When religious influence and dogma began to lose their terrors, legal enactments were slowly modified in woman's favor and hell went out of fashion. Then Conservatism, Ignorance, and Egotism, in dismay and terror, took counsel together and called in medical science, still in its infancy, to aid in staying the march of progress which is inevitable to civilization and so necessary to anything like a real Republic. Equality of opportunity began to be denied to woman, for the first time, upon natural and so-called scientific grounds. She was pronounced physically and mentally incapable, because of certain anatomical conditions, and she must be prevented--for her own good and that of the race _here_--from competition with her mental and physical superiors.
It was no longer her soul, but her body, that needed saving from herself. Her thirst for knowledge the clergy declared had already damned the souls of a very large majority of mankind--in a hereafter known only to them. The same vicious tendency, the doctors echoed, will be the ruin of the physical bodies of the race in this world, as we are prepared to prove. The case began to look hopeless again. Opportunity must be denied, these doctors say, because capacity does not exist. Where capacity seems to exist, it is, it must be, at the expense of individual health and future maternal capabilities.
As a person, she has no status with these consistent believers in "equal rights to all mankind." As a potential mother only, can she hope for consideration either by religious or medical theorist. This has been a difficult combination to meet. Few who cared to contest their verdict, possessed the bravery to fearlessly face the religious dictators, and fewer still had the anatomical and anthropological information to risk a fight on a field which assumed to be held by those who based all of their arguments upon scientific facts, collected by microscope and scales and reduced to unanswerable statistics.
The priest, reinforced by the doctor, promised a long and bitter struggle, on new grounds, to those who fought for simple justice to the individual, aside from her sex relations; who wished for neither malediction nor mercy; those who claim only the right of a unit to enjoy the common heritage untrammeled by superstition and artificial difficulties. They do not ask to be helped--only not to be hindered. They had hailed science as their friend and ally; and behold, pseudo-science adopted theories, invented statistics, and published personal prejudices as demonstrated fact. All this has done a vast deal of harm to the cause of woman.