Under the Crescent the condition of woman is worse rather than better, for in pagan India she is permitted to share in the hope of religion; but in Mohammedan countries it is a popular tradition that women are forbidden paradise; and it requires some effort for the imagination to conceive how debased and wretched must be the condition of the female sex to originate and sustain such a horrible and blasphemous tradition.
Even in the refined and shining ages of Greece and Rome, where the cultivation of letters and the graces of polished style, the charms of poetry and eloquence, the elegances of architecture, sculpture, painting, and embroidery, the glory of conquest and the pride of national distinction, were unsurpassed,—even then and there, woman was but the abject slave of man, the object of his ambition, avarice, lust, and power.
Truly has it been said that nothing more surely distinguishes the savage state from the civilized, the East from the West, Paganism from Christianity, antiquity from the middle ages, the middle ages from modern times, than the condition of woman.
In China, she is used as a beast of burden. The Chinese peasant woman goes to the field with her male infant on her back, and ploughs, sows, and reaps, exposed to all the changes of the weather. In Calcutta, women are the masons, and maybe seen daily conveying their hods of cement, and spreading it on the tops of their houses.
In a country where no European man can labor, where the native rests until compelled by his conqueror to work, seven thousand of these women might have been seen, in 1859, climbing to the edge of ravines, with baskets of stone on their heads, to fill, with these tedious contributions, thousands of perpendicular feet, in order that a railroad might wind among the mountains.
In Australia, she carries the burden which man's indolence refuses; and in Great Britain, the condition of women among the lower classes, revealed by the statistics of her mines and of her manufacturing districts, is such as to make a moralist blush. Behold her, with a strap around her waist, dragging the coal-cart in the mine, and so ignorant, that when asked if she knew Jesus, replied, "He never worked in our shaft."
Do we turn to America, we find that in the providence of God her fortune has been advanced and improved by the extension of the era of free government, and by the diffusion of the principles of the gospel of Christ.
True, in the past, throughout the South, a negro woman worked in the field as a beast of burden; but emancipation and the diffusion of the principles of Christianity changes all this in the South, as it has changed it in Turkey and in the East. The colored man builds for his wife a house, and toils for her in the field or shop, while she keeps the house, and beautifies the sanctuary of the heart.
Now, in all this land, woman's right to be a woman is recognized, and "woman's right to be a man" is opposed, though eloquent orators of either sex may declaim in its behalf. God's law, natural and revealed, is against it. Woman's nature will be woman's nature no longer when she shall desire it.
An illustration of this fact was recently furnished. A female orator had just left the platform for the horse-car. She was tired, and, doubtless, needed a seat. She had been speaking in favor of woman's rights, and had berated the opposite sex for their unwillingness to grant them. Worn out with fatigue, and excited, her lace red, her eyes flashing, she looked around for a seat. The car was full, and among the number sitting down was a workingman.