any hundred years the law
entered families, binding out to servile labor all unmarried women
between the ages of eleven and forty.

For more than a thousand years women in England were legislated for as
slaves. They were imprisoned for crimes that, if committed by a man,
were punished by simple branding in the hand; and other crimes which
he could atone for by a fine, were punished in her case by burning
alive. Down to the end of the eighteenth century the punishment of a
wife who had murdered her husband was burning[204] alive; while if the
husband murdered the wife, his was hanging, "the same as if he had
murdered any stranger." Her crime was petit treason, and her
punishment was the same as that of the slave who had murdered her
master. For woman there existed no "benefit of clergy," which in a man
who could read, greatly lessened his punishment; this ability to read
enabling him to perform certain priestly functions and securing him
immunity in crime. The Church having first made woman ineligible to
the priesthood, punished her on account of the restrictions of its own
making. We who talk of the burning of wives upon the funeral pyres of
husbands in India, may well turn our eyes to the records of Christian
countries.

Where marriage is wholly or partially under ecclesiastical law,
woman's degradation surely follows; but in Catholic and Protestant
countries a more decent veil has been thrown over this sacrifice of
woman than under some forms of the Greek Church, where the wife is
delivered to the husband under this formula: "Here, wolf, take thy
lamb!" and the bridegroom is presented with a whip, giving his bride a
few blows as part of the ceremony, and bidding her draw off his boots
as a symbol of her subjugation to him. With such an entrance ceremony,
it may well be surmised that the marriage relation permits of the most
revolting tyranny. In Russia, until recently, the wife who killed her
husband while he was chastising her, was buried alive, her head only
being left above ground. Many lingered for days before the mercy of
death reached them.

Ivan Panim, a Russian exile, now a student in Harvard College, made
the following statement in a speech at the Massachusetts Woman
Suffrage Convention, held in February, 1881:

A short time ago the wife of a well-to-do peasant came to a
justice of one of the district courts in Russia and demanded
protection from the cruelty of her husband. She proved