"24--Therefore, as the Church is subject to Christ, so let the wives
be to their husbands in all things."
These doctrines, together with the teaching that sex life is of itself
unclean, formed the basis of morality as fixed by the Roman church.
Nor does the St. James version of the Bible, generally used by
Protestant churches to-day, differ greatly in these particulars from
the accepted Roman Catholic version, as a comparison will show.
If Christianity turned the clock of general progress back a thousand
years, it turned back the clock two thousand years for woman. Its
greatest outrage upon her was to forbid her to control the function of
motherhood under any circumstances, thus limiting her life's work to
bringing forth and rearing children. Coincident with this, the
churchmen deprived her of her place in and before the courts, in the
schools, in literature, art and society. They shut from her heart and
her mind the knowledge of her love life and her reproductive
functions. They chained her to the position into which they had thrust
her, so that it is only after centuries of effort that she is even
beginning to regain what was wrested from her.
"Christianity had no favorable effect upon women," says Donaldson,
"but tended to lower their character and contract the range of their
activity.
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