any human being, can be seen. The first ceremony performed on a
newborn child is washing its hands, to purify it, since it also
is unclean.[1784]

+562. Uncleanness amongst the Jews.+ Ritual uncleanness is
represented in the Old Testament as due to contact with carcasses
of unclean cattle and other unclean things;[1785] to contact with
a woman in childbirth, with a longer period if the infant is a
girl than a boy.[1786] Care about clean and unclean things was
praised as a high religious virtue,[1787] and the prophets used
the distinction for the difference between virtue and vice.[1788]
The food taboo is expressed by declaring forbidden animals
unclean.[1789] Plague and leprosy are cases of ritual
uncleanness, also issues.[1790] Distinctions of this kind
(cleanness and uncleanness), enforced by ritual, depend on clear
facts of observation and prescribe simple acts. They include no
dogmas. They prescribe things to be done. They produce notions
and habits. They enter so deeply into ways of living that it
takes long counter-education to eradicate them. The strength of
the adherence to this distinction, in the rabbinical period, is
well shown in the New Testament.

+563. Uncleanness amongst Greeks.+ The Greeks had similar
conceptions of uncleanness. Marriage was surrounded by rites of
purification and precaution, the marriage bath being one of the
most essential acts in the wedding rites.[1791] Death and the
dead produced uncleanness, and purification by water, fire, or
smoke was required.[1792]

+564. These mores produced modesty and subordination of women.+ Two
things of great social importance in respect to women are traceable to
these mores: (_a_) The sex modesty of women. The usages of
Zoroastrianism are cruel. They treat women as base, not on the same
plane with men, affected by a natural inferiority, and therefore as
having something to be ashamed of. Inasmuch as these usages were all in
the mores, the women accepted them as true and right, and probably never
rebelled against them even in thought. The mores therefore taught them
sex modesty, and especial shame of the sex function. (_b_) The
subordination of women. They never were subordinated because they are
weaker, because in savagery and barbarism they often are not so, but
because of their feminine disabilities and the correlative
inferiorities. They accepted the facts and the interpr