captives. Female charms are rarely noticed. We must, however, note that the monuments are all from public buildings.[1] In Babylonia every woman must, once in her life, submit to a stranger, in the temple of Melitta (Venus), for money, which was put in the temple treasury.[2]
Wherever women are treated with tyranny and cruelty, and are denied rights, that is, redress, they kill their husbands. In the laws of Hammurabi a woman who killed her husband was to be either hanged or impaled, the meaning of the word being uncertain.[3] With increasing wealth and the distinction of classes, the mores for rich and poor diverged, for women who had property could defend their interests. They held and administered property, made contracts, etc. In the poem of Gilgamesh, the hero, addressing the ghost of his friend and enumerating the miseries of the dead, says: "Thou canst no longer embrace the wife whom thou lovest, nor beat the wife whom thou hatest."[4] We must take this to represent the mores of the highest classes. Women of the lower classes in Chaldea, whether legitimate wives or not, went about the streets freely unveiled, while those of the upper classes lived in seclusion, or, if they went out, were surrounded by attendants.[5] In all societies women of the poorer classes have to encounter annoyances and have to protect themselves, while seclusion becomes, for the richer, a badge of superiority and a gratification of vanity. Usages which were devised to cherish and pet women become restraints on their liberty and independence, for when they are treated as unequal to the risks and tasks of life by men who take care of them, the next stage is that the men treat them as in-
