"This same bishop boasted, at a public banquet, that in twenty-two months fourteen children had been born to him. A license to the clergy to keep concubines was during several centuries levied by princes."--Ibid.
"It was openly attested that 100,000 women in England alone were made dissolute by the clergy." --Draper, "Intellectual Development of Europe."
Such was the "_elevation" and civilization offered by the Church to woman_. These are among her debts to the Church, and the men who fought and contended against the incorporation of such infamy into the common law were branded as infidels. It was said they denied their Lord. They were pronounced most dangerous, and the clergy held up their hands in holy horror and whispered that such men "as much as denied the Bible, blasphemed their God, and sold their souls to the Devil." And the women, poor dupes, believed it.
One method the Church took to benefit woman and show its respect for her was this: any married man was prohibited from being a priest. Women were so unholy, so unclean, and so inferior, that to have one as a wife degraded a man to such an extent that he was unfit to be a minister or to touch holy things. The Catholic Church still prohibits either party who is so unholy as to marry from profaning its pulpit'; but the Protestant Churches divide up, giving women the disabilities and mon the offices. The unselfishness of such a course is quite touching. It says to women: "You support us and we will damn you; there is nothing mean or niggardly about us."
As to Blackstone's second count--"the right to personal liberty"--I can perhaps do no better than give a few bald facts.
Under Pagan rule the personal liberty of woman had become very considerable, as well as her proprietary liberty; but Christianity began her degradation at once.
Christianity was introduced into England in the fourth century, and the _sale of women began in the fifth_; and it was not until the eleventh that a girl could refuse to marry any suitor her father chose for her. In a word, she always had a guardian; she had no personal liberty whatever; she could neither buy nor own property as her brothers could; she could not marry when and whom she preferred, live where she wished, eat, drink, or wear what she liked, or refuse any of these provisions when they were offered by her male relatives. If they decided that she had too many back teeth they simply pulled them out, and she had nothing to say on the subject. She could be sold outright by her father, or leased or bound out as he preferred. She never got so old but that her earnings belonged to him, and a mother never arrived at an age sufficiently advanced to be entitled to the earnings of her children.