the pulpit, she has been trained to an unquestioning reverence for
theological authority and false belief upon the most vital interests
of religion. Forbidden the medical profession, she has at the most
sacred times of her life been left to the ignorant supervision of male
physicians, and seen her young children die by thousands. Forbidden to
enter the courts, she has seen her sex unjustly tried and condemned
for crimes men were incapable of judging.

Woman has been the great unpaid laborer of the world, and although
within the last two decades a vast number of new employments have been
opened to her, statistics prove that in the great majority of these,
she is not paid according to the value of the work done, but according
to sex. The opening of all industries to woman, and the wage question
as connected with her, are most subtle and profound questions of
political economy, closely interwoven with the rights of
self-government.

The revival of learning had its influence upon woman, and we find in
the early part of the fourteenth century a decided tendency toward a
recognition of her equality. Christine of Pisa, the most eminent woman
of this period, supported a family of six persons by her pen, taking
high ground on the conservation of morals in opposition to the general
licentious spirit of the age. Margaret of Angouleme, the brilliant
Queen of Navarre, was a voluminous writer, her Heptameron rising to
the dignity of a French classic. A paper in the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_, a few years since, by M. Henri Baudrillart, upon the
"Emancipation of Woman," recalls the fact that for nearly four hundred
years, men, too, have been ardent believers in equal rights for woman.

In 1509, Cornelius Agrippa, a great literary authority of his time,
published a work of this character. Agrippa was not content with
claiming woman's equality, but in a work of thirty chapters devoted
himself to proving "the superiority of woman." In less than fifty
years (1552) Ruscelli brought out a similar work based on the Platonic
Philosophy. In 1599, Anthony Gibson wrote a book which in the prolix
phraseology of the times was called, "A Woman's Worth defended against
all the Men in the World, proving to be more Perfect, Excellent, and
Absolute, in all Virtuous Actions, than any man of What Quality
Soever." While these sturdy male defenders of the rights of woman met
with many opponents, some going so far as to assert that women were
beings not end