to wear a girl's coat. She would look at something
else. Reggie pulled off the coat, as if it burned him, and felt he had
been perilously near to something very compromising and indelicate.
Thus did young Reggie receive a lesson in sex contempt at the hands of
his mother!

Let us lay the blame where it belongs. If any man holds women in
contempt--and many do--their mothers are to blame for it in the first
place, it began in the nursery but was fostered on the street, and
nourished in the school where sitting with a girl has been handed out
as a punishment, containing the very dregs of humiliation; where boys
are encouraged to play games and have a good time, but where until a
few years ago girls were expected to "sit around and act ladylike" in
the playtime of the others.

The church has contributed a share, too, in the subjection of women, in
spite of the plain teaching of our Lord, and many a sermon has been
based on the words of Saint Paul about women remaining silent in the
churches, and if any question arose to trouble her soul, she must ask
her husband quietly at home.

But it is at the marriage altar, where women receive the crowning
insult. "Who gives this woman away?" asks the minister. "I do," says
her father or brother, or some male relative, without a blush.
Perfectly satisfactory. One man hands her over to another man, the
inference being that the woman has nothing to do with it. In this most
vital decision of her whole life, she has had to get a man to do the
thinking for her. It goes back to the old days, of course, when a
woman was a man's chattel, to do with as he saw fit. The word "obey"
has gone from some of the marriage ceremonies. Bishops even have seen
the absurdity of it and taken it out.

Women have held a place all their own in the church. "I am willing
that the sisters should labor," cried an eminent doctor of the largest
Protestant church in Canada, when the question of allowing women to sit
in the highest courts of the church was discussed. "I am willing that
the sisters should labor," he said, "and that they should labor more
abundantly, but we cannot let them rule." And it was so decreed.

Women have certainly been allowed to labor in the church. There is no
doubt of that. There are many things they may do with impunity, nay,
even hilarity. They may make strong and useful garments for the poor;
they may teach in Sunday-school and attend prayer-meeting; they may
finance