., p. 182), “I may define man as a male human