her claims upon the community (as even the enslaved wife of the Greek citizen could do for her narrow range of rights in marriage), she could never be manumitted into true freedom; and like all women supported by the personal favor of men outside the family life, her last estate was often worse than the first, and left her friendless in the city she loved.

The Vestals, on the other hand, were a picturesque embodiment of the city's reverence and the city's pride. The altar flame they guarded was the symbol of the collective worship of the many families that had united to build the city. For that reason the high honors which were paid them had a civic dignity which made magistrates step aside for them in the streets, which made criminals flee to their all-powerful protection for succor, which made their persons sacred even from careless touch, and gave them rights over their estates only equalled by the mothers of three children when the right of other women to personal property was finally recognized. The Vestals had also their parallel in Roman history, in the Stoics, who, in the time of Rome's decadence, lived in their world but not of it, and guarded in sublime isolation, amidst the bestiality and greed of their time, the sacred flame of a pure patriotism and a noble humanity.7

It must always be remembered in considering the paths by which freedom and opportunity have been opened to women, that so long as religion was of the family, or the city, of the nation or the race alone, woman had in it no place of her own. The head of 'See F. M. Holland, The Reign of the Stoics.

the Jewish household determined the faith of the family and the wife and mother would have been the last of the flock to differ from the patriarch. In all ethnic religions, which are but family faiths writ large in racial types, the sons of the family alone bear the torch of devotion from generation to generation. There are exceptions in the position of priestesses and sibyls; and in the old Teutonic strain are many traces of freedom and power among the women: but the civilizations that have stamped our laws are those in which all descent, spiritual, political and monetary, has been "through males and the descendants of males." The simple liberty of personal choice as human beings, which is now granted to women as to men, was unthought of in any past we know. To make it possible for the respectable woman, and for the secular woman and for the average woman, to refuse marriage or to live a normal life without a husband, it was necessary that at least two world-events of supreme importance should occur. One was the proclamation of Christianity, that every individual, "Jew and Gentile, male and female, bond and free," had a right to his or her own soul, and must bear individual responsibility for its salvation. Buddha before had announced, "My law is a law for all," and had thereby broken the outer wall of caste in India. For our civilization, however, the first Bill of Rights for women. was the spiritual Magna Charta that sent every human being to the altar solitary and by inner compulsion. Priests might afterward assume powers of exclusive representation of the divine, but even then

each soul must receive this ministration on its own account and for its own behoof. Under Paganism in Asia Minor women had held high priesthoods and official rank and office; and in the last days of the Roman Empire highly placed women had received personal property rights and power to plead in courts. and to order their lives freely as never before. Latin Christianity lost to woman much of this freedom, it is true; and after a time degraded its conception of womanhood by teaching ascetic disdain of marriage. One thing, however, Christianity gave women in the mass-a dignity they lacked before, this direct approach as individuals to the Infinite Ideal. Symbolized as that ideal was, in the feminine virtues of Jesus, the imagination of women was appealed to in a new and intense fashion, and women in crowds took advantage of their new spiritual franchise. The chaos of the time when the old order was breaking up and the new not yet formed, the separation of families, the woeful plight of young maidens bereft of protectors, the poverty of the old nobility, all did much to cast a large class of gentlewomen helpless upon the world. This made the establishment of religious houses a natural and necessary thing. But nothing did so much. to give women a high position in the early Church, or to establish for them unique careers in those religious houses, as the doctrine that the woman and the slave, as truly as the man and the master, whether inside or outside the family bond, must worship as equals and each manage his or her own spiritual concerns in individual responsibility. This it was which

made it honorable for women as for men to follow the Inner Light.

The Christian Church thus early offered women such a place of power as they had not held before.R Education, art, affairs, companionship with learned men and rulers of States, these all belonged to the realm of influence and activity presided over by the Lady Abbess. Great property holdings were hers, in her own name and the name of her order. Like St. Hilda, under whom several bishops were trained, she sometimes presided over mixed religious houses. In many cases she must be summoned to Parliament, like great lords, but might send a proxy; and often she furnished military forces second only to those of kings. That Spanish abbess who ruled sixty towns and villages; those two women rulers of the Holy Empire, who in Germany issued coins on their own account and were represented in the Imperial Diet, were but a few. of the great ladies who gained their highest powers of achievement through the Church. If women of this class lost, later on, their rule if not their influence in the conventual orders, some of the most noble and able live now as canonized saints.

The Lady Abbess was not always a maiden; she was often a widow, and sometimes a wife whose desertion of her husband and her family was counted to her for righteousness, if she embraced the true faith and he and they did not. But she must be celibate at least in profession while she held her stately

'See Louisa I. Lumsden, Woman in History in The Position of Woman, London, Nisbet & Co.

offices. She thus introduced to the ideal conceptions of humanity a new sort of woman; one who could be reverenced, and powerful, lovely and happy, and yet be independent of the family relationship. She thus made the modern spinster possible.

A second great world-event, without which the day of the spinster could not have dawned, was the abolition of slavery, the establishment of the legal right of the manual laborer to his own liberty and to his own possession of the fruit of his toil. Slavery is yet so near to us that we can smell its torment. It has been for man the debauchery and the exploitation of his work-power, that which is the commodity by which he must buy his right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Slavery was for woman, besides this, the debauchery and the exploitation of her sex-relationship. Looking over the world to-day, how few are the women who have emerged from this double despotism! The savage woman still is held by customs that treat her person as a communal property; the women of oriental civilizations still are segregated as members of the sex that must be watched and guarded; the very princesses of royal houses (which preserve in unreal pageant the outgrown customs of the past) are still given in marriage for purposes of State; unenlightened parenthood still barters its daughters in the marriage market for place and money; the day of woman's self-ownership and self-direction as a responsible human being has hardly yet dawned for the mass of the world's women. But for these few who have arrived as persons there are a new freedom