her person and her property, but the spiritual control of her conscience.
This is no fanciful piece of imagery. There are laws still in existence—laws of an earlier age—which prove how complete has been this moral control which we are only now shaking off, since they presume a man's entire responsibility for the actions of his wife, be those actions good or ill. That a woman at her husband's bidding should bend her conscience to his will as a reed bends; that, because he desired it of her, she should break and defy every commandment of God and man; this seemed to our forefathers a natural thing, and a course of action befitting her station and place in life. So far from blaming, they condoned it in her and have expressed that view of the matter in their law—sometimes with awkward and annoying results for a later generation. Woman, until she began to feel in herself the stirrings of independence—woman, when she was just the wife-and-mother-and-nothing-else, the domestic animal—seems to me to have been a creature whom you could not have described as being either moral or immoral. She was just unmoral. Whether she did good or
