When the councils of the medieval church came together to decide on the instruction needful to the young, they hastened to count women out, and to declare them “unfit for instruction.” And they, who in defiance of this decision—kind-hearted nuns of the Catholic Church—established schools for girls, were publicly stoned when they were met on the streets. The early Christian fathers denounced women as “noxious animals,” “painted temptresses,” “necessary evils,” “desirable calamities,” and “domestic perils.” From the English Heptarchy to the Reformation, the law proclaimed the wife to be “in all cases, and under all circumstances, her husband’s creature, servant, and slave.” Herbert Spencer, writing of English laws, in his “Descriptive Sociology of England,” says: “Our laws are based on the all-sufficiency of man’s rights, so that society exists to-day for woman only as she is in the keeping of some man.” To Diderot, the French philosopher, even in the eighteenth century, so persistently do the traditions of the past make themselves felt, woman was only a “courtesan.” To Montesquieu, she was “an attractive child,”—to Rousseau “an object of pleasure to man.” To Michelet, nearly a century later, she was “a natural invalid.” This subjection of woman to man, which has hindered her development in normal ways, has created a contemptuous opinion of her, which runs through the literature and legislation of all nations. It is apparent to-day in unjust laws and customs, which disgrace the statute books, and cause society to progress with halting step. There still exist different codes of morals for men and women, different penalties for crime, and the relations of the sexes to the government are dissimilar. In marriage, the husband has control of the wife’s person, and, in most instances, ownership of her earnings, and of her minor children. She is rarely paid the same wages as man, even when she does the same work, and is his equal only when punishment and the payment of taxes are in question. All these unjust inequalities are survivals of the long ages of servitude through which woman has passed, and which have not yet ceased to exist. During their existence, says Mme. de Staël, “woman was able to exercise fully but one of the faculties with which nature has gifted her—the faculty of suffering.”