In short, she was a veritable Cinderella, and her solitary recreation was going to church on Sunday.  Marriages only took place within the same social circles; the most rigid and absurd spirit of caste ruled everything, and brooked no transgression of its law.  The daughters were educated on the same principles; they were kept in strict home seclusion; their mental development was of the lowest order, and did not extend beyond the narrowest limits of household life.  And all this was crowned by an empty and meaningless etiquette, whose part it was to replace mind and culture, and which made life altogether, and especially that of a woman, a perfect treadmill of labor.”

How was it possible that a condition as joyless and fruitless as this should be the accepted ideal of womanhood?  Already the question is answered.  For ages her identity had been merged in that of the man by whose side she worked with no thought of recompense.  She toiled early and late, filling the office of general helper on the same terms; and even to-day, under our own eyes, the wife of many a farmer goes through her married life often not touching five dollars in cash in an entire year.

Submissiveness, clinging affection, humility, all the traits accounted distinctively feminine, and the natural and ever-increasing result of steady suppression of all stronger ones stood in the way of any resistance.  Intellectual qualities, forever at a discount, repressed development save in rarest cases.  The mass of women had neither power nor wish to protest; and thus the few traces we find of their earliest connection with labor show us that they accepted bare subsistence as all to which they were entitled, and were grateful if they escaped the beating which the lower order of Englishman still regards it as his right to give.  Even in our own country and our own time this theory is not altogether extinct.  The papers only recently contained an account of the brutal beating of a woman by a man.  The woman in remonstrating cried, “You have no right to beat me!  I am not your wife!”

During the Middle Ages, and indeed well into the nineteenth century, possession of property by women was confined to the unmarried, the entire control and practical ownership passing to the husband upon marriage.

Change comes at last to even the most fossilized thought.  One by one, social institutions clung to with fiercest tenacity fell away.  Barbaric independence had followed Greek and Roman slavery, which in turn was succeeded by feudal servitude, to reappear once more in the affranchised communes.  Each experiment had its season, and sunk into the darkness of the past, to give place to a new one, which must transmit to posterity the principal and interest of all preceding ones.  But though progress when taken in the mass is plain, the individual years in each generation show small trace of it.  Even as late as the sixteenth century, the workman fared little better than the brutes.  Erasmus tells us that their houses had no chimneys, and their floors were bare ground; while Fortescue, who travelled in France at the same time, reports a misery and degradation which have had vivid portraiture in Taine’s “Ancien Regime.”