you in Holloway Jail, you'd have raised the roof and torn down the whole social structure!
Well, in England women broke windows. In Germany, as I have said, they broke more. "Your statutes have limited the liberties of the woman who marries. Then you shall never limit us," was the gauntlet thrown down to society by the extremists. They were university women, some of them with doctor of philosophy degrees, who scathingly refused the ring and faced free love instead. They were quite frank about it—and quite fearless. I have talked with them there in Berlin. They looked at me as clear eyed, when they told me of what they had done, as any women who have walked ringed and veiled down a church aisle into legal wedlock. Well, they seemed to think it was the only way, to act directly instead of to agitate.
And they got out the book of the church ritual that they had repudiated. And they turned to a paragraph and said to me, Read. And I read: "The woman's will, as God says, shall be subject to the man and he shall be her master: that is, the woman shall not live according to her free will . . . and must neither begin nor complete anything without the man. Where he is, there must she be and bend before him as her master, whom she shall fear and to whom she shall be subject and obedient."
So I write it here, gentlemen, for you to see. And again, I submit, What would you do if they had said it that way to you? Be fair. Could any ring have held you?
