"Truly we cling more to money than to love; we have more consideration for money-bags than for human dignity; for we emancipate women as soon as they become freeholders; but as soon as they become wives the law declares them our inferiors. Here notwithstanding, that bond is in question in which the equality of man and woman is most evident; that bond in which this equality breaks forth, as it were; that bond in which it is so necessary to proclaim that without equality, the bond itself exists no longer. Yet, by an absurd contradiction, our civil law chooses this moment to proclaim the inferiority of woman; it condemns her to obedience, makes her take a false oath, and takes advantage of love to make it outrage itself. "I have no doubt that, to future ages, the characteristic symbol of our moral condition will be that article of our laws which sanctions in set terms inequality in love. It will be said of us: they had so little comprehension of justice, that they did not comprehend love which is justice in even its holiest type; they had so little comprehension of love, that they did not even admit justice in it; and that in their written law, their Code, the form of marriage, the only sacrament of which they yet had any idea, instead of sanctioning equality, sanctions inequality; instead of union, disunion; instead of the love that equalizes and identifies its objects, some contradictory and monstrous relation, founded at the same time upon identity, and upon inferiority and slavery. Yes, like those forms of the law of the Twelve Tables, that we quote now to prove the barbarity of the ancient Romans and their ignorance of justice, this article of our Code will be some day cited to characterize our grossness and ignorance, for the absence of an elevated notion of justice is as marked in it as is the absence of an elevated notion of love.