The Law is for All

Chapter III a Verse 55 175 once and for all the tradition is broken; vanished the vogue of bowstring, sack, stoning, nose-slitting, beltbuckling, cart’s tail­ dragging, whipping, pillory posting, walling-up, divorce court, eunuch, harem, mind-crippling, house-imprisoning, menial-work­ wearying, creed-stultifying, social-ostracism marooning, Divine­ wrath-scaring, and even the device of creating and encouraging prostitution to keep one class of women in the abyss under the heel of the police, and the other on its brink, at the mercy of the husband’s boot at the first sign of insubordination or even of failure to please. Man’s torture-chamber had tools inexhaustibly varied; at one end murder crude and direct to subtler, more callous, starvation; at the other moral agonies, from tearing her child from her breast to threatening her with a rival when her service had blasted her beauty. Most masterful man, yet most cunning, was not thy supreme stratagem to band the woman’s own sisters against her, to use their knowledge of her psychology and the cruelty of their jeal­ ousies to avenge thee on thy slave as thou thyself hadst neither wit nor spite to do? And Woman, weak in body, and starved in mind; woman, morally fettered by Her heroic oath to save the race, no care of cost, helpless and hard, endured these things, endured from age to age. Hers was no loud spectacular sacrifice, no cross on a hill-top, with the world agaze, and monstrous miracles to echo the applause of heaven. She suffered and triumphed in most shameful silence; she had no friend, no follower, none to aid or approve. For thanks she had but maudlin flatteries, and knew what cruel- cold scorn the hearts of men scarce cared to hide. She agonized, ridiculous and obscene; gave all her beauty and strength of maidenhood to suffer sickness, weakness, danger of death, choosing to live the life of a cow—that so Mankind might sail the seas of time. She knew that man wanted nothing of her but service of his base appetites; in his true manhood-life she had nor part nor lot; and all her wage was his careless contempt.