the source of fertility, and because hidden powers had chosen her to preserve life and secure offspring.

But woman's decline began with the appearance of the great iron tools, which man was better able than woman to wield. Then began the era of private property: the single man became owner of the land and the slaves

and lord of his household, women included, holding over them absolute power, like the power of owner over owned. His rights over his daughters are absolute rights, passing from him by marriage to the husband, who is entitled to a plurality of wives and entitled to divorce whenever he pleases. He imposes upon the wife a chastity he does not impose upon himself, and punishes the adulteress with death, because she is his private property, and he the source of her livelihood and her children's. A trace of that right survives in the statutes of today — witness the fact that the Napoleonic codes, from which our penal law was drawn, prescribe a lightened penalty for the man who kills his wife, or one of his womenfolk, on suspicion of her conduct.

The era of private property set the paternal order in the place of the maternal order and sealed woman's enslavement, because ownership of the land became confined to man, and males, to the exclusion of females, began to inherit the land from their father, in order to continue tilling it and to perpetuate his memory by it. In one country alone, in ancient Egypt, woman equaled man in rights

of inheritance, because the land belonged to the king, the priests, and the soldiers, while the common people were merely cultivators of the land, and therefore felt no difficulty in dividing their small possessions equally between sons and daughters. But in the other agricultural communities founded on ownership of the land, and in the warlike communities whose people depended on raiding for their living — as in the Arabian Peninsula, for example — woman's standing sank, and she was taken as an instrument of procreation, for the bearing of warriors and heirs.

Woman had certain rights in the laws of Hammurabi, and likewise in the laws of Pharaonic Egypt; but in the rest of the Eastern lands her enslavement was complete. In the land of the Greeks they set over her a guardian, or trustee, over her person or her property — when she had property in the form of a separate portion, or a dowry provided by the guardian to secure her living.

In Sparta, however, where ownership of real property and of children was held in common, woman was man's equal in rights: she was trained, like him, for soldiering; she was not shut up in her husband's house; and she was not called to account for adultery, because the children belonged not to the father but to the state.

The Roman woman enjoyed a respected station: she was her husband's partner, not his servant; she was entitled to appear in public places; and among the Romans the girl inherited like her brothers. But the Roman woman did not make good use of her liberties, because she was not educated and was not given the right to take part in politics and affairs.

After the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of the feudal order, resting on war and agriculture, woman's enslavement returned to its former state. In the Middle Ages appeared chivalrous love and the romantic courtship that makes woman an object of worship and deification; but that did not mean her liberation — rather her imprisonment in a lofty castle, and the rivalry of knights to protect her or to win her,

like a precious treasure or a coveted possession. Woman was then an idol which man worships and shatters when he pleases, as Othello shattered poor Desdemona when he doubted her chastity.

When industry advanced and the first signs of the industrial revolution appeared, woman took the first step toward liberation, because wealth became monetary rather than landed, and hence transferable and convertible — unlike landed wealth, which bound man to his soil and kept him from sharing it with woman. And woman came earliest to liberation in the lands where the industrial revolution appeared first: in England and in America, and in the Anglo-Saxon lands before the Latin. To this day, industrial progress in any country is more favorable to the liberation of woman than agricultural progress.

The women's movement spread gradually, and women began to demand equality with man in civil and political rights. New Zealand