Women have always occupied in Quakerism a place theoretically equal to that of the men, in business and religious affairs. George Fox and his successors declared men and women equal, inasmuch as the Divine Spirit is in every human soul. After the influence of the early Friends ceased, the place of woman began to be circumscribed by new rules, and crystallized in a reaction under the influence of purely social forces; so that this most sensible people made women equal to men in meetings and in religious legislation through a form of sexual taboo. Following the custom of many early English meeting houses, the men and women sat apart, the men on one side of the middle aisle, and the women on the other, so that men and women were not equals in the individualist sense, as they are for instance, in the practice and theory of Socialism, but were equals in separate group-life; to each sex, grouped apart from the other, equal functions were supposed to be delegated. Oblong Meeting House, on Quaker Hill, had seats for two hundred and fifty people on the ground floor, and in the gallery for one hundred and fifty more. The men's side was separated from the women's, of equal size and extent, by wooden curtains, which could be raised or lowered; so that the whole building could be one auditorium, with galleries; or the curtains could be so lowered that no man on the ground floor could see any woman unless she be a speaker on the "facing seats"; nor could any young person in the gallery see any one of the opposite sex; yet a speaker could be heard in all parts. The curtains could be so fixed, also, that two independent meetings could be held, each in a separate auditorium, even the speakers being separated from one another. It was the custom for women to have delegated to them certain religious functions, at Monthly Meeting and Quarterly and Yearly Meetings, on which they deliberated, before submitting them to the whole meeting. This old Oblong Meeting House is a mute record and symbol of the century-old contest of the Puritan spirit among the old Quakers, striving for an inflexibly right relation between the sexes. They attained their ends through the creation of a community, but not until the community dissolved.