mes; they had but few privileges; they had no
books; they led a life of terror from the caprices of their lords and
masters, and hence inspired no veneration. The wives and daughters of
the rich tyrannized over their servants, decked themselves with costly
ornaments, and were merely gilded toys, whose society was vapid and
uninteresting. The wives and daughters of the poor were drudges and
menials, without attraction or influence; noisy, quarrelsome, garrulous
women, who said the least when they talked the most.

Hence under Paganism home had none of those attractions which, in
Christian countries, invest it with such charms. The home of the poor
was squalid and repulsive; the home of the rich was gaudy and tinselled
enough, but was dull and uninspiring. What is home when women are
ignorant, stupid, and slavish? What glitter or artistic splendor can
make home attractive when women are mere butterflies or slaves with
gilded fetters? Deprive women of education, and especially of that
respect which Christian chivalry inspires, and they cannot rise to be
the equal companions of men. They are simply their victims or their
slaves. What is a home where women are treated as inferiors? Paganism
never recognized their equality with men; and if they ever ruled men, it
was by appealing to their lower qualities, or resorting to arts and
devices which are subversive of all dignity of character. When their
personal beauty fled, their power also departed. A faded or homely
woman, without intelligence or wit, was a forlorn object in a Pagan
home,--to be avoided, derided, despised,--a melancholy object of pity or
neglect, so far as companionship goes. She may have been valued as a
cook or drudge, but she was only a menial. Of all those sins of omission
of which Paganism is accused, the worst was that it gave to women no
mental resources to assist them in poverty, or neglect, or isolation,
when beauty or fortune deserted them. No home can be attractive where
women have no resources; and women can have no resources outside of
domestic duties, unless educated to some art or something calculated to
draw out their energies and higher faculties by which they win the
respect and admiration, not of men only, but of their own sex.

It was this lack of education which Paganism withheld from women which
not only destroyed the radiance of home, but which really made women
inferior to men. All writers, poets, and satirists alike speak of the
inferio