Until lately, the Bible theory that a woman was her husband's chattel was also carried out by law, and she forfeited on marriage all she possessed and became incapable of holding property. The more civilised view of woman as an individual has, however, now in matters of property become incorporated into the law, and the wife is no longer in the position of a minor.
While the licence of the Old Testament has thus colored our laws and our social opinion, the asceticism of the New has also exerted its baneful influence on Christendom. The hatred of women shown by Tertullian and by Jerome permeated the theology of the primitive church. Monasteries, nunneries, and the celibacy of the clergy, all grew out of the teaching of Jesus and of Paul. The frightful sexual immorality which invariably accompanies the enforcement of an unnatural asceticism is too well known to need proof or argument here.
Even in her motherhood woman cannot escape the degradation stamped upon her by the Bible. For forty days after the birth of a son, for eighty days after the birth of a daughter, the mother was unclean; "she shall touch no hallowed thing, nor come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purifying be fulfilled" (Lev. xii., 4).
Paul's contempt for the desire of a woman for knowledge has been fully shared by those who believe in him as an apostle of Christ. The education of women has been shamefully neglected until our own time, and—still marking that woman's advancement accompanies scepticism—it was the secular University of London which first held out to women the educational honors which had been jealously preserved as the privilege of man.
Happily for women, the influence of the Bible is becoming feebler and feebler as education and heresy make their beneficent way among men. The chains bound round her by the Bible are being broken by Freethought, and soon she shall walk upright and unfettered in the sunshine, the friend, the helper, the lover, but nevermore the slave, of man.
ONE PENNY.
Printed by Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, at 63, Fleet Street, London, E.C.—1885.
