d aesthetics are interwoven.

They made red and purple to be morally wrong, idealizing the plainness
of their uncultured ancestry, and sweet sounds they excluded from their
ears, declaring them to be evil noises, because they would set up the
boorishness of simple folk of old time as something noble and exalted,
"making believe" that such aesthetic lack was real self-denial and
unworldliness. It is not surprising that in a riper age of the world,
after lifetimes of this idealization of peasant states of mind, their
children find themselves morally and mentally unprepared for the
responsibilities of citizenship, of high ethical trust and of the varied
ways of a moral world, whose existence their fathers made believe to
ignore and deny.

Women have always occupied in Quakerism a place theoretically equal to
that of the men, in business and religious affairs. George Fox and his
successors declared men and women equal, inasmuch as the Divine Spirit
is in every human soul.

After the influence of the early Friends ceased, the place of woman
began to be circumscribed by new rules, and crystallized in a reaction
under the influence of purely social forces; so that this most sensible
people made women equal to men in meetings and in religious legislation
through a form of sexual taboo.

Following the custom of many early English meeting houses, the men and
women sat apart, the men on one side of the middle aisle, and the women
on the other, so that men and women were not equals in the individualist
sense, as they are for instance, in the practice and theory of
Socialism, but were equals in separate group-life; to each sex, grouped
apart from the other, equal functions were supposed to be delegated.
Oblong Meeting House, on Quaker Hill, had seats for two hundred and
fifty people on the ground floor, and in the gallery for one hundred and
fifty more. The men's side was separated from the women's, of equal size
and extent, by wooden curtains, which could be raised or lowered; so
that the whole building could be one auditorium, with galleries; or the
curtains could be so lowered that no man on the ground floor could see
any woman unless she be a speaker on the "facing seats"; nor could any
young person in the gallery see any one of the opposite sex; yet a
speaker could be heard in all parts. The curtains could be so fixed,
also, that two independent meetings could be held, each in a separate
auditorium, even the speakers being