The ban upon geology and astronomy, because they refute the
biblical version of the creation of the world, are no longer
effective. Medicine, biology and the doctrine of evolution have won
their way to recognition in spite of the united opposition of the
clerics. So, too, has the right of woman to go unveiled, to be
educated, and to speak from public platforms, been asserted in spite
of the condemnations of the church, which denounced them as
destructive of feminine purity. Only in sex matters has it succeeded
in keeping the bugaboo alive.
It clings to this last stronghold of ignorance, knowing that woman
free from sexual domination would produce a race spiritually free and
strong enough to break the last of the bonds of intellectual darkness.
It is within the marriage bonds, rather than outside them, that the
greatest immorality of men has been perpetrated. Church and state,
through their canons and their laws, have encouraged this immorality.
It is here that the woman who is to win her way to the new morality
will meet the most difficult part of her task of moral house cleaning.
In the days when the church was striving for supremacy, when it needed
single-minded preachers, proselyters and teachers, it fastened upon
its people the idea that all sexual union, in marriage or out of it,
is sinful.
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