[30] When the temporal kingdom took possession of Italy, the rate of ignorance was 90 per cent. It has now been reduced to 45 per cent.
[31] The “Boston Herald,” Aug. 17, 1886, heading an article upon these statutes, “Copper Colored Blue Laws.”
[32] A husband is entitled to punish his wife when he sees fit. At first he is to use remonstrances; if these do not avail, he is to have recourse to more severe punishment. The confessor is at first bound not to pay much heed to women complaining of their husbands, because women are habitually inclined to lie.
[33] The scene in the convocation was animated, the public at large favoring the women. The senior Proctor being slow in his figuring, one of the “Gods in the Gallery” becoming impatient for the announcement of the numbers, shouted “Call in one of the ladies to help you, sir.”
[34] In Egypt, where women received the same education as men, very few children died—a fact noted in the absence of child mummies.
[35] “Eve lived 940 years, giving birth to a boy and a girl every year. Eve lived ten years longer than Adam. They must give this first woman the best constitution in the world for while her husband lived 930 years and communicated to his sons for several generations the principle of so long a life (which is no less applicable to Eve than to him), he must have been of very vigorous constitution; turn the thing as you will it will always be an argument from the greater to the less to show that Eve’s body was better constituted than that of her husband.”
CHAPTER TEN
[1] As the resurrection of a material body to dwell in a spiritual heaven.
[2] When a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disheartened by the circumstance to see clearly the absurdity of this command. This is the condition of women, for whom I have the same compassion that I would have for a prisoner so long cramped in a narrow cage that he could not use his limbs. While many women are thinking their own thoughts there are others without so potent a brain, who have as yet, failed to see the absurdity of allowing others to think for them. For this condition of mental and moral blunders the church is responsible.—Ralph Waldo Emerson.
[3] When reading was first taught women in America, said Dr. Clemence S. Lozier, it was opposed on the ground that she would forget her father’s or husband’s name should she learn to read and write. Geography met with like opposition on the ground of its tendency to make her dissatisfied with home and desirous to travel, while the records of history show that the first public examination of women in Geometry, 1829, raised a cry of disapproval over the whole country.