Even the priceless virtue of chastity, in the name of law and in the name of the Bible, was trampled under foot. Mrs. Gage, in “Woman, Church, and State,” says:
“Women were taught by the church and state alike that the feudal lord, or seigneur, had a right to them, not only against themselves, but as against any claim of husband or father. The law known as Marchetta, or Marquette, compelled newly-married women to a most dishonorable servitude. They were regarded as the rightful prey of the feudal lord from one to three days after their marriage.... France, Germany, Prussia, England, Scotland, and all Christian countries where feudalism existed, held to the enforcement of Marquette.”
Respecting this law, Michelet writes: “The lords spiritual had this right no less than the lords temporal. The parson, being a lord, expressly claimed the first fruits of the bride” (La Sorcerie, page 62).
In this country, while the most illiterate and depraved man is clothed with the rights of a sovereign, the noblest woman is held in a subordinate position; and from the Bible, priests and politicians have procured the chains that hold her in subjection.
Referring to the Bible, America’s greatest woman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, says: “I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman” (Eighty Years and More).
Brave Helen Gardener says: “Every injustice that has ever been fastened upon women in a Christian country has been ‘authorized by the Bible’ and riveted and perpetuated by the pulpit” (Men, Women, and Gods, page 14).
“Women are indebted to-day for their emancipation from a position of hopeless degradation, not to their religion nor to Jehovah, but to the justice and honor of the men who have defied his commandments. That she does not crouch to-day where St. Paul tried to bind her, she owes to the men who are grand and brave enough to ignore St. Paul, and rise superior to his God” (Ibid, page 30).
George W. Foote of England says it will yet be the proud boast of woman that she never contributed a line to the Bible.