unsightly has been built on it, it seems to underlie all else in the national heart, like the clean, resisting, faithful rock. It is as little like mere gallantry as granite is like a fungus. It is so far from being a mere custom or fashion that it has outlived innumerable changes in the national customs and law! And it is difficult to see into what wildernesses and unwholesome swamps women might not have dragged themselves, and been dragged by men, if this fair undersoil had not been won for us by our ancestors in the woods!
Certainly there is no country in which feudal law struck such deep root as in England—that feudal law which takes so small account of woman as a being with rights of any order. Yet it was not against womanhood but against wifehood that feudal law reared its iron hand. It was marriage that stripped a woman of all her rights; handing her over with all her property to her husband to be used by him, with few restrictions, at his own will and pleasure. So completely was the wife reduced to the place of a chattel that her whole moral responsibility was lost. If she committed a fault in the presence of her husband it was he, not she, who was answerable before the law. The ignoble woman found in this a means of escape. The noble saw in it the degradation of wife—and motherhood. It is in the interests of the wife that the first great reforms influencing the status of women were carried out in England. For her the Act of 1857, which gives to the married woman, after sentence of judicial separation, the right to keep anything she may earn
