We are told that women owe honorable marriage to Christianity;* that the more beautiful and tender relations of husband and wife find their root there; that Christianity protects and elevates the mother as no other law or religion ever has. Let us see.
On this subject I find in Maine's "Ancient Law" these facts:
"Although women had been objects of barter and sale, according to barbaric usages, between their male relatives, the later Roman [Pagan] law having assumed, _on the theory of Natural Law, the equality of the sexes_, control of the _person_ of women was quite obsolete when Christianity was born. Her situation had become one of great personal liberty and proprietary independence, even when married, and the arbitrary power over her of her male relations, or her guardian, was reduced to a nullity, while the form of _marriage conferred on the husband no superiority_."
Thus as a daughter and as a wife had she grown to be honored and recognized as an equal under Pagan rule.
"_But Christianity tended from the first to narrow this remarkable liberty...._ The latest Roman [Pagan] law, _so far as touched by the constitutions of the Christian emperors, bears marks of reaction against these great liberal doctrines._" --Maine.
And again began the sale of women. Christianity held her as unclean and in all respects inferior; and "during the era which begins modern history the women of dominant races are seen everywhere under various forms of archaic guardianship, and _the husband pays a money price to her male relations for her_. The prevalent state of _religious_ sentiment may explain why it is that _modern_ jurisprudence has absorbed among its rudiments _much more than usual of those rules_ [archaic] _concerning the position of women which belong peculiarly to an imperfect civilization._" --Ibid.
Thus it will be seen that from the first, and extending down to the present, the Church did all she could to cast woman back into the night of the race from which in a great measure she had been rescued through the ages when Natural Law and not "revelation" was the guide of man. The laws which the Church found liberal and just toward women it discarded, and it searched back in the ages of night for such as it saw fit to re-enact for her. Of this Maine says: "The husband now draws to himself the power which formerly belonged to his wife's male relatives, the only difference being that he no longer pays anything for the privilege."