o awful. Just in proportion as it is consistently
carried out, it trains men from boyhood into self-indulgent tyrants; and,
while some women are transformed by it to saints, others are crushed into
deceitful slaves. That this was the result of chattel slavery, this nation
has at length learned. We learn more slowly the profounder and more subtile
moral evil that follows from the unrighteous promise to obey.

WOMAN IN THE CHRYSALIS

When the bride receives the ring upon her finger, and utters--if she utters
it--the promise to obey, she sees a poetic beauty in the rite. Turning of
her own free will from her maiden liberty, she voluntarily takes the yoke
of service upon her. This is her view; but is this the historic fact in
regard to marriage? Not at all. The pledge of obedience--the whole theory
of inequality in marriage--is simply what is left to us of a former state
of society, in which every woman, old or young, must obey somebody. The
state of tutelage, implied in such a marriage, is merely what is left of
the old theory of the "Perpetual Tutelage of Women," under the Roman law.

Roman law, from which our civil law is derived, has its foundation
evidently in patriarchal tradition. It recognized at first the family only,
and that family was held together by paternal power _(patria potestas)_. If
the father died, his powers passed to the son or grandson, as the possible
head of a new family; but these powers could never pass to a woman, and
every woman, of whatever age, must be under somebody's legal control. Her
father dying, she was still subject through life to her nearest male
relations, or to her father's nominees, as her guardians. She was under
perpetual guardianship, both as to person and property. No years, no
experience, could make her anything but a child before the law.

In Oriental countries the system was still more complete. "A man," says the
Gentoo Code of Laws, "must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by
no means be mistress of her own action. If the wife have her own free will,
notwithstanding she be of a superior caste, she will behave amiss." But
this authority, which still exists in India, is not merely conjugal. The
husband exerts it simply as being the wife's legal guardian. If the woman
be unmarried or a widow, she must be as rigorously held under some other
guardianship. It is no uncommon thing for a woman in India to be the ward
of her own son. Lucretia Mott or Florence Nigh