Christian view. Protestantism, even Puritanism with
its associations of spiritual revolt, so far from modifying the accepted
attitude, strengthened it, for they found authority for all social
organisation in the Bible, and the Bible revealed an emphatic predominance
of the Jewish husband, who possessed essential rights to which the wife
had no claim. Milton, who had the poet's sensitiveness to the loveliness
of woman, and the lonely man's feeling for the solace of her society, was
yet firmly assured of the husband's superiority over his wife. He has
indeed furnished the classical picture of it in Adam and Eve,

"He for God only, she for God in him,"

and to that God she owed "subjection," even though she might qualify it
by "sweet reluctant amorous delay." This was completely in harmony with
the legal position of the wife. As a subject she was naturally in
subjection; she owed her husband the same loyalty as a subject owes the
sovereign; her disloyalty to him was termed a minor form of treason; if
she murdered him the crime was legally worse than murder and she rendered
herself liable to be burnt.

We see that all the influences on our civilisation, religious and secular,
southern and northern, have combined to mould the underlying bony
structure of our family system in such a way that, however it may appear
softened and disguised on the surface, the husband is the head and the
wife subject to him. We must not be supposed hereby to deny that the wife
has had much authority, many privileges, considerable freedom, and in
individual cases much opportunity to domineer, whatever superiority custom
or brute strength may have given the husband. There are henpecked
husbands, it has been remarked, even in aboriginal Australia. It is
necessary to avoid the error of those enthusiasts for the emancipation of
women who, out of their eager faith in the future of women, used to
describe her past as one of scarcely mitigated servitude and hardship. If
women had not constantly succeeded in overcoming or eluding the
difficulties that beset them in the past, it would be foolish to cherish
any faith in their future. It must, moreover, be remembered that the very
constitution of that ecclesiastico-feudal hierarchy which made the husband
supreme over the wife, also made the wife jointly with her husband supreme
over their children and over their servants. The Middle Ages, alike in
England and in France, as doubtless in Christendom gene