WOMEN'S POSITION IN CLASS DIVIDED SOCIETY

Another excerpt from Winwood Reade.

„THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN“

….However as the intelligence expands and the sentiment become more rifined, marriage is hallowed by religion; adultery  is regarded as shame to the husband, and as sin agaist the gods;  and a new feeling  - jealousy – enter for the first time the  heart of man. The husband desires to monopolize his wife, body and soul. He intercepts her glances;  he attemt to penetrate into her thoughts. He cower her with clothes; he hiden even her face from the public gaze. His jealouzy, not only anxious for the future, is extended ower the past. Thus women from thir earliest chilhood are subjected by the selfishness of man to severe but salutary laws. Chastity becomes the rule of female life. At first it is preserved by force alone. Male slaves are appointed to guard the women, who, exept sometimes from momentary pique, never betray on another, and are allayed agents the men. But as the minds of men are gradually  elevated and refined trough the culture of the intellect, there rises withim them a sentiment which is unknown in savage life.  They conceive a contemt for those pleasures which they share with the lowest mankind, and even with the brutes. They feel that this instinct is degrading; they strive to resist it ; they endeavor to be pure. But that instinct is strong with the accumulated  power of innumerable generations; and the noble desire is weak and newly born;  it can seldom be sustained exept by the hopes and fears of religion, or by the nobler teaching of philosophy. But in women his new virtue is assinted by laws ad customs which were established,long before, by the selfishness of men. Hire then, the abhorrence of the impure, the sense of duty, the fear of punishment, all unit and form a moral law which woomen themselves inforce, becoming the guardians of they own horor, and treating as traitors to her seks the womn who betrays her trust. For her the most compassionate have no mercy; she has broken thos laws of honors on which society is fuonded. It is frbidden to receive her; it is an insult to women to allude to her exitence , to pronounce her name. Se is condemned without inqiry, as the oficer is condemned who  has  shown cowardice before the foe. For the life of women is a battle- field; virtue is the courage , and pease of mind is the reward. It is certainly and extraordinary  fact that women should be subjected to a severe social discipline for which men are almost entirely exept. As we have shovn, it is explained by history; it is due to ancient subjection of womem to the man. But it is not the women who are to be pitied; it is they who alone are free, for by that discipline they are preserved  for the tirany of vice. It would be well formen if they also were rulled by  a severe opinion. To passions are allway foes, but it is only when they have been that they are able to become master; it is only when they have allied theselves with habit tha they terrible power becomes known. They resemble will beasts  which men feed and cherish until they are themselves devoured by their playmates. What misery they cause, how many intelects they paralyze, how many famillies they ruin, how many innocent hearts they break asunder, how many lives they poison, how many young corpses they carry to the tomb.

What a fate can be more wretched than that of the man who resign himself to them ?.......“