flicted on women on the ground of witchcraft and this must be taken
into calculation when one considers what woman owes to religion. The
Reformation reduced woman to the position of a mere breeder of children.
During the sway of Puritanism woman was a poor, benighted being, a human
toad under the harrow of a pious imbecility.

The pioneers in the Modern Woman Movement in this country were, of
course, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Miss Susan B. Anthony. In their
"History of Woman Suffrage" they comment on the vicious opposition which
the early workers encountered in New York. "Throughout this protracted
and disgraceful assault on American womanhood the clergy baptised every
new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion,
and uniformly asked God's blessing on proceedings that would have put to
shame an assembly of Hottentots."

And while the clergy either remained silent or heaped abuse on this
early movement, such freethinkers as Robert Owen, Jeremy Bentham, George
Jacob Holyoake, and John Stuart Mill in England entered the fray
wholeheartedly in behalf of the emancipation of woman. In France it was
Michelet and George Sand that came to their aid. In Germany it was Max
Sterner, Buechner, Marx, Engels, and Liebknecht. In Scandinavia it was
Ibsen and Bjoernson.

The battle was begun by freethinkers in defiance of the clergy and it
was only when the inevitable conquest of this movement was manifest that
any considerable number of clergy came to the aid of this progressive
movement. The righting of the wrongs imposed on womankind therefore had
been started not only without the aid of the churches but in face of
their determined opposition. It was not the clergy that discovered the
injustice that had been done to women throughout the centuries, and when
it was finally pointed out to them by sceptics, it was the rare
ecclesiastic that could see it so and attempt to right the wrong.

R. H. Bell, in tracing this struggle of woman in her publication, "Woman
from Bondage to Freedom," has this pertinent remark to make. "If there
are any personal rights in this world over which Church and State should
have no control, it is the sexual right of a woman to say, 'Yes' or
'No.' These and similar rights are so deeply imbedded in natural
morality that no clear-headed, clean-hearted person would wish to
controvert them.... Enforced motherhood, through marriage or otherwise,
is a mixed form of slavery, voluntary mot