Huntsville gazette., 1889-10-12
A BACKWARD GLANCE.
41he Advance of Civilixat tIon and the Reign
of Christianity Bringing Woman For
ward to Her Place Beside Man.

Never since civilization took its first
feeble steps, wayward yet ever onward,
have women occupied the favorable
position which they do at present-fa.
vorable for their own special develop
/ ment, and favorable for the race.
In the earlier, the purely savage.
state they were perhaps as much the
eqaai of their mates as the lioness and
tigress are now; indeed, science init
mates that they were something more.
Be all that as it may, civilization had
to take an apparent step backward and
downward in order to bring them any
where near another and better sort of
equality. AS the more beautiful among
them were sought pampering and in
diligence made them tenderer and
weaker doubtless, till they lost equality
and became dependents. With that
they were easily made the spoil of war,
the capture from the hostile tents,
slaves, whether kindly or tyrannically
entreated, and with hardly more
chance of deepening their natures or
enlarging their souls than they might
Lave had were the Mohammedan faith
tha true one-the faith which teaches
thai they have no souls. There was
but cue way then to any happiness Or
comfort for them, but one way to win
any hearts desire for themselves
or their children, and that
was through the good will of
the chief, the master the lord, or
that of his favorite, and that good will
had to be obtained at any cost. Help
less and weak, timid as helpless weak
ness makes one, their only arts were
love and cunning, and where one of
these would not answer, it had to be
supplemented by the other. II the
master nature had in it elements OF
justice, the cunning was not needed;
but that was probably not too fre-
quently the case. Through all the
subsequent regimes ever enlarging
and ennobling, women have not en-
tirely succeeded in ridding themselves
Of the whole of the effect of this stage
of their existence in the race, and sly
ness and subtlety are traits against
which many of them-but, thank Heav-
en-! not all-have yet to struggle. Civ
| ilization had gone very far indeed be-
fore women left this condition of sub
! lection. Only inseparate and not alto
| gether admirable instances were they
free from it even so late as the time Of
the best Greek conditions. 1t was a
nominal freedom that they had in Rome,
| where one wife was the rule, but where
the freedom Of divorce was a nullify-
ing and destroying offset 1t was in
the Hebrew life that women first re-
ceived any due share of recognition at
time when the harem, or tho zenana,
or its equivalent, was nearly every
where else the rule. The poetical and
sacred character of womanhood had
been recognized in Miriam, in
Deborah, in Anna; and in the
custom of the one wife the initial
point of the real family had
started But civilization seems to work,
Inv 1SoNClA, b1ii ouSh OliC WIN lump
and not in separate parcels; for just as
we have at the time Of the European
renaissance, without any known COM
munication, a renaissance of the same
sort in the islands of the farthest East,
SO the custom of having but one wife
presently prevailed in Rome and in
many other places, as if by common
consent Women then with the Ger
mans were sort Of priestesses; they
ruled in way as strongly as if by
| force. Expeditions were undertaken at
tneir will, were abandoned if they for
bade and their blessing was striven
| for. But great as advance had by this
/ time become, greater yet was the adj
vance that chivalry and the spirit of
the crusades effected. There had doubt
less been individual love and worship
before; but now it was general, so to
speak; no one beautiful woman was so
much to be reverenced as womanhood
itself. This half poetical, half relig-
iouS reverence, extended to the whole
sex, was not so ennobling to women as
to men themselves; it did men vastly
more good than it did the feeble women
mewed in cages and receiving an aims
Of worship. The act of worship was
ennobling to the worshiper, and once
lifted to the plane where he could see
the real worth of woman, man has not
receded, and every advantage that she
has since gained has been given to her
by the man who might have withheld
it.
1t was then, among the people of a
pure and grand religion, where moral
law existed of the straitest sort, that
woman first rose from the mere dust,
respecting herself as she received re-
spect, feeling her first thrills Of aspira-
ton. And it was under the develop
ment of this same religion in its lowell
est and loftiest life that she became the
object Of tender regards that she ceased
to be a slave, that the world was
i opened to her to use according to her
| l.,